A Narrative Review and Assessment of Olive Introduction and Dissemination in China from a Cultural Perspective

China has introduced and cultivated olives (Olea europaea) for more than 60 years, yet whether a localized olive culture has formed—and whether the industrialization achieved in Longnan, Gansu Province, constitutes a sustainable and replicable model—remains unanswered. This narrative review draws on eight Chinese monographs as secondary primary sources, verified against archival documents, statistics, policy records, and market and survey reports, and reinterprets the history of olive introduction and dissemination in China from a cultural perspective. The evidence indicates that the 1964 large-scale introduction was shaped jointly by Cold War political symbolism, the naming of the olive as “oil canar,” and the rain-and-heat schema of monsoon agriculture, which concentrated early cultivation in the hot, humid southwest, frequently beyond the crop’s ecological requirements; that spontaneous, off-plan introduction in the Hanzhong Basin, Shaanxi province outperformed planned sites and redirected attention to the dry valleys of the southern Qinling slopes, where Longnan emerged as China’s core producing area after 2000; and that the economically meager decades from 1960 to 2000 nevertheless accumulated brand narratives, local agronomic knowledge (including negative knowledge), and an intergenerational research community that underpinned later industrialization. The sustainability of the Longnan model remains conditional rather than demonstrated: economic viability depends on policy support whose market-replacement risk is unquantified, consumer cultural autonomy might be weak, and ecological effects lack baseline measurement. The study is limited by its reliance on secondary sources and fragmentary quantitative evidence; its cultural interpretations are offered as testable propositions rather than established causality.