Paper short abstract:

The institutionalization of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as an industry and its formalization of the medicinal plant fangfeng as an official anti-Covid-19 remedy has contributed to the (un)making of commons amongst the plant harvesters of rural eastern Mongolia.

Paper long abstract:

The institutionalization of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and its promotion of organic plants as the therapeutic ideal have led to a practically-insatiable demand for ‘wild’ plants across industrialized East Asia. Prior to Covid-19, the rural Mongolian border town of Magtaal benefited from this rising market to emerge as the epicentre of wild fangfeng harvesting, a plant widely used in TCM against colds and fevers. In the late summer and early fall, town residents from every age bracket and social class would go out into the countryside, mimicking historical ideals of pastoral labour pooling and distributive sharing, to cooperatively benefit from this resource boom. However, with the emergence of Covid-19, a process of bottlenecking through economic, legislative formalization emerged: first, the Chinese price for fangfeng skyrocketed attracting Mongolian business interests who instigated the government to illegalise rural harvesting; China closed its border to Mongolia and the plant became scarcer. In Magtaal, this has resulted in a series of traumatic changes to the previous consensus of fangfeng as benefit commons, as the residents fracture into two groups: 1) those that increasingly see the plant as a reproductive labourer, trying to learn its biological, ecological and distribution patterns to help it create more-than-human capitalist benefits; or 2) those that participate in mafia-esque networks, using the law as a tool to parasitize off of the former group and monopolise profit.