Zhou Taomo (Nanyang Technological University)

In 1973, four cows and one bull were shipped to the Guangming Farm, an agricultural production base for China to supply fresh produce to British Hong Kong. The cattle’s human caretakers included Malayan, Indonesian and Vietnamese Chinese expelled from Southeast Asia due to local ethno-nationalist policies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Guangming was a state-directed productive space with prominent features of the planned economy, ironically installed when the rest of Shenzhen and China was embarking on market reform. The reform of the Guangming Farm lagged the marketization in Shenzhen and did not begin in earnest in the early 2000s. In this talk, I want to show that this delay was a deliberate state design. The PRC mobilized the Southeast Asian refugee labor for the expansion of international trade, the market economy, and state capital. In this process, the diasporic Chinese became simultaneously the agents and targets of Deng Xiaoping’s reform.