Paper short abstract:

In a Chinese food network, images of personal relations nurtured both urban consumers' distrust in the state's regulatory capacity and their hope in a civic alternative. Informed by "stategraphy," I suggest that performances of state boundaries are key to understand these contradictory evaluations.

Paper long abstract:

During fieldwork in a network of peasant cooperatives and consumer associations in China, I observed that images of personal relations nurtured both urban middle-class consumers' distrust in the state's regulatory capacity regarding organic food and their hope in a civic alternative. These apparently contradictory interpretations of close ties as producing either "corruption" or "transparency" constitute what I call "the puzzle of personal relatedness." Similar diverging evaluations of personal relatedness can be found in the academic literature on regulation. Personal relations are regarded as a threat to the globally-travelling Western liberal model of the "independent regulator." Corruption—sometimes with a culturalist reference to guanxi (instrumentalist personal ties)—is said to be found to an extreme extent in China and thought to undermine transparency. Post-socialist anthropology, in contrast, suggested that deficiencies of socialist institutions compelled state actors and other citizens to develop guanxi to overcome shortages and, more recently, to deal with risks such as food safety. To move beyond this dead-end of presupposed (cultural or socialist) otherness in debates about regulatory success and failure, this paper adds to anthropological debates that have questioned the conventional dichotomous depiction of corruption and transparency. Informed by the relational "stategraphy" approach, the ethnography shows how positive evaluations of personal relatedness emerge as the regulating state, both in the form of state certification and agricultural experts, is both entangled and performatively distanced in the food network. Such performances of state boundaries are key to understand corruption, transparency, and the puzzle of personal relatedness.