Socio-Legal Discussion Group: Balancing the power imbalance: Intermediation of contract farming relationships in China

Abstract

Large-scale agricultural corporations (known as 'Dragon Head Enterprises') have been mobilised by Chinese governments to drive rural socioeconomic development by forming close economic liaisons with peasant households, such as farming agency (weituo yangzhi), a special type of contract farming. I explore, based on ethnographic data, how a husbandry Dragon Head Enterprise implements its contractual terms and rules on contracting farmers and sustains the thorny corporation-farmer relationships through the daily intermediation of a group of frontline workers, i.e. the technicians. I look at how they utilise a variety of knowledge to indigenise corporate rules, identifying three techniques that these technicians-intermediaries use, namely coaching, preaching, and compliance bargaining, with which they maintain an operative interstice of rules, redefine the significance of farmers’ breach of written terms, and balance the imbalanced relationship. The technicians' exercise of a limited but real discretion reveals their power and vulnerability, as well as corporate-farmer power dynamics more nuanced than simple economic hierarchies.