"Today there are ploughing machines, that’s quicker!": the transformation of agricultural working knowledge in Post-Reform China

Drawing on written sources such as local gazetteers, agricultural statistics, reports and proverb collections, as well as ethnographic fieldwork among migration-affected rice-farming households in southern China, this article looks at the transformation of the Chinese rice knowledge system in the past decades. It argues that rural state policy, promoting modernisation and standardisation, has led to a complex reconfiguration of rice farmers’ repertoires of working knowledge. While this poses challenges, it also gives farmers more socio- technical options regarding the pressing question of how to preserve rice fields as safety net resources despite heavy rural outmigration. More generally, the article argues that looking at the intersection of agricultural practices and migration through the lens of knowledge enables us to grasp the particular agency of rice farmers between home and migration, allowing us to question the state paradigm of linear technological progress.