UC Davis

This thesis examines Puer tea as a culturally specific cash product to understand the agricultural transitions occurring alongside a sequence of political and socio-economic changes in China's contemporary history. This research interrogates how Chinese state institutions integrate national food security strategies and local land use policies into the global neoliberal corporate food regime. This thesis also develops a narrative of the financialization of Puer tea based on an in-depth study of the Puer tea trading and resale markets that employ digital platform and blockchain technologies. I argue that China has aligned its food security strategies and agrarian reform policies with the neoliberal food regime by reducing the emphasis on food sufficiency for staple foods and shifting to a moderate food import strategy. Meanwhile, in-country agricultural production favors cash crops as main crops, which are expected to be more profitable for local farmers. The financialization of Puer tea has demonstrated that even though digital and blockchain technologies tend to promote a decentralized democratic economic market structure, their operational mechanisms still perpetuate a form of extractivist capitalism, resulting in highly polarized and unequal wealth distribution in the Puer tea industry. The financialization and potential digitalization of Puer tea creates a distancing effect within the Puer tea industry, exacerbating inequality among farmers and trading intermediaries as more actors become involved.The financialization of Puer tea abstracts the value of food as substance into highly complex commodity derivatives markets and extends the reach of extractivist capitalism beyond material forms into intangible social and cultural heritage forms of value as well.