Spicy red in Shrimp Town: Smart farming and settler colonialism in Guizhou province

Abstract

This article explores the chili pepper industry in Guizhou and how it intersects with a push toward high-tech, digital agriculture schemes as part of Guizhou’s economic development driven by a data economy. State bureaus, tech companies, and research institutes around rural development cast digital, data-driven agriculture as a broadly positive development that will provide environmental sustainability and economic benefits to small farmers. In examining Guizhou’s Chili Pepper City, I argue that such initiatives maintain state power through accelerating complexity and implementation of universalizing technologies. In the context of Guizhou, these universalizing technologies are intertwined with a legacy of China’s own settler dynamics, the political uses of poverty alleviation and environmentalism to control land, and socialist legacies of using agricultural modernization toward nationalist ends. I draw on a multitude of news articles, journals, and secondary sources, as well as repeat site visits and interviews that I conducted in Guizhou from 2017 to 2019.