Lawrence Zhang, "When Smallholders Meet Plantations", Tea Culture(s) 2019

"When Smallholders Meet Plantations: Response to Foreign Competition in the East Asian Tea Industry"
Lawrence Zhang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Abstract:
By the early 20th century, the Chinese tea industry was in crisis. Tea export, traditionally one of the more important cash crops, was falling cataclysmically. Much of this crisis was caused by the rise of British India as a tea producer, and the general shift from China to India for Western tea consumption. Industry experts in China were examining the production ecosystem of tea in the country and exposing the myriad flaws in it to highlight why they believe China was losing to British India in the global competition for customers. They looked to Japan for inspiration for how to reform the tea industry, and sought ways to revive and improve production efficiency as well as quality in order to reinvigorate the industry’s output and regain market share.
This paper will examine how reformers in China talked about the Chinese tea industry’s problems during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the prescriptions they had for fixing problems they identified. The issues at hand involved every level of the production cycle of tea, from cultivation and harvest, processing of tea leaves, logistics networks that transported the tea, as well as the post-processing and marketing of tea in foreign countries. Every step was found lacking in some way in comparison to what the British were implementing in India, and which had so efficiently defeated the Chinese in the world tea market. Left unsaid, however, was the fact that the two areas were producing tea in fundamentally different ways: while the British were using a plantation system with large scale cultivation and production, thus reducing cost significantly, China was straddled with a production infrastructure that had a large number of small producers, each planting and producing tea on a small scale and thus lacking the latest technologies available at the time. Attempts at reform were taken, but ultimately they produced mixed results as war loomed in the 1930s and ultimately cut short the experimentation with new production methods.
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TEA CULTURE(S) - International Colloquium 2019
Organised by:
Department of Asian and North African Studies, Foscari University of Venice
Confucius Institute at Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Italian Association for Tea Culture
Auditorium Santa Margherita
Dorsoduro 3689, Campo Santa Margherita, Venezia
November 8th, 2019

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Grazie mille x aver pubblicato questi video! Purtroppo questa volta non sono riuscita a partecipare, quindi apprezzo moltissimo riuscire a vederne parte qua su youtube. Conto sulla prossima edizione! Saluti