Recreating Property, Scaling a Boom: Smallholder Claim-Making and Tea Expansion in Reform-Era Southeast China

In the decades following decollectivization (1980–2000s), Anxi County, China’s largest Oolong tea-producing region, experienced a rapid and sustained expansion of tea cultivation. Unlike typical cash crop booms driven by agribusiness or state-led enclosure, this transformation emerged through smallholder initiatives under conditions of ambiguous mountain tenure. Drawing on county- and village- agricultural surveys, legal records, and oral histories, this paper examines how individual land-claiming practices scaled up to produce a land regime shift and how a new tea economy took shape in the process.

In the absence of formal titling, villagers devised ground claims, talking claims and representing claims to secure their access to mountain land, often operating with tacit local approval. These practices not only changed the physical landscape, but also social relations, moral norms, and ecological systems. As tea cultivation expanded upslope, wetlands were converted to dry cultivation, local hydrology was altered, and rice production became increasingly untenable. These environmental changes, in turn, reinforced the households’ dependence on tea. Meanwhile, get-rich-quick stories of a few tea households generated aspiration and competitive pressure among neighboring villages, accelerating participation in the tea economy. The paper analyzes how the interactions of claim-making practices, social dynamics, and environmental feedback cumulatively produced the tea boom from below.