The widespread phenomenon of unsafe food on the Chinese market has been argued to be both symptomatic of moral disregard for the well-being of strangers, and productive of social distrust. While the state has attempted to ameliorate the situation with new food safety laws in 2009 and 2015, scandals continue to appear in Chinese media. In response to this state of affairs, some agricultural producers have turned to organic farming and different forms of consumer involvement. In this talk I address the issue of personal and institutional trust based on ethnographic fieldwork at one such organic farm in northern China. Engaging with theories of relational ethics, I show how the business model of this farm hinges upon building up personal trust in customers, turning strangers (shengren) into associates (shuren), rather than on the institutional trust embodied in state organic (youji) certification.
Anders Sybrandt Hansen is an associate professor of China studies and anthropology at Aarhus University. He has written on education and transnational education migration, political subject-formation and party-state language. He is currently working with two colleagues at Copenhagen U on a three-person project on ethics and food “Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China”.
Email: etnoash@cas.au.dk
