RCCHC「科技、社會與文化」講座系列 #4 - From Native Pesticides to Chinese Medicine Agriculture: Traditional Chinese Agricultural Knowledge in the 1950s and Today

(Available in English only)

This talk examines the construction and recirculation of “traditional” Chinese agricultural knowledge through the lens of two episodes: the mass campaign to manufacture native pesticides (大搞土农药运动), first launched in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, and the promotion of “Chinese medicine agriculture” (中医农业) beginning in 2016. The Great Leap campaign was part of the PRC leadership’s effort to overcome material scarcity and transform agriculture along both modern and revolutionary lines. It relied on and celebrated local knowledge of the myriad uses of wild and cultivated plants, systematizing this knowledge for the use of local governments in manufacturing botanical, “native” pesticides. Of special importance was local people’s knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants, including their traditional classification in terms of taste and smell (性味 xingwei): bitter, spicy, numbing, acrid, stifling, and sour. In contrast with the Great Leap Forward's many devastating failures, the native pesticides campaign generated a wealth of materials on “traditional” knowledge of botanical pesticides far richer than those produced in any other era. Today, industrialized agriculture dominates the Chinese landscape, and chemical pesticides have ceased to be a scarce resource and instead become a scourge that multiple forms of alternative agriculture have emerged to oppose. Among these is “Chinese medicine agriculture,” which seeks to harness “traditional” Chinese knowledge of botanical pesticides but engages very little (or not at all) with its Great Leap predecessor. Above all, this history leads us to reconsider the meaning of “traditional” agricultural knowledge and the important role played by Mao-era actors in its synthesis and preservation.