Our results suggest that the yield effects of crop rotational histories in cotton are relatively modest in magnitude: the posterior means for effects of any specific crop were mostly under 15%. However, given the tight profit margins of commercial agriculture, a 15% change in yield could translate into a far greater percentage change in profit, and could therefore be of substantial economic significance to a grower. As we seek to feed a growing worldwide population while doing minimal harm to the environment, crop management practices that increase yield while reducing the need for costly and damaging pesticides and fertilizers are of great value. Crop rotation is one such method, and we are optimistic that ecoinformatics approaches may be helpful in elucidating the details of how to optimally implement crop rotation.On February 5th, 2014, over thirty U.S. food production organizations joined together to form the Coalition for Safe Affordable Food with the aim of lobbying Congress to affirm the safety of genetically modified foods. The organizations of the coalition—the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the National Council of Farm Cooperatives,large plastic garden pots the National Corn Growers Association, and the American Soybean Association, among others—were on the defensive first of all against ballot initiatives seeking compulsory labeling of genetically modified foods over the last two years in over half of the fifty states.
Secondly, China’s recent ban on certain genetically modified food imports had led to the return of 600,000 tons of American corn in 2013, and perhaps explaining why the front page of the Coalition’s website features a photograph of a smiling East Asian child against a pastoral background, happily biting into a large corn cob . In China, by comparison, the issue had become explicitly nationalist, with GM crops depicted as a threat not only to public health but to national food security and with struggling farmers protesting the “traitors” in the agricultural ministry who had continued some imports. In a video made for army officers but later leaked online, the voice-over makes this clear: “America is mobilizing its strategic resources to promote GM food vigorously. This is a means of controlling the world by controlling the world’s food production” . This dissertation will show that these contemporary conflicts between and within the United States and China over food security have a long history that has defined uneven political and sociocultural relationships between these two countries, and moreover that literature has played an important role in imagining and defining those relationships. Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus famously calls for a rapid increase in food exports to China to sustain the industrialization of agriculture in the American West. A character in the novel declares that for American farmers and industrialists to survive in the coming century, “we must march with the course of empire, I mean we must look to China,” . Suggesting his own views hued closely to this fictional voice, Norris elsewhere linked the close of the frontier to American marines landing in Beijing to help put down the Boxer Rebellion .
In addition to celebrating American power directly through the military, and indirectly through control of the food supply, Norris also contributed to so-called “yellow peril” discourse with stereotypical portrayals such as the Chinese kidnapper in Moran of the Lady Letty . While scholars have explored the connections and tensions in American literature of this period between the fantasy of the China market as an engine for American prosperity and anti-immigrant racism, what remains unexplored is how Chinese writers understood and engaged with these same issues. In 1905, to protest the treatment of Chinese workers in the U.S., activists in southern China organized a boycott of American imports that lasted over a year . In the propaganda literature and other works of cultural production popularizing the boycott, the act of giving up American food products appears as particularly poignant. One popular song, for example, politicizes Norris’s celebrated commodity: “American wheat flower is made with Chinese blood” . In the novella Extraordinary Speeches of the Boycott , meanwhile, the protagonist decides that the only way for China to be truly independent of the U.S. is to develop its own food sovereignty, and at the close of the narrative he moves to the countryside to promote large-scale agriculture. In reading these American and Chinese texts comparatively for the first time, this project shows the multifaceted roles of both imaginative literature and other rhetorical forms, and especially literatures of food, on both sides of U.S.-China political struggles.
Furthermore the project demonstrates how these early conflicts informed the later Cold War competition between the two countries, when each attempted to export its own versions of rural modernization to the rest of Asia, from the Korean War era all the way up to the 2014 military video. More broadly, by reading American and Chinese literature about agriculture together, we begin to appreciate how writers and their reading audiences of this period imagined the modernization of food production in their respective national contexts as entwined with transnational exchanges and tensions. In addition to the prominent conflicts over U.S. and Chinese food power during the past century, transnational collaborations between Americans and Chinese are perhaps less well known. Most importantly, from the 1890’s to the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, a steady stream of American agriculturalists travelled to China to research Chinese agricultural practices and recommend improvements. While certain interests, such as International Harvester, hoped to promote U.S. farming technologies, this project will focus on the larger group of researchers with institutional funding—above all the Rockefeller Foundation—trying to solve what they saw as a global food shortage1 . These visitors were graduates of the new U.S. agricultural colleges, and an increasing number of Chinese also travelled to the U.S. to become trained agronomists. The most influential of these consultants was Lossing Buck, husband of novelist Pearl S. Buck. Buck travelled with Lossing during his fieldwork, and edited his first book, Chinese Farm Economy,raspberry plant pot in the year before she wrote The Good Earth. I argue that this novel’s extraordinary binational success—it was widely read and debated in China—can be best understood through the longer history of academic collaboration between Chinese and American agricultural experts attempting to define the nature of Chinese rural society through reference to the U.S. This is furthermore why there is actually significant overlap between her representations of the Chinese countryside and those of the Communist writers ostensibly at the other end of the political spectrum. World War II largely put an end to U.S.-Chinese collaboration in the countryside, and when the Communists came to power in 1949 they renewed the terms of food conflict from the turn of the century. When the U.S. ambassador was recalled to Washington in August 1949, Mao Zedong characterized him as a fleeing colonial governor, and in a widely-read series of essays Mao criticized the American practice of distributing famine relief flour, saying that it was bait intended to catch the Chinese people and devour them. The image is reminiscent of the ending of The Octopus, where the figure of the American industrialist prepares a shipment of famine relief wheat as the first step to expand U.S. food export channels to China and India.
With the opening of the Cold War in Asia during the 1950s, the U.S. and China each launched propaganda campaigns to promote how their competing visions of rural modernization could help the rest of Asia. The earlier work of the agronomists in China, such as Lossing Buck, served as the foundation for the Cold War U.S. program of non-redistibutive, technical improvements aimed at international development, a series of projects in India and other countries that were later collectively dubbed the green revolution. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, went on to implement nearly all of the agronomists’ earlier suggestions, but combined them with land redistribution. As evident in contemporaneous literature and film, both nations championed their own programs as promising the utopian end to rural hunger, in contrast to the failure of the other. In this way the Cold War period shows a synthesis of the earlier two periods, as the old political rivalry renewed but this time through technical discourses of production and development. Just as the two major national powers advancing the Cold War in Asia developed their agricultural and rural modernization programs out of their respective work in the Chinese countryside before the war, so did a third approach that we can now recognize as the prototype of the modern non-governmental organization . Another transnational project of the late 1920s and early 1930s was the Mass Education Movement , headed by James C. Yen, who was born and raised in Sichuan and who attended Yale and Princeton. Through his network of contacts with the YMCA, Yen secured Rockefeller funding for the MEM, giving talks throughout the U.S. and publishing multiple essays and pamphlets for an American audience. In contrast to the technical focus of the agronomists, Yen sought to reform village life as a whole, beginning with literacy and only then moving on to rural economy, health, and government. Literature again played a central but slightly different role in this project, which focused on literacy for the rural population rather than literary representations of those rural communities. American academics also participated in the MEM project, but here they were anthropologists seeking to understand and affirm local traditions, rather than scientists seeking to maximize crop yields. Most notably, Yen strove to remain independent of both the Nationalists and Communists, and after the Communists ultimately came to power, he neither stayed in China nor settled in Taiwan, but instead moved to the Philippines and founded the Institute for Rural Reconstruction. This non-governmental organization has continued to promote grass-roots, community-centered programs throughout rural Asia, later expanding to Latin America and Africa. When in the 1970’s and 1980’s a new generation of international development workers began to question the top-down technical programs that the U.S. promoted throughout the Third World, James C. Yen’s work fifty years earlier in China was rediscovered . In short, this dissertation argues that American and Chinese writers imagined the other through tropes of agriculture, food, and hunger during the early- and mid-twentieth century. Writers producing fiction, poetry, and other forms of literature about agriculture and rural life mediated the material connections between the two countries, including their food trade and agricultural modernization projects. In pursuing these literary and cultural comparisons, the dissertation proposes dialectical relationships along two axes. It begins with the dialectic between imaginative literature and political-economy, specifically the political-economy of agricultural development. Literary and cultural studies as fields have shown that literature mediates readers’ understanding of and engagements with historical processes, which cannot be apprehended in their totality. The relationship between literature and political-economy is dialectical because the former does not simply mirror the latter, but also provides ways of understanding that influence future actions. Many scholars have examined American literature’s dialectical relationship with agricultural development and larger environmental transformations.2 For example, William Conlogue has shown that during the twentieth century U.S. literary authors crystalized for their reading publics various competing directions for future agricultural development. In Chinese literature, understanding and reimagining the countryside and the rural people has been explicitly tied to national transformation since the early twentieth century, and during the Maoist period aesthetic treatments of agricultural production were tightly regulated.In particular, this dissertation builds on Allison Carruth’s work showing that many twentieth-century U.S. literary writers responded to and mapped the growth of what she calls “American food power” abroad. I argue that how Americans and Chinese imagined their competing food interests had long-term consequences for the emergent global food system. As my literary and cultural analyses will show, the most common trope through which the relationship between the U.S. and Chinese countryside—and in turn the shifting political economic relationships between the two nations—was imagined was that of famine, for which I propose two main reasons. First, famine displays most completely the perceived failures of the current rural system, and so the need for modernization. As Marx noted, during the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy, people in daily life experience production, distribution, and consumption as only abstractly connected, but during periods of crisis their direct underlying unity becomes become painfully evident. In this way the representation of rural crisis as famine actually gives the most complete picture of the total food system as analyzed by food studies.