Twisting Ruralities: the Ecological Imagination around the Beijing Farmers’ Market

As presented by the Beijing Farmers’ Market, ecological farming based in the rural offers an escape from food-safety crises. The rural here is imagined as an “authentic” idyll where more-than-human living webs can be rebuilt through an ethics of care embedding classic Chinese philosophy. At the same time, an imagination of the rural as backwards is maintained, leading to conventional farmers being seen as submitting to the capitalist farming system. This twisting of ruralities, my analysis of the Beijing Farmers’ Market will show, offers up the rural as a retreat from urban problems while ignoring how this (imagination of the) rural is inflected by the urban.