Chang, Huang-Wei; (2025) From Tea Terroir to Place Brand: Inequalities in Strategies of Regional Revitalisation in Pinglin, Taiwan. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Urban-centric development in Metropolitan Taipei has placed Pinglin – a peripheral agricultural district – at a crossroads. Recognised for its tea production, Pinglin continues to grapple with a declining population and inadequate infrastructure. Between 1975 and 2023, the Taiwanese government implemented several strategies to address Pinglin's economic challenges, including tea competitions, the “One Township One Product” campaign, and rural place branding initiatives. Collectively, these efforts constitute a terroir economy approach, aimed at enhancing both the economic performance and local identity of Pinglin via valorising its Baozhong tea industry. While this approach (1) successfully established Pinglin as the internationally recognised "Hometown of Baozhong Tea" and (2) improved local incomes, it has not addressed the deeper structural issues – market competition, standardisation and urban hegemony that perpetuate regional inequality, especially localised mechanisms of injustice. This thesis argues that these mechanisms – sustained by the terroir economic approach – failed to rectify regional disparities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2023, the research explores the multi-layered formation of regional inequality manifested in Pinglin. The tea terroir is first conceptualised in two domains – "abstract" and "lived" – to help explore the dynamics between state power and local agency. These dynamics inform the rise of three dominant social classes in Pinglin: teamaking masters, whose expertise is legitimised through awards; tea merchants, who gain status via tasting knowledge; and regional branding network organisers, who leverage creativity. Practices of specific classes to retain access to privilege include family education, taste cultivation, and cultural mediation. Such elite access results in local inequalities, further interpellated into deeper, micro-mechanisms of cultural capital accumulation, individual habitus and reflexivity. This specific analysis of class within the terroir economy is connected to broader patterns of economic resource imbalance, social misinterpretation, and poor political representation in Metropolitan Taipei. My analysis uses a critical/realist understanding of contingent causality.

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