Traditional markets, food circulation and supply, market transformation, and urban food ecologies.
Anthropologist Zhong Shuru turned ten years of wet market research into China’s Wet Markets, attempting to understand China’s vast and intricate food system through the wet market’s gateway. She visited over 200 markets across the country, documenting how food moves and how people in them live and change.
Qilin melons at eight mao a jin, scholar’s curios from every dynasty (authenticity not guaranteed) — at Shahe Grand Fair in Changping, Zhong Shuru stumbles on a bustle where low prices and absurdity coexist, and shows young people how to turn wet-market thrills into know-how through fieldwork methods.
Associate Professor Zhong Shuru of Sun Yat-sen University brings her new book China’s Wet Markets to Beijing: Saturday morning browsing the organic farmers’ market, an evening conversation on the past, present, and future of wet markets.
Shu’er, diagnosed with autism at five, has spent ten years at the wet market with her mother—first carried to dodge stray dogs, then independently targeting a stall for pork belly. This noisy market is her daily classroom for maintaining social functioning and practising getting along with others.
In 2016 she moved into a small room beside the wet market in a small Hainan town, spending fourteen months amid the stench of fish and sweat, trying to get wary stall-holders to open up.
Xu Yunyian, fifty, runs a seafood and dried goods shop at Shuangjingtou wet market – no online store, no podcast. Retired elderly catching the early market and Chinese New Year stockpiling keep a family of four going; her younger son grew up right in this lane.
From “ghost delivery” and farmer-support marketing to sorters on the run, shifting wet markets, and plastic waste, the issues facing workers, merchants, farmers, and the environment beyond platform convenience are often overlooked.
Social work volunteer Meng Fang goes to the market with friends and brings back hemp seed, sour meat and local homemade liquor, then enters the White-Pants Yao Ecomuseum to see golden-silk silkworms, yarn-running and cloth-dyeing; traditional life continues in these everyday routines.
In Yijing Market, Wuzhou, Guangxi, the grandmother opened the shop in 1995. The mother later took over, and the daughter helps during the Spring Festival. The mother opens the shop early each morning and returns home in the evening to do the portioning, knowing exactly what regular customers usually buy. The little shop is unlikely to be taken over by the daughter.
Pickers and delivery riders at Xiaoxiang, Hema, JD Qixian, and Pupu describe the three-minute limit, piece-rate pay, and physical toll in the comment section. Consumers respond with empathy, off-peak ordering, and reduced reliance, as the dialogue shifts from personal guilt to questioning platform algorithms and industry competition.
