(In)alienable Numbers: Digitizing Farmland and Selves in China
This talk examines how China's farmland databases were generated, with a focus on the Land Rights Authorization (2013-2019). My research reveals that rural residents provided the measurements and calculations for the databases. The intellectual labor these landholders performed was objectified and alienated into official legal numbers. Historical numbers, particularly measurements taken during decollectivization reforms, became reference for new land surveys, even creating parcels in landscapes where wet-rice paddies no longer existed. These contributors of raw data, however, face risks and vulnerabilities: state policies formulated based on this data can, in turn, affect their livelihoods. By tracing the (in)alienability of these numbers, the talk emphasizes that rural residents are not merely subjects in state technological projects, but contributors to both historical and contemporary statistical governance.
Sheng Long’s work focuses on numerical governance: how people quantify farmland, vegetation, and weather in ways that resonate with urban-rural development disparities and social stratification in statistical engagement. Her first manuscript project, Numbering Land: Ethical Measures of Geography and Subjectivity in Agrarian Reforms, is an ethnography of geographic and legal data in national reforms and everyday agriculture. It examines the contribution and vulnerability of rural landholders in the state’s statistical governance of land belonging and agrarian resources. The work thematizes numbers as an unsettling actor in both routine life and techno-scientific projects, questioning the power dynamics in technologies invented by government and giant corporations.