Agriculture In China 1949 2030

This book examines the agricultural policies and programs adopted by the Chinese leadership since 1949 and analyzes the role of agriculture in China's changing development strategies. Dr. Hsu gives particular attention to the measures intended to improve agricultural technology and to the sources of funds for agricultural investment. He concludes that, although the collective system has been effective in mobilizing China's rural resources for agricultural development and in promoting progress in labor-intensive agricultural technology, periodic extreme leftist policies and interference by rural party cadres have caused various kinds of inefficiency, offsetting the advantages gained from collective farming. This is the first book to systematically analyze the ways in which China's agricultural development is being financed. By critically examining the level and nature of state resources allocated to agriculture, the author challenges the view that China has pursued an agriculture-first strategy of economic development since the early 1960s.

Kenneth Walker, the doyen of modern Chinese economic studies from the 1960s until his death in 1989, was the world's most authoritative commentator on China's agricultural development in the first four decades of the People's Republic. With an unparalleled authority derived from the use of primary Chinese sources, his collected papers provide a unique account of this era. In addition to their historical importance, the papers offer valuable insight into contemporary China's agricultural sector, which arguably poses the most serious economic and social problems for the Bejing government today. Including the posthumously-published study of `Food and Mortality During the Great Leap Forward,' Walker's comprehensive analysis of forty years of China's agricultural development will be a valuable resource for scholars and researchers of China, as well as undergraduates and postgraduates.

The report examines the relationships between agricultural policies in the North China Plain, the approaches to water management that evolved from them, the quantity of water that was actually used, and the consequent groundwater depletion beneath Luancheng County, Hebei Province, from 1949 to 2000. To systematically address these relationships, we use a comprehensive water-balance approach. Our results indicate that a single, longstanding policy-that of using groundwater to meet the crop-water requirements not supplied by precipitation-is responsible for the steady rate of groundwater decline.

The pace of growth in China's agricultural sector is remarkable. Determining how this demand for food will be met requires a complex analytical framework whose parameters are the subject of an intense discussion. Thesse workshop proceedings provide a rich repository of material addressing the issue.