The Resilience of Diversified Clusters: Reconfiguring Commodity Networks in Rural China during the COVID-19 Pandemic

We conceptualize typical rural communities in China as diversified economic clusters. In normal times, economic actors in these communities rarely cooperate with each other, but are integrated into separate commodity chains. These “diversified clusters”, however, show resilience and flexibility when an external shock—the COVID-19 pandemic—disrupts the spatial connections throughout the existing commodity chains. In this study, we use primary field data collected from one typical rural community in Northern China to show how economic diversity, aided by social networks and space-shrinking technologies, allowed for the vertical commodity chains to be reconfigured temporarily into localized horizontal commodity networks to cope with the emergencies brought about by the pandemic. Our findings suggest that while market integration can create precarity at the individual level, it can also contribute to economic resilience at the community level if it increases economic diversity and complementarity within the community. This study sheds lights on discussions of the resilience of rural and economic clustering by a novel conceptualization of diversified clusters and also offers a nuanced understanding of the connection between market integration and community resilience.