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Agriculture in China: Prospects for production and trade
Book
Rural development in China CHINA’S AGRICULTURAL MODERNIZATION: THE SOCIALIST MECHANIZATION SCHEME by On Kit Tam Croom f 19.95
Helm,
UK,
1985,
24 1 pp,
least of all the Chinese planners, seems to have foreseen. The gains associated with the shift from Maoism to Dengism raise a variety of fundamental issues of political economy, centering on:
0
AGRICULTURE IN CHINA’S MODERN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT By Nicholas R. Lady
0
Cambridge University Press, bridge, UK, 1983 and reprinted 285 pp, f22.50
Cam1985,
RURAL DEVELOPMENT
IN CHINA
By Dwight Yusuf
and
H. Perkins
Shahid
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, USA, 1984,235 pp, $25.00 AGRICULTURE IN CHINA: PROSPECTS FOR PRODUCTION AND TRADE OECD, Paris, 1985, 84 pp, FF65 CHINA: AGRICULTURE YEAR 2000
TO THE
The World Bank, Washington, USA, 1985, 143 pp
DC,
These five books (four new and one an unchanged reissue of the 1983 original), together with Kenneth Walker’s Food Grain Procurement and Consumption in China,’ are evidence of the exceptional fascination which Chinese rural development holds for a wide range of Western economists. For many, this interest stems from the easing of ultra-egalitarianism and the restoration of individual and family incentives to peasants under the various responsibility systems following the end of the cultural revolution. This, in turn, lead to a remarkable surge of agricultural production from 1979 to 1984 on a scale which no one,
FOOD POLICY May 1986
0
the balance between equity and efficiency, much along the same lines as the debate which was particularly strong for the Indian sub-continent in the late 1960s and early 1970s phase of the green revolution; the roles of bureaucratic controls and the price mechanism as competing or complementary policy instruments in optimizing both shorter-term resource use and output and longer-term investments on the farm and its infrastructure; an assessment of how soon and to what extent the gains of recent years will be checked by a landshort agriculture still poorly provided with much of the essential technical and physical infrastructure.
There are also the more ‘practical’ interests of business and government advisers concerned with the implications of more recent policies and their results for China’s international trade. Their interest may be the more immediate outlook for trade in farm products and Chinese imports of farm inputs (both for current use or capital investment), or the longer-term prospects for China turning to the international division of labour as an escape from diminishing returns on its own land. Apart from their importance in irrigation and drainage, mechanical power and equipment have played a limited role in Chinese agriculture. They came to the forefront of national policy making only after the Fourth National People’s Congress, followed by the First National Conference on Learning from Dazhai, in 1975. They were actively promoted until the end of 1978, with the commune organization as the key means of implementation. More recently, peasants have
reviews
been given the right to own their own capital inputs, including large tractors, and the state has facilitated the production of suitable equipment. There has been a large expansion in the use of two-wheeled tractors, bringing China more into line with other agricultures in Asia. Taking the World Bank report as a pointer, the adequate provision of suitable machinery services is barely a problem now or in the foreseeable future (paragraphs 3.59 and 3.60), which is not surprising. However, as Dr Tam’s citation of the Summary Report of the National Conference on Learning from Dazhai indicates, matters were seen differently in 1975: The function of mechanizing agriculture is not confined to the raising of agricultural labour productivity significantly so that labour can be freed to engage in diversified production and to build prosperous socialist new-type villages. Agricultural mechanization has very important implications
for utilizing the advantages of the bigness and publicness of the commune organization, and for the diminution of inequality between industry and agriculture, and between mental and manual work. China’s Agricultural Modernization: the Socialist Mechanization Scheme describes the contribution of mechanization from the early 1960s onwards, its organization at various levels (national, provincial and communal, the bureaucratic and brigade), attempts to reconcile efficient operation with rigorous egalitarian objectives, and the methods of finance. Dr Tam points out that, notwithstanding some years of collective ownership of machinery, no satisfactory system of management had been adopted by the majority of communes by the late 1970s. His Chapter five gives several pointers that improvements were being made, although there is little to convince me that they could have had much net effect. One wishes for a more detailed analysis of the interplay between the apparently conflicting objectives. For example, what advantage of ‘bigness and publicness’ is there in the centralized ownership of the twowheeled tractor, whether used in cultivation or as the power unit for a small trailer, or even of Suzuki-sized trucks? Or again, machinery subcon-
181
Rural development in China CHINA’S AGRICULTURAL MODERNIZATION: THE SOCIALIST MECHANIZATION SCHEME by On Kit Tam Croom f 19.95
Helm,
UK,
1985,
24 1 pp,
least of all the Chinese planners, seems to have foreseen. The gains associated with the shift from Maoism to Dengism raise a variety of fundamental issues of political economy, centering on:
0
AGRICULTURE IN CHINA’S MODERN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT By Nicholas R. Lady
0
Cambridge University Press, bridge, UK, 1983 and reprinted 285 pp, f22.50
Cam1985,
RURAL DEVELOPMENT
IN CHINA
By Dwight Yusuf
and
H. Perkins
Shahid
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, USA, 1984,235 pp, $25.00 AGRICULTURE IN CHINA: PROSPECTS FOR PRODUCTION AND TRADE OECD, Paris, 1985, 84 pp, FF65 CHINA: AGRICULTURE YEAR 2000
TO THE
The World Bank, Washington, USA, 1985, 143 pp
DC,
These five books (four new and one an unchanged reissue of the 1983 original), together with Kenneth Walker’s Food Grain Procurement and Consumption in China,’ are evidence of the exceptional fascination which Chinese rural development holds for a wide range of Western economists. For many, this interest stems from the easing of ultra-egalitarianism and the restoration of individual and family incentives to peasants under the various responsibility systems following the end of the cultural revolution. This, in turn, lead to a remarkable surge of agricultural production from 1979 to 1984 on a scale which no one,
FOOD POLICY May 1986
0
the balance between equity and efficiency, much along the same lines as the debate which was particularly strong for the Indian sub-continent in the late 1960s and early 1970s phase of the green revolution; the roles of bureaucratic controls and the price mechanism as competing or complementary policy instruments in optimizing both shorter-term resource use and output and longer-term investments on the farm and its infrastructure; an assessment of how soon and to what extent the gains of recent years will be checked by a landshort agriculture still poorly provided with much of the essential technical and physical infrastructure.
There are also the more ‘practical’ interests of business and government advisers concerned with the implications of more recent policies and their results for China’s international trade. Their interest may be the more immediate outlook for trade in farm products and Chinese imports of farm inputs (both for current use or capital investment), or the longer-term prospects for China turning to the international division of labour as an escape from diminishing returns on its own land. Apart from their importance in irrigation and drainage, mechanical power and equipment have played a limited role in Chinese agriculture. They came to the forefront of national policy making only after the Fourth National People’s Congress, followed by the First National Conference on Learning from Dazhai, in 1975. They were actively promoted until the end of 1978, with the commune organization as the key means of implementation. More recently, peasants have
reviews
been given the right to own their own capital inputs, including large tractors, and the state has facilitated the production of suitable equipment. There has been a large expansion in the use of two-wheeled tractors, bringing China more into line with other agricultures in Asia. Taking the World Bank report as a pointer, the adequate provision of suitable machinery services is barely a problem now or in the foreseeable future (paragraphs 3.59 and 3.60), which is not surprising. However, as Dr Tam’s citation of the Summary Report of the National Conference on Learning from Dazhai indicates, matters were seen differently in 1975: The function of mechanizing agriculture is not confined to the raising of agricultural labour productivity significantly so that labour can be freed to engage in diversified production and to build prosperous socialist new-type villages. Agricultural mechanization has very important implications
for utilizing the advantages of the bigness and publicness of the commune organization, and for the diminution of inequality between industry and agriculture, and between mental and manual work. China’s Agricultural Modernization: the Socialist Mechanization Scheme describes the contribution of mechanization from the early 1960s onwards, its organization at various levels (national, provincial and communal, the bureaucratic and brigade), attempts to reconcile efficient operation with rigorous egalitarian objectives, and the methods of finance. Dr Tam points out that, notwithstanding some years of collective ownership of machinery, no satisfactory system of management had been adopted by the majority of communes by the late 1970s. His Chapter five gives several pointers that improvements were being made, although there is little to convince me that they could have had much net effect. One wishes for a more detailed analysis of the interplay between the apparently conflicting objectives. For example, what advantage of ‘bigness and publicness’ is there in the centralized ownership of the twowheeled tractor, whether used in cultivation or as the power unit for a small trailer, or even of Suzuki-sized trucks? Or again, machinery subcon-
181