“The Leaders Haven’t Arrived – Don’t Sell Yet”

Before We Begin

When I wrote the first draft in October 2024, every line was brimming with emotion. I could not understand how the company operated; I was angry, I was resentful. This year, when I came to revise the manuscript, I had already been through the “baptism” of another state-owned enterprise, and looking back now those events seem fairly unremarkable. The one thing that has not changed is this feeling of “playing house”.

I have concerns about what might happen if I tell the story exactly as it unfolded, so I have anonymised the names of individuals, places, brands and the e-commerce mini-program. The story is true; I am sharing only one cross-section of it.

“Qingzhou” is a pseudonym. The agricultural brand names appearing in this piece are also pseudonyms.

In August 2022, I joined an agricultural products company in the Qingzhou Development Zone, working in marketing at the newly established marketing department. The state-owned company had been around for more than a decade and had gone through the entry of private capital along the way; when I joined, it was in the midst of a mixed-ownership reform structure. All of our work revolved around running a mini-program called “Qingzhou Flavours”. At the time, the company was not genuinely committed to going all-in on e-commerce; it was simply operating the project on behalf of the Qingzhou District Agricultural Commission. If the mini-program performed well, the company would receive government subsidies.

This logic of doing business that was neither truly market-driven nor genuinely aimed at public service set the stage for all the chaos that followed.

◉ Qingzhou by day and at dusk.

The Qingzhou Development Zone sits along the lower reaches of the Yangtze, and its character seemed no different from the other small river towns of the Jiangsu and Zhejiang region. With its broad, fertile land, it enjoyed a natural advantage in agriculture. Yet, as a development zone under a city better known for its economy, Qingzhou’s GDP performance had been underwhelming in the decade since its county-to-district conversion. The district government turned instead to cultivating “specialities”, building an online trading platform to expand the national profile of local agricultural products—something of a new initiative under the digital economy.

At first glance, it sounded like a wonderful job, and I was excited about it. I had previously worked as an editor at a food-focused video media outlet, filming cooking tutorials as well as short food documentaries. I had travelled to many corners of the country to document local specialities and had done product promotion for a chain food brand. This time, I thought I could go to the source of agricultural products and genuinely deliver on the “from farm to table” concept, offering farmers some real, tangible help. With the mini-program bearing official endorsement, I figured there would be plenty of additional support and that the work would surely be easy to get going.

However, a few months into the job, my enthusiasm was doused. I gradually came to realise that this government-led mini-program operated on anything but pure e-commerce logic—it was tangled up with government directives, the rules of a relationship-driven society, and equity power plays. How much produce could actually be sold was, in fact, the least important objective.

For the two years that followed, it felt like playing house, until I was eventually forced to leave. Before long, the mini-program, too, had “disappeared”.

Where Does the Produce Come From?

After joining the company, my first major task in the marketing department was to move our existing group-buying business online.

I had assumed that doing e-commerce meant going directly to ordinary consumers—everything would revolve around planning marketing campaigns, producing self-media content to drive traffic, and managing operations within the mini-program. What I had not expected was for the company to bring Lao Pu, a veteran salesperson who had been running the group-buying business at this firm for over a decade, into our marketing department.

Lao Pu’s group-buying experience centred mainly on government departments and state-owned enterprises. For many years, our company had been predominantly a B2B operation: after purchasing agricultural and sideline products in bulk, some went wholesale to department stores and supermarkets, and the rest went to employee welfare group-buying for government offices and state-owned enterprises—whenever festivals or holidays approached, these institutions would publish their welfare budgets in advance, and if we won the tender, we would source local produce, arrange delivery, and distribute it to employees. This annual holiday welfare business operates on a logic entirely distinct from the fiercely competitive retail market beyond.

Lao Pu was a little over forty. When he arrived, he took part in none of the online work. He simply added two steps to the existing group-buying business for institutional clients: listing the agreed-upon product bundles online and producing paper redemption vouchers for partner institutions. Yet these two steps fell to us—we had to handle the operations on Lao Pu’s behalf. When employees at partner institutions ran into problems redeeming their vouchers, we also doubled up as customer service, fielding their queries.

Lao Pu was a lone wolf—he was almost never in the office, always saying he was out meeting clients. I never got close to him, and at first I could not understand why he had been assigned to the marketing department. It was only after a while, when I noticed that our daily turnover was a mere handful—sometimes only tens or hundreds of yuan, spiking to four or five thousand only before holidays—that it dawned on me: our sales figures were almost entirely propped up by Lao Pu’s group-buying business. If we had relied solely on selling to individual consumers, our total turnover would have been embarrassingly low, and we certainly would not have been able to deliver on our obligations to the authorities come year-end.

◉ A Chinese mitten crab cooperative in Qingzhou.

The marketing department’s second major task was to build a public regional brand for agricultural products.

Before our mini-program went live, the Qingzhou government had once promoted a public agricultural brand called “Feng Yue Hai Chuan” (a pseudonym). I heard that they had originally wanted to register the brand using just the characters for “Qingzhou”, but the Trademark Law prohibits place names from being used directly as trademarks, so the characters were decomposed and rearranged—giving rise to “Feng Yue Hai Chuan”. Many local farmers had used packaging bearing this brand, and local media had run plenty of coverage about “Feng Yue Hai Chuan”. But when a new district leadership team took office, they named yet another brand—”Qinghe Three Brothers”—declaring that from then on everything would start afresh, with “Qinghe Three Brothers” set to replace “Feng Yue Hai Chuan” entirely.

The logo for “Qinghe Three Brothers” was designed by our marketing department. The part-time graphic artist knocked out an icon in half a day—no brand story, no colour guidelines—and somehow the district agricultural commission approved it regardless. In February the following year, the name appeared in the Government Work Report: “Improve the public brand system for agricultural products, introduce a unified logo for ‘Qinghe Three Brothers’, and build the ‘Qingzhou Flavours’ platform.”

With the new brand officially unveiled, it felt for a moment as though I were caught up in something grand—with official backing, surely everything would go smoothly. Yet during my first six months, the greatest effort I put in was hunting down suppliers and persuading them to sell on our mini-program—and they simply gave no face to this official platform.

◉ White-cut chicken made with local free-range chicken at a Qingzhou restaurant.

It was only after I joined that I gradually learned how many kinds of local speciality agricultural products Qingzhou produced. At a typical Jiangsu–Zhejiang restaurant, cold platters commonly featured Qingzhou golden gourd shreds and Qingzhou lamb. The rice from Qingzhou was also excellent, and Qingzhou rice wine, derived from it, appeared frequently on restaurant menus. Chinese mitten crabs, poultry such as chicken, duck, and pigeon, all kinds of fruits and vegetables—Qingzhou grew them all. Even saffron, which I had assumed was cultivated only in Tibet, was also produced here.

With so many product categories and no shortage of individual growers and breeders, small-scale local farmers generally sold their own output directly. When their production capacity fell short of what we needed for partnership, we turned to cooperatives and enterprises that had already grown to a certain scale. Some of these firms had already built strong brands within the city—such as Chunhe pork and Jinmu lamb (both pseudonyms)—and if they came on board, their own reputations would lend credibility to our promotion.

The general manager and Lao Pu were Qingzhou locals with extensive connections who knew many suppliers. They helped us set up a WeChat group for each one. We created an information-gathering form and invited partners to submit their business licence, product descriptions, wholesale prices, and suggested retail prices.

◉ Most orchards in Qingzhou’s countryside also keep some poultry.

Once the form was posted in the group, there was often complete silence. The operations team would have to send a nudge every few days before a single, half-filled form came back—often one with information missing or incomplete—and then chase them for another two or three rounds before the details were barely scraped together. Some suppliers simply called directly: “Just take down the prices I tell you over the phone. As for photos, we haven’t got any—just download some from the internet, they’ll all be more or less the same.”

Sluggishness was the least of our difficulties—dismissive indifference was far worse. Hengda Stainless Steel (pseudonym) had a big reputation locally; their attitude towards us was polite and friendly, and they replied promptly. I suspected this was largely because they did contract manufacturing for top-tier international brands and were accustomed to dealing with outsiders. What they wanted to list was stainless steel cookware from their own brand, “Youchu”, but the prices they offered looked suspicious. I checked their Tmall flagship store for sales figures, only to find that on several items the cost price they had given us was actually higher than the retail price at their own flagship store. When we flagged this in the group chat, they promptly resubmitted more reasonable figures. The reason they had tossed out inflated wholesale prices was simple: they had already concluded that our platform could not generate much in the way of sales.

Recruitment progress was painfully slow. The district agricultural commission held a dedicated mobilisation meeting to ask each enterprise and cooperative whether they were willing to join “Qingzhou Flavours”. Our company sent Lao Pu to attend, and he came back to report: “Everyone raised their hands, but whether they’ll actually come on board is still anyone’s guess.”

Chunhe Pork was a major local brand—I had seen its dedicated counters in markets and supermarkets. During earlier exchanges in the group chat, they had pointed out that for small, scattered orders, couriering each package individually would be cost-prohibitive. They never explicitly refused, yet they never got around to filling in the form. After the district agricultural commission’s mobilisation meeting, the operations team assumed things should finally get moving, but when they followed up, nothing seemed to have changed—the two sides remained locked in a standoff.

Some time later, with no one pressing them any further, Chunhe suddenly and unprompted filled out the form and sent it back to us one day. Two or three other pork brands also eagerly joined.

We later learned that this was not the result of competition among rivals. Word had spread that the government had made it clear: if Chunhe did not join “Qingzhou Flavours”, then in future official publicity introducing Qingzhou’s representative pork brands, Chunhe would no longer be mentioned.

Such an ultimatum would of course leave no written record. The “invisible hand” conveyed the message in absolute silence, and the enterprises’ decision to join was not because they saw promise in this e-commerce platform, but simply to forestall whatever step the authorities might take next.

And so our e-commerce platform became a beneficiary of this semi-coercive mechanism. Over the course of six months, some thirty to forty cooperatives and enterprises gradually signed on to “Qingzhou Flavours”, with the number of products on sale exceeding one hundred. The shopping experience was no longer two or three swipes to the bottom of the page, and the mini-program finally began to look something like a proper e-commerce platform.

Striving for Legitimacy

As the platform’s product range gradually expanded, we received new instructions: remove every trace of the “Feng Yue Hai Chuan” logo from the pages.

This was a historical legacy issue. “Feng Yue Hai Chuan” had been the public regional brand in operation for many years prior. The district agricultural commission had once designed packaging for several pillar categories—vegetables, white goat, Chinese mitten crabs, Cuiguan pears, rice, and more—and in many of the product photos suppliers submitted, the “Feng Yue Hai Chuan” logo was still clearly visible. The operations team could only erase the logo from each image, one by one.

But physical packaging was far harder to “cure at the root”. So many packs had been printed over the years that no company was willing to simply throw them away. We could still catch glimpses of “Feng Yue Hai Chuan” in the occasional consumer review photo posted online.

We would give suppliers a friendly nudge, suggesting they stop using the old packaging, but it never went beyond a gentle reminder: Everyone chose to turn a blind eye—who could say whether, in a few years’ time, the government would change hands again and the policy would shift once more? Perhaps “Qinghe Three Brothers”, the brand being pushed so vigorously today, would itself become the next historical legacy issue.

If brand compliance was a non-starter, then at least in marketing strategy, we still tried to lean towards something more legitimate.

Sister Kong, our department head, was a former colleague of mine. It was she who invited me to join this company. A Qingzhou local, she had met the company’s general manager—also from Qingzhou—during an MBA course, and it happened that the GM was just setting up a marketing department at the time. It was precisely the GM’s personal connections that had given the company the opportunity to become the district agricultural commission’s operating partner, and that set the whole chain of events that followed in motion.

◉ The operations colleague and me taking product photos in the park outside the office.

Sister Kong had spent over a decade in marketing and had a methodology picked up from a large corporation. She believed that promotion should start with a “marketing calendar”, dividing the year into distinct campaign windows. Events like the 618 sale, Double 11, and the New Year Shopping Festival were major promotions that virtually every industry took part in; beyond those, you had to “create festivals” of your own, tailored to your product’s characteristics, so that throughout the year the mini-program always had different events cycling through.

So we first drew up an annual plan, then broke it down into a sprawling marketing-calendar Excel spreadsheet, laying out for each campaign window the theme, start and end dates, hero products, promotional mechanics, discount strategies, membership benefits, communications plan, and sales targets.

At my previous job, I had only been responsible for communications—the marketing team would handle the planning, and I would then match content and external placements to the brief. But here, planning, communications, and execution all fell on my shoulders.

I dug out the marketing-calendar spreadsheet Sister Kong and I had used at our old company, and using it as a skeleton, I painstakingly built up the framework bit by bit, first laying the groundwork for the front half.

Like every e-commerce platform, we set up spend-and-save discounts, limited-time offers, flash sales, and a five-yuan no-minimum-spend voucher for new registrants, then forced a “mega-sale” into existence to match each agricultural season. Almost every stretch saw the mini-program invent a fresh marketing theme.

Yet the results of these promotions were always underwhelming.

A great deal of the problem lay in communications. We were nominally a marketing department, yet had zero discretionary budget. Forget buying advertising—we weren’t even permitted the most basic product-for-exposure exchanges, such as sending goods to bloggers in return for a post on WeChat Moments or Xiaohongshu.

The only channels where we could actually be heard were the “Qingzhou Flavours” WeChat Official Account and WeChat Channels. Our Official Account had been inherited from the “Feng Yue Hai Chuan” era, with twenty thousand followers, yet each article barely scraped past five or six hundred views. Later, Sister Kong began sharing our articles on her own Moments feed, which added another hundred or two to the count. To be honest, that was probably our most effective promotional tool.

It was not until April 2023 that I finally had my first offline event with a budget.

It was a “bringing benefits to communities” market organised by the district agricultural commission. Besides running a stall, we also had to broadcast simultaneously on “Qingzhou Flavours” WeChat Channels.

◉ Sister Kong hosting the livestream while I ran production.

We had done livestreams before, in the office—Sister Kong on camera, the rest of us managing production, and each session drew perhaps a dozen or so live viewers. This time was a step up. We hired a dedicated ad agency that brought professional recording equipment and even provided two experienced presenters. To make the figures in the final report look good, the company allowed us to run paid traffic.

Problems came quickly. WeChat Channels required a minimum follower count before you could connect external streaming equipment or run paid traffic. The few hundred followers we had built up through what I can only call “genuine heartfelt effort” were nowhere near enough, so we had to “artificially pollinate” first.

This was the first sum I spent on marketing at this company: 150 yuan to buy 300 WeChat Channels followers.

The moment the ad agency team arrived, they started organising something else. They reasoned that the livestream couldn’t just show raw ingredients—it needed finished dishes so the presenters could take a few bites and stretch the broadcast time. So we dashed upstairs to find a restaurant willing to cook on our behalf. After knocking on one door and then another, we finally found one that agreed to turn out seven or eight small plates, for a total labour fee of 600 yuan.

Once the livestream went live, the format alternated between the host’s talking segments and guest interviews. For each product category introduced, we brought on a guest from that industry for a fifteen-minute conversation.

When it came to the lamb segment, I had invited Director Li in advance, a man I had only recently met. The previous May Day, I had collaborated with the agricultural commission on a “new-generation farmers” series, and in my write-up I had dubbed him a “white goat full-industry-chain veteran”. Sensing the rapport was still warm, I went to ask him, and he agreed without a moment’s hesitation.

Just before his turn, I went over his talking points with Director Li, when he suddenly grew awkward, repeatedly trying to push someone else onto the stage. I assumed he was simply nervous about going live, or that it was his usual modesty, so I went out of my way to encourage him, insisting that this segment simply could not go on without him. Director Li hesitated, then reluctantly took the sheet of paper, and I assumed everything was settled.

But the moment the lamb segment started, I discovered Director Li had already slipped away. I had no choice but to grab a worker from another lamb cooperative at our stall to fill in.

This was quintessentially Qingzhou—a casual, off-the-cuff promise in a society built on personal connections; you cannot take any of it seriously. And Director Li’s timing was impeccable: he slipped away precisely after the leaders attending the event had departed.

◉ The sheepfold at Director Li’s farm.

Back to the market—it was billed as “bringing benefits to communities”, but whether residents could actually buy anything was never the point.

Eight or nine in the morning was when residents did their grocery shopping. The stall was set up, the goods prepared, but we were forbidden to start selling early. The reason: once a few items were sold, the promotional display would look thin, and when the leaders came to inspect, it would not look impressive enough.

By the time we were finally allowed to sell, it was already afternoon. The ice packs had melted, and the meat and poultry that had been sitting for most of the day were slowly seeping blood and juices. It had not gone off, exactly, but with that appearance, naturally no one wanted it.

What the district agricultural commission liaison wanted was simply “enough”—enough volume, enough grandeur. How much went to waste was never part of the equation.

My revulsion at vanity projects reached its peak that day. Strangely, just a few days before the event, my voice had gone; for an entire day I could only communicate through breathy whispers, and by the end, I had lost my voice completely.

Silence was my last form of resistance, and the only psychological self-defence I had left.

“The Regulars” vs. “The Guerrillas”

◉ Rice paddies in Qingzhou.

Not everyone who works the land gets a helping hand from “the authorities”. More often, people rely on their own ways of making a living.

Sister Wei is exactly the kind of person who does.

Sister Wei was originally a pastry supplier on “Qingzhou Flavours”. Everyone in the office was struck by her, because she was incredibly energetic and always reachable on her phone. Whether it was a new product listing, an after-sales issue, or some last-minute notice, Sister Wei responded promptly in the group chat every single time. More often than not, you would not see a word from any other supplier—it was as though the entire WeChat group were nothing but her, answering away.

Colleagues often sent me little videos, suggesting I could re-edit them as promotional material. You never had to guess the source—every clip came from Sister Wei’s Moments feed.

Once I added her on WeChat, I gained a far more vivid sense of her posting rhythm. She published at least eight to ten Moments posts a day: product close-ups, nine-grid posts paired with Kuaituantuan sales pages, or short videos of about fifteen seconds. Nor was her range confined to pastries. Whatever we stocked on “Qingzhou Flavours”—vegetables, lamb, local-breed chickens and ducks, Chinese mitten crabs—she carried it in her own catalogue too.

The tool Sister Wei used was a group-buying mini-program. Merchants handled the supply, set prices and commission rates, while the group-buy leader managed their private customer base and shared links; once a sale went through, they pocketed the commission. What this channel tested was not platform traffic but the group-buy leader’s eye for products and personal influence. Sister Wei’s agricultural-products business took off from exactly that point.

In truth, Sister Wei had always been a brilliant salesperson.

Before selling produce, she had run a maternity-and-baby lifestyle shop in Qingzhou for over twenty years. She was also among the very first wave of sellers to open a Taobao store. From 2016 onwards, the maternity-and-baby trade turned sluggish; Sister Wei kept her shop open but joined Amway herself, venturing into unfamiliar cities such as Shenzhen to prospect for clients, and her results were respectable.

Sister Wei genuinely had the constitution of a born seller—boundless energy, a rapid-fire delivery that never seemed to run dry. Her slightly husky voice and a lilt of Jiangsu–Zhejiang accent, if anything, made consumers less likely to bristle.

What truly set her pivot into agricultural products in motion was the full static lockdown under 2022’s pandemic controls. Everyone was stuck at home, unable to get food. And then, in an instant, Sister Wei realised that sources of supply were everywhere around her: her paternal cousin had a hundred-mu (roughly 6.7-hectare) tree nursery with free-range chickens roaming beneath the trees; her younger female cousin grew pears and peaches; her younger male cousin made Qingzhou pastries… All those relatives became her suppliers.

Sister Wei joined over fifty local WeChat groups in one go and began posting group-buying mini-program links inside them, covering more than forty residential complexes around her small town. To this day, she “could find any estate with her eyes shut”—because she had personally delivered goods to every single one of them.

It was in those WeChat groups that Sister Wei met our sales colleague Lao Pu, which in turn made her a supplier on “Qingzhou Flavours”. One by one—pastries, fruit and vegetables, lamb—she started listing the local produce she sold onto the platform. By her own estimate, the revenue “Qingzhou Flavours” brought her amounted to perhaps five per cent of her total sales. Small, yes, but a brilliant salesperson lets no channel go unexplored.

This “born salesperson” also displayed extraordinary product instinct.

◉ When I visited Sister Wei, she showed me the “imperfect crabs”.

Take Chinese mitten crabs, for instance. Beyond the premium gift-boxes with a high average order value, Sister Wei had created a separate “imperfect crab” SKU on her own mini-program—crabs with a broken leg, unable to fit into a gift box, but priced far lower and better suited to a family meal. The official e-commerce platform had to think in terms of elegance and presentation; Sister Wei’s channel, by contrast, could be nimble and practical.

From our vantage point, Sister Wei was far from the ideal supplier. After all, she was a middleman, her wholesale prices were not low, and it was difficult to trace the origin of her goods. But she excelled at being quick on her feet. The moment a seasonal product appeared, she invariably spotted it before we did. On that Excel sheet of new-product listings, it was always her name filling in the most rows. And so the partnership simply carried on, quarter after quarter.

It was not until I paid her a personal visit a year later that I truly grasped the scale her business had reached.

Sister Wei’s WeChat had close to 9,000 contacts and eight customer groups of her own—the larger ones holding three or four hundred members, the smaller ones well over a hundred. On top of that, she had built a network of 181 sub-group-buy leaders. Thanks to the “one-click reselling” feature of the group-buying mini-program, these sub-leaders did not have to ship anything themselves; all they needed to do was tend to their own Moments feed, and the commission flowed in.

Sister Wei single-handedly performed the work of an entire marketing department: sourcing products, creating content, managing customers, running communities, handling after-sales.

By comparison, “Qingzhou Flavours” had nowhere near her numbers in members or community size. Or, to put it more bluntly, “Qingzhou Flavours” itself was, in effect, just another “downline” of Sister Wei’s—and the power dynamic between platform and supplier that I had always taken for granted might well have been the other way around.

Looking back at Sister Wei, I became acutely aware for the first time that so much of what I had worked on over the past two years had been nothing more than a game of “playing house”.

We pored over marketing calendars, designed membership tiers, mapped out seasonal promotions, and thrilled when a WeChat Official Account post picked up an extra hundred or two views. Yet the people who actually sold agricultural produce never relied on any of those systems. They built their businesses one piece at a time, on their own supply lines, networks of acquaintances, WeChat groups, and Moments feeds.

We thought we were building a platform. In reality, we were merely borrowing muscle from sales networks that others had long since built.

Two years into my job, the company’s equity structure shifted. The general manager, who had been hoping to attract outside investment, was in the end pushed out by capital—and stripped of his management role along with it. The marketing department he had founded was ordered to relocate its offices to the holding parent company.

Before long, Sister Kong resigned, and then Lao Pu left as well.

My two operations colleagues and I had almost nothing left to do: publish one WeChat Official Account post a week, adjust the promotional campaigns on the mini-program every fortnight, and sit in the new office like three ghosts no one could see.

But it was also during that stretch that I began to notice the finer tremors.

In January that year, the district Government Work Report proposed strengthening the “Qinghe Three Brothers” regional public brand for agricultural products—yet, unlike in previous years, it did not also mention strengthening the mini-program platform “Qingzhou Flavours”. The name of our platform had vanished from the official plan.

Did the company ever collect the government subsidy that year? I do not know. Once the key figures at its centre were gone, would the district agricultural commission continue to funnel support into “Qingzhou Flavours”? I suspect not. The parent company had clearly grasped the same reality, and naturally saw no reason to pour more staff into the project.

Six months later, the three of us left as well, one after another.

To this day, “Qingzhou Flavours” has not been taken offline. The WeChat Official Account bio still reads “Officially designated sales platform for the Qingzhou agricultural products regional public brand”. Only the web of unspoken connections that once kept the whole thing running has long since evaporated.

While writing this piece, I came across a new district Government Work Report.

A year after we had left, it read: “Intensify the building and promotion of regional public brands, and continue to expand sales and exhibition channels for agricultural products.”

Two years after we had left, the line had shifted to “Deepen the construction of the ‘Qingzhou Fresh Products’ brand and platform”.

A familiar story all over again. Look—there is always a new generation stepping up.

– This is Foodthink’s 825th original article –

Foodthink

Author

Frankie

Struggling to get by, writing now and then.

About the Lianhe Creative Programme

To understand the current state of food and agriculture, and to encourage more people to explore the complexities behind food and farming issues, Foodthink has joined hands with several public-interest organisations and media partners to co-launch the Lianhe Creative Programme in 2024 and 2025, supporting media creators and researchers in conducting fieldwork in the food and agriculture sector and funding their completion of publicly accessible content.

After several rounds of interviews with the panel, the Lianhe Creative Programme supported 18 creative projects in 2024 and 20 creative projects in 2025. Some of the supported works have been completed and published:

“A-Mei the Cleaner, Who Just Wants a Proper Meal | The Worker’s Table”

“In Malaysia, Chinese Traders Will Only Take Grade-A Durians”

“Fake Meat Drives Out the Real: Pastoralists, Dinner Tables and the Amazon”

“Watermelons Guaranteed Sweet, Growers Guaranteed Bitter”

“From the Guoshan Yao to the ‘Chosen Mushroom Foragers’: The Foraging Frenzy Sparked by a Single Termite Mushroom”

“Ma Lan in Shenzhen, with No Meal Companion in Sight”

“Why Has the Sweetness of Childhood Vanished?”

“Why Can Guizhou Not Live Without Sour Soup, and Sour Soup Without Guizhou?”

“Who Drove Away the Wet Markets?”

“Will Fresh Food E-Commerce Make the Wet Markets Disappear?”

“When Drones Become the New Farming Tool: Who Defines ‘Scientific Farming’?”

“The Braised Goose in a Qiaopi: One Hundred Thousand Yuan a Bird”