The 98 Percent Tea Statistic Nobody Checked

In January 2012, a lab tested three lots of Tieguanyin sold under the Richun brand, all three grown in Anxi. Each carried a mix of 13 to 17 different pesticides, and each contained endosulfan, a compound banned for use on tea leaves in China and banned globally under the Stockholm Convention for its persistence and bioaccumulation. That result, from Greenpeace East Asia's 2012 survey of Beijing tea retailers¹, is a real, specific, measured finding about real bushes. It is not the number most people repeat when they bring up Anxi and pesticide in the same sentence. That number is 98 percent, and it never measured anything Anxi did.

Where the 98 percent figure actually comes from

The figure surfaced the same year, in a Sina News piece on the wider pesticide furor: "为了抗真菌和除虫，98%的茶叶在栽培过程中难免要用农药" ("to resist fungus and pests, 98 percent of tea inevitably requires pesticide use at some point during cultivation"). The article attributes it to the Organic Tea Research and Development Center at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences' Tea Research Institute, and its own logic is right there in the surrounding sentence: nationwide, certified organic tea runs at roughly 1 to 2 percent of total production, so the other 98 to 99 percent is not certified organic, and the article rounds that into "inevitably uses pesticide."

That is an inference about certification share, not a measurement of how heavily a bush was sprayed, whether the spray was legal, or how much residue reached the leaf. A conventionally farmed tea garden that uses pesticide correctly, within the legal limit, on the legal list, counts inside that 98 percent exactly the same as a garden spraying banned compounds off the label. The number also was never about Anxi specifically. It is a national figure, cited in a national news story about several regions and several tea companies, that later retellings of Anxi's own scandal borrowed because Anxi's was the highest-profile pesticide story that year. The real, Anxi-specific findings from the same year, the Richun lots and their endosulfan, sit right next to the 98 percent claim in the coverage and measure something else entirely.

What Anxi's own bureau actually reports doing

The county's response is on the record with the Anxi County Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau, and it has a name: "两留两减两禁一回归", two retentions, two reductions, two bans, one return. Growers are asked to keep tea trees at a natural height and keep grass on the terrace walls rather than clearing it (the two retentions), cut pesticide and chemical fertilizer use (the two reductions), stop using non-approved pesticides and herbicides outright (the two bans), and return processing toward older, less input-heavy craft methods (the one return). The province's own account of the campaign describes it as the piece of Anxi's post-2012 rebuilding aimed squarely at the reputation the pesticide scandal cost it.

A specific, measured year exists inside that program. In April 2017, Anxi was named a pilot candidate for national "Agricultural Product Quality Safety County" status, a designation with its own testing regime, and the county's own reporting for that year states that chemical fertilizer use fell 10.23 percent and pesticide use fell 5.4 percent compared with 2016. In the same year, a 6,254-mu (about 1,030-acre) zone was run as a zero-chemical-pesticide demonstration area, and county-wide quality testing across five administrative levels covered 19,495 batches at a 99.97 percent compliance rate. None of that is the 98 percent figure being disproven in the abstract. It is a specific county, in a specific tested year, reporting a specific, smaller change in a specific direction.

The technology that replaced some of the spraying

One of the tools the reduction campaign leaned on is a sound-and-light pest-control system built by the plant-protection company Silei. Dabofeng, an Anxi tea estate, first installed it in 2019 against the small green leafhopper, the tea bush's most damaging insect pest. The equipment releases two kinds of vibration: one disrupts the leafhopper's normal feeding, the other interferes with its mating during the breeding season, and both work without a chemical spray. By the time Fujian's provincial government profiled the technology again in May 2026, more than 40 large, high-standard tea estates across Anxi, including Dabofeng and Yunling in Xiping township, were managing roughly 350,000 mu (about 58,000 acres) of tea garden between them, close to half the county's total tea garden area. Equipment like Silei's now runs on those estates alongside automated irrigation and soil monitoring.

That is a real scale-up from the 5,000 mu the same system covered for leafhopper control back in 2017, though it describes the estates using the newer management model in general, not a claim that every one of those 350,000 mu now runs pesticide-free. What it shows is which part of Anxi's tea sector adopted the post-2012 changes fastest: the estates large enough to invest in the equipment and the monitoring that goes with it.

The number an outside government checked

Anxi's own account of its progress is worth corroborating from outside the county. Quanzhou, the prefecture-level city Anxi sits inside, has done exactly that in an official reply to its own legislature. Responding to a proposal at the Quanzhou People's Congress in May 2024, the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs stated that Anxi was the first county in Fujian province to launch organic-fertilizer-substitution and chemical-pesticide-reduction campaigns. By the end of 2023, it reported, the ecological tea garden share across the whole city, Anxi included, had reached 82.6 percent of total tea garden area. Anxi also carries a longer-running, more selective credential: in partnership with Quanzhou's entry-exit inspection agency, the county began building toward organic certification in October 2011, months before the pesticide scandal broke, and in 2015 it received the first "National Organic Product Certification Demonstration Area" designation issued anywhere in China.

What independent fieldwork says the government numbers do not

Set against county and city self-reporting, two pieces of independent academic research complicate the tidy version of this story. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution surveyed 310 Anxi tea growers between July 2022 and August 2023 and found adoption of ecological practices genuinely uneven: the researchers identified nine distinct combinations of factors that led a grower to adopt green techniques and four that led one not to, evidence against a single, uniform shift across the county rather than for one. A 2026 paper in the Journal of Agrarian Change goes further, using Anxi's pesticide crisis and its aftermath as its own case study of what the author calls a scale mismatch. Local policy, in this reading, engaged large producers and formal estates far more successfully than it engaged the ordinary smallholder working a few mu by hand. That imbalance undercuts the kind of county-wide collective management, shared water, shared pest pressure across neighboring plots, that an ecological transition actually needs to hold.

Put the pieces together and the honest answer sits between the two extremes. The 98 percent figure was never a way to check any of this: it measured a certification rate, not a spraying practice, and it was never Anxi's number to begin with. Anxi's own reduction figures are real, specific, and independently corroborated by Quanzhou's government, not just repeated by Anxi's own press. What they are not, on the fieldwork's own evidence, is evenly distributed. A large estate running Silei's vibration equipment and a smallholder farming a few mu by the old methods are living through the same ten years of policy very differently.