One River Tea - The Social Element 2024
One River Tea - The Social Dimension 2023-2024
When One River Tea started in of 2018, only a few things were certain: we wanted to sell tea, we wanted to be a cooperative, we wanted to be a direct conduit for producers and consumers. All of our initial content focused on “the tea, the land, and the people,” and situated our business as one in service of both Chinese producers and international consumers: it was to be a social enterprise. That, combined with good tea and reliable service, has allowed this project to grow from a hobby into a serious business. For those who do not follow the Reddit or blog, however, this element of the project might still seem somewhat vague or elusive. This article should help catch you up to speed, and may also be a call to action.
(April 2018 - First Tea Trip)
The Tea: Our Initial Experiences
In the Summer of 2023, we first tried our hand at making Fuding-style white tea and what locals call white tea in Enshi: Shaigan. Some of you even drank the results of these experiments, and we were encouraged enough to involve other picking households in Maiyingtai Village in our next attempt. For two years, we had sold dry tea flowers from the village to varying levels of success. Having many good experiences with osmanthus red and jasmine green, the time seemed ripe to introduce white tea to tea flowers. The Wu Family in Fuding was kind enough to support us in this experiment, and supplied the shoumei that would go into the final cracker. It seemed as though all systems were go.
When I arrived in the village in December 2023 with volunteer Cao Zibang, it quickly became clear that it would be a struggle to get this tea ready. For one thing, modern cultivars like Longjing #43 scarcely had any flowers worth picking. Sadly for us, some households only had this cultivar on their land. The weekend we came was also remarkably cold, with evening temperatures just above freezing. The wooden, un-insulated cabin provided little protection to the elements. Such weather discouraged many young villagers to visit home, and made some older residents think twice about venturing outdoors. In the end, only four households participated in picking flowers, those of Qinggao, Qingjia, Yulin, and Changjiang. This final household, represented by Auntie Tang, would turn out for this first time to be be quite the sly operator.
(Winter 2023) (Winter 2022)
To encourage residents to bear the cold with us, the handsome price of 20 RMB per Jin was set on fresh tea flowers. The requirement was that these flowers had to be developed enough that the white petals were visible, but not so developed that they had already opened up. At the end of picking on Saturday evening, we were at first delighted to see the picks of Qinggao, Qingjia, and Yulin, all of which had picked slightly more usable flowers than Zibang and I had. At last came Auntie Tang with a Beilou (wicker backpack) full to the brim of flowers. Since 5AM that morning, one neighbor alleges, Tang had been out with a headlamp picking flowers. She quickly pulled out the plastic bag lining of the backpack, had us weight it, pulled out a few choice flowers for our approval. We nodded, and she promptly left after payment. As we were pouring out the flowers onto drying racks, quickly it became clear that Tang had pulled a fast one on us, and not for the last time. The bottom of the bag she left was full of flowers either too small or too large. There was no time to complain or sort her out, so Cao Zibang and I spent much of that evening and the next morning sorting out the bad flowers.
When the finished product finally touched my lips the next month in January, my heart sank. It was bitter, bitter in a way that no amount of dates, yellow rock sugar, gouji berries, or lemon seemed to cover up. As any one who has ever brewed up a cup full of tea flowers will know, despite their inviting scent and appearance, these little fellas are not exactly appetizing iin quantity. Yet, it appeared the Wu Family had handled the shoumei-flower ratio perfectly. For a while, I suspected that maybe the steaming process involved in pressing white tea had somehow amplified the bitterness of the tea flowers such that even one flower per cracker was too much. Months passed, and I fully accepted our first commercial batch of self-produced tea was a complete bust. Slowly but surely, those we had been gifted the tea began to write back that they somehow liked the crackers. Some even put in private orders for these crackers. When I tried the tea flower crackers myself again in July, I was shocked to see how well they had mellowed out. They may still yet prove to be a sustainable way to help a green-tea dependent village diversify their outputs.
(Tea Flower Drying) (Cracker Circa July 2024)
Either way, while still somewhat disappointed by this apparent setback, we prepared ourselves for Spring green tea. Going into 2024, we knew well that demand for Mingqian green tea had declined in China, and prices were set to drop. 2023 Orders for the Loushuiyuan Cooperative, our partner in production, had been about half of what they were the previous year, and our extant online business through ORT could not possibly sell even 1% of their former production capacity. Yet the fact remained that Maiyingtai villagers made up to one third or even half of their annual tea income in March and April. The show had to go on. Three lines of attack were prepared: a WeChat Store, Celebrity Partnerships, and direct participation in leaf collection. The first of these actions proved to be a modest success, the second an unmitigated disaster, and the third a mixed bag.
We have five years of online retail experience under our belts and an existing audience of Chinese followers. This means we at least knew the basics in taking nice pictures and spicing up product descriptions for what are effectively three price points of the most typical Chinese red and green tea you have ever seen. Such quality was however more than fine for our target audience: causal tea drinking leftist students. They had never had tea so delicate, so fine. 90% of our following on Bilibili and in various WeChat group knew about us for our social praxis, and did not actually drink tea on the daily. When other big name left wing posters shared our content, a flurry of sales came onto the Wechat Store in... February, and almost all for came the previous year’s green tea. 17000 RMB in the co-ops bank account was a nice result of all this, and it seemed like we were on the verge of an explosion in Spring time sales. Other than one Palestinian grad student in Wuhan, however, few of these young comrades would prove to be repeat buyers.
(Customer Note 1: “Keep Up the Good Work, From the Resistance Stream With Love.”)
(Customer Note 2: “Hang in There, Comrade, Here is My Measly Contribution.”)
Celebrity partnerships seemed like the natural next step. Bilibili influencers helped make green tea a best seller in the dead of Winter, which itself only happened after I had told our story on Fujianese Provincial TV for their New Year’s Eve Gala. Media power seemed to translate directly into sales and it seemed like a needed investment at a time when it was precisely sales through the usual channels that were a problem. Whereas before all this media attention was free, direct product promos are not. For the group of crosstalk (Xiangsheng) actors recommended to me, all of whom were experienced Tiktok salesmen and part time political activists, it was to cost 3/4th of my university salary that month just to bring them out for a weekend of promotional livestreams. Yet these were professionals who had verified sales figures for fidget spinners and reading lights in the tens of thousands of units. Should they only sell 100 units of tea, I could make that investment back; should they sell 1000, the co-op would be in good shape for Mingqian tea sales. I was not too worried. In the end, they would sell just 4 boxes of tea. As they were livestreaming, pre-recorded streams of “Hefeng Maojian” and “Enshi Yulu” were also live, claiming to have the same Mingqian green tea on hand and for less than half the price of the unprocessed leaves needed to make a single Jin of our Maojian. Our well-meaning guests found themselves on the receiving end of consumer ridicule and fan scorn.
(Pic 1: Xiaoyan Minding Green Tea Collection)
(Pic 2: Volunteer Nathan Helping The Changquan Household Pick)
Before and after this incident, we were on the scene from March 22nd to April 4th to facilitate the whole of Mingqian picking. As you can read about more here, this was a critical learning experience. The Loushuiyuan Cooperative’s virtual bankruptcy following the decline in 2023 orders meant that farmers were not willing to take any IOU’s for this season’s most valuable fresh tea leaves. We stepped in to settle the accounts in cash, our own cash, for those two weeks. Although Auntie Tang did once again try to pull one over on us, sneaking non-organic tea from a neighboring village up the mountain, our threat to call off all tea collection on Day 3 prevented any further speculative behavior. Things were further smoothed over by the assistance of WWOOFers to help the household with oldest, slowest pickers. Knowing that most of the tea picked those tea weeks remains even presently unsold, once aloof households like Qingjia and Qinggao were won over to the project.
White tea would prove to be a more fruitful venture later that Spring. With Derek, Giacomo, and later Jason also on the scene, different variations on white tea emerged. Grandpa Sun, for his part, had made some Shaigan “white tea” to go with the tea jars we had commissioned from a local potter. Derek made some green Shoumei, Jason made Yinzhen, and the leaves we all picked together would become brown Shoumei, under the watch of Grandpa Sun. It was later pressed into a cake, Brown River, by the Wu Family, and now has been sampled by many of our friends and customers. While still not what we initially wanted, this cake represented our first step into self-producing white tea.
The Land: Rebuilding an Organic Plantation
In many ways Hefeng County is the optimal place to produce organic tea. More than 70% of the county is forested and some 90% is mountainous. Unlike on the nearby Jianghan Plain, input-intensive, mechanized agriculture is an impossibility. Maximizing yield is also not the local tea grower’s best route to growing their income. Historically, there were four picking seasons here: March-April (一茶), May(二茶), June-July (三茶), August-September (四茶)，each of which were punctuated by fertilization, pruning, and indeed sometimes pesticide application. Now, the average price of fresh leaves for those last two seasons is only 0.5 - 1.5 RMB per Jin, meaning the average farming household who had a handsome 10 Mu and an astronomical seasonal yield of say 200 Jin per Mu would be walking away with no more than 3,000 RMB in either of those later seasons. There is thus no point investing in pesticides when there is so little money to be made. Aside from compound fertilizer application to maximize first-flush yield and some seepage from herbicides sprayed on porches and pathways, tea production is already de-facto organic.
Nonetheless, compliance with USDA or EU organic labeling, something that could help local tea reach higher price-point markets, requires a stricter level of management. This is something that most tea growers are still skeptical on in Manyingtai Village. As we mentioned in a past Tea Soup episode, for more than a decade now most households have attempted to honestly grow tea organically, but none have had much reward. Organic tea is priced identically as conventional tea on the local market, and almost all Enshi tea is marketed to tourists as “organic” or at least “ecological,” regardless of how the tea is actually managed. That means those who have complied all those years, weeding the paths by their tea fields by hand at least three times a year and applying organic fertilizer at a ratio of 7:1 compared to compound fertilizer, have gotten no monetary return for all this extra work. They have good reason to be tired of it.
（Winter Tea Field） （January Fieldwork）
Part of the solution to this problem was our decision to support the Loushuiyuan cooperative directly renting 14 Mu (just over two acres) of some of the hardest to access tea fields. These fields were veritcally wedged in between the Maiyingtai and Lianghekou Villages, many at a steep incline, and all without consistent care from the scattered households responsible for them on paper. Through the Hefeng County Tea Office, we were able to get further project funding to introduce a new cultivar better suited to white tea production, Chunyu #1. Leveling out and hoeing the field would however be a job left to myself, volunteers Cao Zibang and Xiao Liyuan, Director Luo, plus the eternal MVP: Grandpa Sun. It was miserable work for January. It was first delayed by the snow and constantly punctuated by the rain, slowing work down to a standstill on some days. In theory, 5 able bodied men could be expected to ready 14 Mu in six days. It took us more than two weeks. The weather was not the only problem. As I am still reminded when out weeding, there was an obvious skill gap between everyone involved. Crooked tea rows in some spots will be a long lasting testament to the soft hands and not-so-green thumbs that tilled them. Sun, now in his 60’s, has about 40 years of agricultural experience under his belt, Luo had about 10, myself less than that, while Cao had about 2 years of experience, and young Xiao had never held a hoe before arriving there.
Nonetheless, eventually the work was done and the fields were more than ready when the new tea starts arrived in March. Volunteers Jose and Nathan arrived just in time to help Sun and other neighbors in the planting. All were able to get into the ground before their roots dried out on the factory garage floor.
(Summer 2024 Volunteer Shock Brigade Helping Rain Or Shine)
Since then, it has been demonstrated that weeding is the single task where volunteer labor is most needed. The now almost barren fields need to be weeded at least three times between May and October in order for the starts to thrive. While we did find that tea starts which were intercropped with soy or aided by clover cover and plastic tarps did tend to do better than those planted on completely barren terraces, no section of the plot was completely free from weeds. Five volunteers, Amir, Eddie, Shadi, Prakuti, and Li all came out to help with the toughest July weeding. Four others would have joined them, but were cut off by flooding that canceled most incoming traffic. Those who made it were in for tough work. In this part of the year, weeding is only done between 6am and 9am, and again from 4pm to 6pm. For the rest of daylight hours, the Sun rules the tea fields alone. This little “shock brigade” was able to take care of a large chunk of the area under direction management. I hope that next year one entire round of weeding for the whole plot can be accomplished with volunteer labor. For organic tea farming in this area, this is precisely the propaganda of the deed we need most desperately.
The People: In Search of a Cooperative Subject
Enterprises in the cooperative movement are usually divided into worker cooperatives (Mondragon), marketing cooperatives (Ocean Spray), collectives (Dazhai), or consumer cooperatives, AKA your local food co-op or credit union. Internally, One River Tea is, at the present, a worker cooperative in the sense that everyone is a member-owner. We are also so small that it is basically a typical partnership between three people. Outwardly though, our support and cross-polination with other cooperative ventures places us firmly within the solidarity economy. Thorough trial and error, we are building and have built economic “dual power” in many different packages. If we are a worker’s co-operative, then Loushuiyuan is a typical marketing cooperative, the Manyingtai Sub-Village Collective Team is exactly what is sounds like, and our friends from the People’s Food Sovereignty Forum, Digital Apprentice Program and Jinlong Pepper Group are trying to set up co-operative projects across the gamut. Learning together, we hope to find the best ways to maximize our service to Chinese tea producers and international consumers.
Loushuiyuan, more properly the Loushui Professional Farmer Co-operative, is the cooperative venture we have given the most support. It is also in a way the most problematic. On the one hand, it has been the site where we have hosted 17 volunteers involving ourselves and other enthusiasts directly into production. Few WWoofing sites in China have that much traffic in just two years, and no other village in Hefeng County has seen so many foreign faces. Through our continued work here, we have also come to better understand local tea brewing traditions and share them globally. Maiyingtai farmers nominally in the cooperative have gotten additional income through three payouts, one of which was completely ORT-funded. They have also gotten direct help from volunteers and have largely enjoyed all of this lively, decidedly international new company. The village caught the attention of county and provincial government, and now millions of RMB have been invested to turn the village into a site of domestic eco-tourism. In return, we have gotten one of a kind promotional material that has let us grew our brand and reach even further. It seems like a win for everyone involved.
However, as one Chinese volunteer rightly pointed out to us, all of this glossed over the internal contradictions within the enterprise. It is precisely because member households were not given formal co-ownership of the cooperative that Loushuiyuan had gone astray. While the downturn in the local green tea market is real exogenous factor at play in the co-op now 1-2 year insolvency, the cooperative’s massive investment in a restaurant during the pandemic was also misplaced, and would have been an appropriation opposed by most members. Now deeply in debt, cooperation is strained as ORT money and personal assistance from myself and past volunteers (ostly Phelan) has to be stretched over, well, everything. This was the crux of the Chinese volunteer’s critique: more and more money will have to be spent on maintaining their basic production activities, while the farmers themselves will have less and less direct assistance. Even if ORT could maintain its goal of allocating 15% of our income on this and other social ventures, this volunteer argued, it will mean little if the lion’s share of that goes to keeping the lights on in the co-operative factory. It would devolve into a cooperative without cooperative subjects.
To answer that critique, we have been negotiating for months now to work directly with the Maiyingtai Village to revive their collective. On paper, China has had a system of “dual level management” integrating both farmer household and village collective operation of rural resources in every village across the country. Since the liquidation of most collective fields in 1997 and the end of the Agricultural Tax System in 2004, collective management has basically evaporated as collective accounts zeroed out. Back in June, a new Chinese policy document made it clear that village sub-team collective like the one in Maiyingtai were encouraged to restart some modicum of a collective economy, meaning assets owned and controlled in common by all members of the sub-team. At last in August an agreement was inked between ourselves and the Maiyingtai sub-team members. So long as the they maintain heirloom tea bushes and double down on organic management, we would put half of the funds that go to the Hefeng project directly into their collective account. In return, they have to share with us how they are using the funds, and indeed guarantee that whatever is bought stays in the collective. For now, a village gate and new pruning equipment are the first purchases they have made.
(Collective Agreeement Signatures) (Collectively-Purchased Gate)
Beyond the farmers of Maiyingtai, we are also in service of the much larger community of people that drink the tea we sell and read the information we put out on various platforms. You, dear reader, are one of the people we serve. It remains to be seen how we can best incorporate folks like you into our operation. The most extreme idea, forwarded by the Digital Apprentice Program, is to rusticate a handful of the most committed tea enthusiasts and radical students, physically moving them to Hefeng or similar such sights, and finding away for them to integrate online income generation with rural stewardship. To their credit, that is precisely what they have done, teaching college students from disadvantaged background to code and live full time in rural Guizhou, Fujian, and Hainan. Very few of you I think want to commit a lifetime to such a project. I have also gotten to know scholars through the People’s Food Sovereignty Forum who bring out student or consumers to various fruit cooperatives for entire seasons of volunteer work. Their work is an intensive, education-oriented sort of WWoofing that would appeal to a few of you, but would still be an unrealistic commitment for most. Finally, friends at the Jinlong Pepper Group, plus a few direct viewers from Bilibili, have discussed forming something like the consumer cooperative pioneered by the Huanghe Collective Prosperity Co-operative. The idea is organize online enthusiasts into a separate entity where they would get free or discounted tea and dividends on whatever they sell to those outside the co-op. This is the most realistic proposal I have heard so far, but I need to visit this pioneer group in question before deciding on the viability of this idea.
Even a rather tepid expansion into consumer cooperative work would not be without a degree of internal contradiction. Imagine such a cooperative structure existed and we poll consumer members on what tea they want for the next tea season and stock accordingly. If we did so, there is a decent chance the product might bomb and lose us money, as most consumer choices are passive and spontaneous. Pricing is another potential issue. We are defacto price makers on basically all we sell, as it is not identical winter wheat or polished white quartz that we are selling. Our 2015 Baimudan is not just white tea, nor are our Lincang Puer cakes just Puer. How can one rationally and democratically set a price on these things? They can’t under a market system. We are incentivized to price slightly below similar products from competitors but no lower than that. The ultimate price point has nothing to do with the value that consumers ultimately derive from it, and consumers rightly would want to minimize that price, but potentially to the point that overall revenue might decline. None of this is to say that such contradictions can not be overcome. Just ask your local food co-op. To paraphrase one scholar put it, any cooperative business that becomes successful will be subject to the historical burden of socially normalized “mercantile behavior.” The speculation and obfuscation that are the accepted rules of private enterprise, are in contradiction with rationalizing, democratic goals of cooperative firms, and indeed the solidarity economy more broadly.
A Humble Request
Please send your own ideas, requests, or feedback on how the social dimension of One River Tea can be better ran to meet your needs and the needs of the community. What do you like about the things we have done so far, and what might we do differently? We owe everything to your support, friendship, and continued solidarity. Help us make tea better, for everyone.