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Paper short abstract

In Yunnan’s coffee frontier, state power, global markets, and returning graduates converge around “specialty” as a new regime of value. This paper traces how neo-rurals navigate these entangled logics, and how their success reconfigures rural hierarchies through the conversion of cultural capital.

Paper long abstract

Older Yunnan farmers call coffee “rice” — a crop for survival. In these borderlands, once among China’s most impoverished, a generation later, their returning children have turned these beans into markers of taste, identity, and modernity.

This generational contrast unfolds within a frontier where state power and global capital converge. The Chinese government channels rural revitalization as developmental momentum; international corporations respond to expanding ethical consumption markets. Neo-rurals leverage these resources: policy subsidies, infrastructural investments, and technical training to construct integrated businesses combining cultivating, processing, tourism, and retail. While attracting media attention that narrates state achievements and corporate ethics. In these rural aesthetic spaces, selling coffee imbued with cultural and sensory value, new farmers navigate entangled regimes through their fluency in the performance of taste, policy rhetoric, and curatorial storytelling.

Mirroring China’s compressed modernity under reform and opening up, this rural transformation simultaneously braids state-led capital investment, industrial intensification, pastoral romanticism, and patriotic pride in producing “good Chinese coffee.” However, neo-rural success operates as a conversion mechanism: educational capital acquired in cities transforms into political leverage and economic advantage in the village. This reconfiguration marginalizes those excluded from high-value chains: smallholders, older farmers, and unprotected seasonal laborers.

Based on 7 months of participant observation in Yunnan's coffee-growing regions, this paper examines how multiple imaginaries produce both new possibilities and new forms of exclusion within China's rural frontier.