Wine and Viticulture in East Asia: Changing Landscapes, Political Economy, and Global Shifts

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Wine consumption and production are growing rapidly across East Asia, with the largest transformation occurring in China, already becoming one of the world’s largest consumers of high priced Bordeaux and other imported wines and with the continuing growth of domestic wine production, often some quite high in quality though often overlooked outside of China. Though less prevalent in scholarship, wine making traditions in other countries including Japan and Taiwan and wine tourism among consumers in all of these countries is also growing in popularity. This panel brings together scholarship on wine economies and histories in these regions of East Asia and seeks to fill in a space in scholarship on wine economies and culture to explore more broadly the ways in which East Asia is becoming a global center of wine production and consumption. As scholars engaged in the critical examination of wine economies, history, and culture in East Asia, we feel that social science scholarship on wine in this region has been critically lacking, as in the example of the recent volume Wine and Culture: From Vineyard to Glass, which contains no work on East Asia, let alone Asia more broadly. To fill this void and create new spaces within Asian studies for critical scholarship on wine economies and culture, this panel includes scholarship from a variety of fields including Anthropology, Economics, Development Studies, and Geography. Papers also focus on a variety of regions including Tibetan Southwest China, Northeast China, Japan, and Taiwan.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Brendan A. Galipeau, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Chair

• Pierre Ly, University of Puget Sound

Individual Presentations

• New Wine in Old Villages: The Introduction of Industrial Vineyards Entangled with Post-Socialist Farmland Ownership and Village Economy - Kiho Kim, University of Chicago

• “Proper Divorce Saves Both Sides”: Foreign Partnerships, Coopetition and Industrial Upgrading in Chinese Wine - Cynthia Howson, University of Washington, Tacoma; Pierre Ly, University of Puget Sound

• Challenges and Opportunities: Comparing the Emerging Wine Industries of Changhua County, Taiwan and the Kofu Basin, Japan - Aaron Kingsbury, Mayville State University; Liang-Chih Chen, National Taiwan University

Discussant

• Jinghong Zhang, Australian National University