Why Have Tea Farmers’ Skills Gradually Degraded Since a Leading Enterprise Moved In?
I was born in a small tea-growing village in Hunan. Having grown up among the tea gardens and hillside forests since childhood, I developed a special interest in the tea industry.
When I was little, tea production in the village was far from systematic. Every household treated it as a sideline: when the season came, they would pick and pan-fire a batch of tea to earn a little extra money for the family. Later, outside entrepreneurs moved in and set up larger-scale tea factories, and tea gradually became the village’s mainstay.
It was only as I grew older and gained more knowledge and experience that I realised what this really was: “capital entering the countryside” or “industry entering the countryside” — a process driven mainly by the government and leading enterprises.
Yet the rise in tea farmers’ income is hardly in proportion to their gruelling labour. Long hours of manual or mechanical picking under the blazing sun mean that tea farmers sometimes have to resort to Huoxiang Zhengqi Liquid to ward off heatstroke.
The leading enterprises, however, make far greater profits. For instance, fresh-leaf bud tips bought from tea farmers at 80–95 yuan per jin can, at an average yield of four and a half jin of fresh tea to one jin of finished tea, be packaged and sold on the open market for well over a thousand yuan.
Why is the profit gap between tea farmers and leading enterprises so wide? And apart from deepening their own exploitation, do farmers have any better route to higher margins? I turned my attention to the restructuring of tea-making skills in the village.
I. “All-Round” Tea Production
In the 13th year of the Guangxu reign (AD 1887), a merchant from Guangdong happened to taste a White Maojian from the Hunan–Hubei borderlands — its liquor was beautifully clear, its flavour exceptional — and decided to stay and set up a tea factory. He brought in tea-making masters from Qimen in Anhui and improved the local white tea into a black tea, which he named “Yihong”. On this basis he founded the Taihehe Tea Firm.
At its height, Taihehe’s Yihong black tea shared the famous epithet “Northern Qihong, Southern Yihong” with the black teas of Qimen, Anhui. The techniques of black-tea making were passed down locally and gradually spread to our village.
Green-tea-making skills in the village, on the other hand, owe much to the national programme of “agricultural technology extension to the countryside”. In the early 1990s, technicians from the county agricultural extension station came to the village to teach tea farmers how to produce premium green teas, and many of them learned the craft behind “Silver Needle” and “Silver Peak”.
So before the leading enterprises arrived, most villagers — young and old, men and women — had at least some understanding of the art of pan-firing tea.
During the tea season, everyone would pick fresh tea leaves by day and pan-fire them at night on their own kitchen stoves. Once done, they either sold the tea to middlemen who came to the village, or braved a bus ride to the county town to sell there. Prices in town were higher, but you had to be very careful — if the tax inspectors caught you, you’d lose your shirt.
Besides ordinary tea farmers, the village also had a handful of small-scale family workshops equipped with machinery and more advanced processing techniques. In addition to picking and pan-firing their own tea, these workshops would sometimes hire a few extra workers and buy fresh tea leaves from neighbouring farms to process, then sell the finished tea through their own networks of contacts.
In those days, tea production in the village was far from systematic, and selling tea was simply a way to earn a little cash for the household. And yet, the tea farmers were “all-round” tea producers: they held the full range of skills from cultivation and picking all the way through processing and selling.
That assessment rings true with what I have observed in my village. Since the leading enterprises moved in, the model of “all-round tea production” has been shifting.
II. Skill Upgrading and Procurement Obligations
Thanks to government policy and the technical support provided by the leading enterprise, tea farmers upgraded their skills in both cultivation and picking.
In terms of planting layout, villagers replaced their former row-planted tea intercropped with other crops with specialised close-planting layouts, expanding the area under tea and boosting fresh-leaf yields. In terms of varieties, high-yielding cultivars such as Bixiangzao, Baihaozao and Chuyeqi were introduced. In terms of pest and disease management, organic fertiliser and biological control replaced chemical pesticides and fertilisers to build the credentials of organic tea. As for picking techniques, villagers were encouraged to hand-pick bud tips and “one bud, one leaf” for premium teas.
Skill upgrading raised both the income and the income stability of villagers. To borrow a saying the villagers enjoy — “sell tea to buy rice”: “Now a single day’s tea picking earns enough to buy rice that lasts a month. Before, all year we worried about drought and water, yet a year’s grain harvest couldn’t even get a few hundred jin. Times are better now.” Survey data from 2021 showed that tea farmers contracted to the leading enterprise earned an average income of around 2,000 yuan per mu — with the highest reaching over 4,000 yuan.
Tea farmers who sell their fresh tea leaves to the company do gain a degree of security in terms of the purchasing channel and price stability, but the market monopoly of the leading enterprise has stripped them of broader bargaining power.
In the past, the village’s mechanised family workshops typically had a stable, close-knit buying circle rooted in bonds of locality and kinship, held together by mutual favour. Ordinary farm households and workshop owners were often from the same clan, or neighbours and close friends; they shared genuine trust and an unspoken, long-standing understanding: “I won’t find fault with your quality; you won’t haggle me down on price.”
When the leading enterprise arrived, this buying circle was violently disrupted. The enterprise adopted the “company + farming household” model, signing contract-farming agreements with village tea farmers for the purchase of fresh tea leaves, and tying farmers to the firm through a rebate scheme: for every jin of bud tips delivered, ten jin of fertiliser came back.
Once the leading enterprise learned that a tea farmer had broken the contract by selling spring-tea fresh leaves to a tea-making workshop around Qingming, it would refuse to buy that farmer’s leaves altogether, leaving their summer and autumn fresh tea leaves with nowhere to sell — and thus gradually monopolised the supply of fresh tea leaves.
In recent years, with the village’s family tea-making workshops in decline, the leading enterprise — now with no rivals — has begun tightening its purchase prices and shortening its buying window, steadily eroding the profits ordinary tea farmers earn from growing tea.
“The workshop (MCY) pays 75 yuan per jin, but the factory (the leading enterprise) only pays 70. They’ll pay 75 to the middlemen from other villages, but we get just 70 — that’s 5 yuan less per jin, which means we have to stand in the sun that much longer. But we can’t just not sell it. If I don’t sell to the factory today, they’ll find out tomorrow and stop buying my tea altogether.”
“They (the leading enterprise) just say they don’t want it, and that’s the end of it. What else can you do but pick as hard as you can?”
III. “Partial Tea Farmers” Behind High Value-Added
The enterprise also actively took part in tea expos, tea-making skills competitions and similar events organised by the government and tea trade associations, promoting its brand through television, newspapers and new media. In doing so, it shifted the village’s tea from “mass-market tea” aimed at ordinary consumers to “premium tea” targeting the high-end market, dramatically raising the value-added of its products.
This restructuring of skills could not have happened without the strong push of government subsidy policies.
For example, the leading enterprise enjoys tax incentives ranging from 6 to 17 per cent on tea production, and if it upgrades its tea-making equipment it can also claim a 42 per cent subsidy on technical-upgrade expenditure. On top of that, local governments have offered a host of additional support — a subsidy of 5 yuan per mu for organic tea certification fees, and free tea seedlings and fertiliser distributed through cooperatives, to name just two. These are all dividends that ordinary tea farmers and family tea-making workshops simply cannot access.
This quiet reshaping of tea-making skills unfolded silently amid the lush mountains. While ordinary tea farmers settled into the comfort of a stable income, they gradually drifted away from the high-value-added tasks of processing and selling, becoming “partial tea farmers” whose constant companions were long hours on their feet, the blazing sun, and Huoxiang Zhengqi Liquid. And so the profit gap between tea farmers and the leading enterprise was widened all the further.
Returning to the second question raised at the start of this article: apart from repeating their own labour exploitation, do farmers have a better route to higher margins? Can tea farmers actually break away from the leading enterprise, pan-fire their tea themselves, and sell it on their own?
To find out, I started selling tea on WeChat Moments.
My mother and I would pick tea by day and, in the evenings, follow a master’s guidance on pan-firing. We sold at prices below the going market rate on WeChat Moments, yet the profits were still handsome — nearly double what we would earn selling to the leading enterprise.
The volume, however, was far less encouraging. My social media circle is a good one by ordinary tea-farmer standards, and even I can manage only a dozen or so jin of tea a year. For ordinary tea farmers, pan-firing and selling their own tea is even harder.
So does discussing the question of farmers’ skills even have a point?
I don’t think so. Even if industrial development and the division of labour are an irreversible trend — a current we cannot halt simply out of sympathy — we still need to uphold a baseline of fairness in the process of development, endow individuals with the capability and the right to grow, and give every person the opportunity to achieve a good life through their own efforts, rather than tilting those rights towards the leading enterprise and other parties that already hold a competitive advantage.
When it comes specifically to the formation of farmers’ skills in the course of agricultural industrialisation, we must keep pace with the times. We should not only focus on improving farmers’ traditional skills in cultivation, picking and harvesting, but also actively develop their new skills in market-oriented processing and trading — only then can farmers truly share in the benefits of industrial development and the transformation of agriculture.
The original paper was co-authored by Professor Wang Xing and the author of this article.
This is hereby noted.
With our sincerest thanks to Professor Wang Xing.
Click “here” to access the original paper.
Editor: Ze’en