China is experiencing climate whiplash: extreme fluctuations between drought and flooding that threaten the health and autonomy of millions of people. Set against mounting anxiety over the future of global water supplies, Andrea E. Pia’s Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) investigates the enduring political, […]
Is your job a pointless job? Does it make a meaningful contribution to the world? If your job was eliminated, would it matter to anyone? These are some of the questions that David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, examines in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & […]
Given the social and political significance of ‘the peasant’ (nongmin) in modern Chinese history, it is surprising that the term nongmin is largely absent in Hong Kong, where discourses about individual farmers (nongfu) are far more prevalent. In tracing the modern etymology of Chinese peasants and the history of Hong Kong agriculture, this essay argues that the lack of ‘class’ consciousness makes Hong Kong farmers even more vulnerable to the unceasing wave of urban sprawl.
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