Abstract
We conceptualize typical rural communities in China as diversified economic clusters. In normal times, economic actors in these communities rarely cooperate with each other, but are integrated into separate commodity chains. These “diversified clusters”, however, show resilience and flexibility when an external shock—the COVID-19 pandemic—disrupts the spatial connections throughout the existing commodity chains. In this study, we use primary field data collected from one typical rural community in Northern China to show how economic diversity, aided by social networks and space-shrinking technologies, allowed for the vertical commodity chains to be reconfigured temporarily into localized horizontal commodity networks to cope with the emergencies brought about by the pandemic. Our findings suggest that while market integration can create precarity at the individual level, it can also contribute to economic resilience at the community level if it increases economic diversity and complementarity within the community. This study sheds lights on discussions of the resilience of rural and economic clustering by a novel conceptualization of diversified clusters and also offers a nuanced understanding of the connection between market integration and community resilience.
Highlights
The greatest disruption brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to the global economy is arguably the suspension of the circulation of capital, labor, and commodities along commodity chains, caused by the various mobility restrictions from the international level down to grassroots communities [1,2]
We try to further the examination of this relationship between market integration on the one hand and precarity and resilience on the other by investigating how different types of market integration can shape the economic resilience of rural communities when coping with external shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic
Conceptualizing this type of community as a “diversified economic cluster”, we show that (1) deep market integration exposed all residents to disruptions—albeit in differentiated ways and to uneven extents, and (2) the diversified economic structure in the community, aided by existing social networks and space-shrinking technologies, allowed for the circuits of commodities to be reconfigured to form local commodity networks, providing the community with an adaptive mechanism for effectively coping with urgent challenges during the crisis
Summary
The greatest disruption brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to the global economy is arguably the suspension of the circulation of capital, labor, and commodities along commodity chains, caused by the various mobility restrictions from the international level down to grassroots communities [1,2]. We present a case study of how a typical rural community in Northern China coped with the emergencies brought about by the pandemic Conceptualizing this type of community as a “diversified economic cluster”, we show that (1) deep market integration exposed all residents to disruptions—albeit in differentiated ways and to uneven extents, and (2) the diversified economic structure in the community, aided by existing social networks and space-shrinking technologies, allowed for the circuits of commodities to be reconfigured to form local commodity networks, providing the community with an adaptive mechanism for effectively coping with urgent challenges during the crisis.
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