About this talk

This talk examines how industrial agricultural technologies and rural-urban migration have shaped smallholder farming in southern China over time. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and documentary research with migrants and stayers in Hunan Province, a major rice-growing region, the talk asks: how have successive waves of technological change and migration affected family farms? How are rural households responding to these shifts? And how have policy shifts since the early 2020s towards intensified mechanisation and digitalisation fed into these dynamics? The talk adopts a temporal, socio-technical approach, structuring the analysis around three moments: the reform period in the 1980s and ’90s, when large-scale migration and industrial agricultural technologies expanded; the first two decades of the new millennium, when villagers appropriated these technologies to cope with labour loss; and the early 2020s to the present, when digital technologies such as agricultural drones have entered rural production alongside new corporate and policy actors. It argues that the relationship between technology and migration is not linear but evolving and contradictory. While labour-saving technologies have contributed to out-migration, they have also enabled smallholder persistence, new livelihood strategies, and selective return migration. This temporal, socio-technical perspective highlights shifting power dynamics, growing inequalities within the village, the emergence of ‘new farmers’ (新农人), and the commodification of labour. It also reveals subtle forms of agency among both large and small farming households. Lena Kaufmann, PhD, is an SNSF Ambizione Fellow and Principal Investigator of the ‘Digital Agriculture’ project at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Trained as an anthropologist and sinologist in Berlin, Rome, Beijing, Shanghai, and Zurich, she spent four years in China and has conducted ethnographic research on migration and agriculture in China, as well as on Chinese digital infrastructures in Switzerland. She has taught anthropology and Chinese studies at the Universities of Zurich, Bern, and Fribourg, and has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the University of Konstanz. She is currently an Academic Visitor at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her research has been supported by several major grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and other institutions, and she was shortlisted for the Swiss Mercator Award. She is the author of Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China (AUP, 2021; reprinted by Routledge, 2025), co-editor of a special issue on anthropology and contemporary history, and convenor of the German Anthropological Association’s Regional Group China(s).

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