Abstract
This chapter reviews agricultural development in China during the last two centuries. Changes in land and population, impacting on output growth, reflect decades of stability and peace that followed the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, but were halted in the late nineteenth century. Subsequently, under the Republic of China (1912–1949), political and military upheavals severely constrained output growth—a situation exacerbated by the Guomindang Government’s failure to institute constructive institutional, economic or technological policies for agriculture. In the Maoist Era (1949–1978) the establishment of collective agriculture and a monopoly procurement system helped promote industrialisation by transferring grain from the rural to the urban sector, albeit at the expense of squeezing Chinese farmers. Since 1979 market forces have played an increasingly important role, although tensions between maintaining cheap food supplies to hold down industrial wage costs, facilitating output growth and achieving fiscal balance have been a persistent challenge.
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Notes
- 1.
An early twentieth-century Japanese source makes the point forcefully: “On the Manchus becoming the masters of China, they did not like to have their birthplace defiled by the subject nation, and forbade the Chinese to immigrate into it. This greatly retarded the economic progress of the country [Manchuria ]…[When Chinese migrants were subsequently allowed once more to settle in Manchuria ] these immigrants carried with them the advanced knowledge of agriculture, and the intelligence and industry inborn in the great race” (Bank of Chosen, 1920, pp. 12–13). See also Naoto (1995).
- 2.
Access to farmland outside China Proper was a major source of the increase in arable land. E.g. Kent Deng notes that “[t]he additional farmland supply in Manchuria and South Mongolia alone was equivalent to about one-sixth of China’s total” and he adds that “China’s farmland more than doubled in the first 100 years of the Qing rule” (Deng, 2015, p. 6).
- 3.
- 4.
Cf. Deng’s (2003) estimate of 1.7 per cent p.a. population growth between 1734 and 1833 and the much lower 1.1 per cent growth rate (1943–1833) given by Ho (1959) and Perkins (1969). The difference reflects a wide disparity in the base year figures: Deng’s population estimate for 1734 is 75.2 m; that of both Ho and Li, for 1741, is 143.4 m. Commenting on official Qing census data, Kent Deng argues that “the [Chinese] census-based series are fundamentally sound: institutionally, economically, sociologically and biologically (i.e., in terms of human reproductive parameters). The conclusion is that Chinese official census data are…more accurate and reliable than all the modern-day estimates or guesses” (Deng, 2004).
- 5.
After 1850 political dislocation and the delegation of important fiscal and other responsibilities to provincial officials impacted on China’s population registration system. Thus, “the century between 1851 and 1949…is practically a demographer’s vacuum” characterised by the absence of any reliable provincial population estimates (Ho, 1959, pp. 97 and 246). The demographic impact of the Taiping Rebellion was catastrophic, according to some sources reducing the total population by one-sixth. Millions of lives were also lost as a result of natural disasters.
- 6.
The gradual dissemination of paddy cultivation techniques had a huge pay-off, and laid the foundation for the eventual spread of wet rice culture throughout Southern China. Success in using wet-field rice farming techniques was critically dependent on access to water, especially between flowering and ripening of the rice-plant. No less important was the introduction of new seed strains, the single most important of which was early ripening rice , whose shorter growing period made it possible to introduce a second (winter) crop, thereby extending double cropping over a much wider area and generating increased energy supplies (calories).
- 7.
Compared with pre-industrial agricultural technologies available to European farmers, a major advantage of wet-field rice cultivation was its ability to maintain soil fertility at a high level, without the necessity of rotating crops. Its main challenge was, however, a high labour requirement.
- 8.
Nor were they necessarily engaged full-time in farming: many pursued handicraft activities in the winter months when conditions made it impossible to work in the fields.
- 9.
Although Shi is not explicit on this point, his estimates would appear to reflect the arable grain area and average yields per unit of arable land under grain.
- 10.
Comparison of Shi’s estimates of per capita output (1989, p. 66) with those of the post-1949 period is no less interesting, suggesting that the 1850 per capita level was not re-attained until into the 1980s in post-1949 China.
- 11.
Cf. Perkins, who argued that domestic political upheavals acted as a safety valve that “helped delay a Malthusian day of reckoning for Chinese agriculture …Were it not for the Taiping Rebellion , rising population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might have outstripped the ability of Chinese agriculture to provide adequate food supplies” (1969, p. 29).
- 12.
The focus of Myers’ study was the two provinces of Hebei and Shandong.
- 13.
Myers captures this well: “A study of Chinese agriculture on a global basis will always be complex and intractable. The huge size and diversity of China must make us cautious in theorizing about agriculture elsewhere in the country. In the famine-ridden northwest great masses of peasants were perpetually on the verge of starvation; the human spirit frequently broke under these conditions, and the family disintegrated. On the other hand, commerce was more developed and rural conditions were more prosperous and stable in the central provinces” (1970, pp. 294–295).
- 14.
After an increase in the early Qing, the formal agricultural tax burden remained stable until towards the end of the Dynasty, when the Taiping Rebellion led to a tax rise (Liu, 1912). Additional taxes were levied by local authorities to fund local expenditures.
- 15.
An important distinction is that between “regular taxes” (zheng shui, 正税) and “supplementary taxes” (fu shui, 附税). The late 1920s and 1930s saw the introduction of an increasing number of new levies on farmers, the burden of which gradually outweighed that of “regular” taxes.
- 16.
Hence the phenomenon of “permanent tenancy” (yong dian, 永典), reflecting the symbolic division of a piece of land between the “surface” and “bottom” rights to the land. Cf. the notion of emphyteusis in Roman Law.
- 17.
Cf. J.L. Buck: “…it is the fashion in some places for the landlord to know as little as possible about his business, and any landlord who takes an interest in his holdings loses social status…In southern Kiangsu [Jiangsu ], where there are many tenants of absentee landlords and of large resident landlords, the landlord looks upon his tenant as of the lowest order of humanity” (Buck, 1925, pp. 19 and 24).
- 18.
One source suggests that in Jiangsu during the decade before the outbreak of war against Japan in 1937 rents rose substantially: “…in Baoshan [county] the bigger landlords have raised rents by nearly 50%…In Danyang and…villages near Shanghai they have doubled and even trebled them” (Zhang, 1957: Vol. 3, 256–257).
- 19.
Elsewhere, Bianco is unequivocal in arguing that in the face of what he [Bianco ] describes as “the most fundamental problem, the condition of the peasantry…the Kuomintang’s failure was well-nigh total” (1971, p. 109).
- 20.
- 21.
Increasing affluence since the 1980s has allowed consumption to shift towards a more protein-rich diet, raising the “self sufficiency” benchmark to at least 400 kg.
- 22.
The grain-sown area fell from 120.6 to a low of 99.4 m ha between 1978 and 2003. Although it subsequently recovered, in 2016 it was 113 m ha—still more than 6% below the 1978 level. Concealed in these aggregate figures were sown-area adjustments for individual grains, of which corn was the largest beneficiary, in response to burgeoning demand for animal feed (cf. Fig. 12.3a).
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Ash, R., Du, J., King, C. (2018). Perspectives on Agricultural and Grain Output Growth in China from the 19th Century to the Present Day. In: Pinilla, V., Willebald, H. (eds) Agricultural Development in the World Periphery. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66020-2_12
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