THE EVOLUTION OF POLICY AND CAPABILITIES IN CHINA'S AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGY

BY THOMAS B. WIENS*

*Senior Research Analyst at Mathtech, Inc., Bethesda, Maryland. The author is indebted to Prof. Motonosuke Amano and Shigeru Ishikawa for providing invaluable access to materials in their possession, and to the Social Science Research Council, Joint Committee on Contemporary China, for partial support of this research.

The most important and often asked question about Chinese agriculture is whether it can generate a sufficiently rapid increase in total product to sustain at constant or improving consumption levels a population which will continue to increase for many years to come. At present it is only possible to answer with expressions of optimism or pessimism founded largely on faith or on the assumption that past trends will continue. A more convincing answer would relate past trends and future potential increases in "inputs"-land, labor, various forms of capital, and weather conditions to realized or expected changes in "outputs"-production of agricultural products. But to begin to define the relationship between inputs and outputs, whether in qualitative or quantitative terms, one must have a prior understanding of the "technology" which defines the structure of the relationship, of the process generating changes in this technology, and of the effects these changes have had and will have on the stability of the input-output relationship.

Economists, including those studying China, have tended to confine their conception of technology to a "residual effect"-the "source" of changes in output which cannot be accounted for by changes in inputs within a static input-output relationship (or "production function").1 This approach is of no value in predicting the future, when ceteris paribus is rarely an appropriate assumption, and can be terribly misleading in "explaining" the past. Econometric studies of production functions are unreliable unless technological change is explicitly accounted for, because changes in conventional input use are so

1 For an example of this approach, see Anthony M. Tang, "Policy and Performance in Agriculture,' in A. Eckstein et al., eds, Economic Trends in Communist China (Chicago: Aldine, 1968).

highly correlated with changes in technology that omission of the latter leads to biased estimates of the effects of inputs. For example, growing fertilizer use appears to have been closely correlated with historical increases in rice yields in Japan, until the rate of diffusion of improved seeds is introduced into the equation. Then, as Hayami and Yamada have shown, the estimated marginal effect of increased fertilizer use (ceteris paribus) becomes very small.2

The spread of improved seeds, however, is only one of the more quantifiable aspects of a complex process. This paper will avoid quantification, but will build a base on which quantification can proceed: To begin to predict future rates of technological advance and lag times before full diffusion, we need to know how technological change is generated and implemented in China; to begin to predict changes in the structural relationships among inputs and outputs, we need to understand the underlying strategy and objectives of Chinese agrotechnical policy and the extent of their harmony with the perceived self-interest of peasants; to begin to predict the quantitative importance of technological change to production levels, we need to assess the forces determining probabilities of success or failure and potential and realized economic impact of individual innovations. These topics are explored in this paper through a set of illustrative case studies of interrelated aspects of technology as they have developed over the past two decades and can be expected to unfold in the next few years. The aspects are loosely classed as improved seeds, fertilizer use, irrigation and water control, mechanization, and improved techniques. The case studies are not intended to cover all important developments over the period.

We begin with some working hypotheses, which may be appraised in the light of the case studies. First, to provide a crude paradigm of the process of technological change in China: it involves an interaction among scientists and technicians, politicians (i.e., higher level cadres), and peasants (including lower level cadres). Scientists and technicians are under pressure to make breakthroughs on problems deemed significant to economic production but a research achievement is in the first instance measured on scientific or technical, rather than economic, criteria. It undergoes peer review, which may pit younger researchers, untainted by preliberation or Western training, against an older (and sometimes wiser) group of colleagues, but this screening process is not as rigorous in China as elsewhere since the originator(s) may counterattack with the accusation that their disparagers have an insufficiently Marxist or Maoist spirit (i.e., are negativist), against which accusation there is no effective defense.

When a breakthrough is documented by evidence, albeit on narrow criteria of measurement, it may attract the attention of local politicians, in whose interest it is to obtain recognition by translating the breakthrough into increases in key production measures. This may be a low-risk proposition for the politician, who can blame misleading technical data if failure results. With political support, the innovation is subjected to large-scale experimental testing, but the tests may be hasty, unscientific, carelessly monitored, or again evaluated on exces

Y. Hayami and S. Yamada, "Agricultural Productivity at the Beginning of Industrialization," in K. Ohkawa et al., eds., Agriculture and Economic Growth: Japan's Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

sively narrow criteria. If it passes these tests, the politicians are in a position to apply pressure for rapid and large-scale implementation in production, where for the first time any economic drawbacks may become fully apparent.

It is the peasants and grassroots cadres who are likely to notice and articulate any major economic weaknesses; if they are severe, and depending on the degree of voluntarism currently acceptable, they may abandon the innovation or resist its implementation. A high volume of promotional propaganda is frequently an indicator of such resistance. Peasants may not immediately perceive a net loss of social product, however, if the adoption process is subsidized in some way by the state, as must often be the case. Nor, for that matter, do the promoters ever publicly net out the cost of such subsidies in their published assessments of economic impact.

Failure eventually results in a period of reassessment, in which professionals who were previously reluctant to speak emerge to criticize the innovation, although less openly if the prestige of the political promoter(s) has been laid on the line. Rarely does such a discussion end in total discrediting of the innovation-usually the critique focuses on the limits or preconditions for its applicability, in part as a face saving device, and attention turns to means of removing these limits or fulfilling the preconditions. After a period of retrenchment, a modified or qualified version of the same innovation may be promoted once again with greater caution.

This paradigm suggests that the process of technological change in China, in contrast to other countries, embodies a less conservative or skeptical view of innovational potential, a higher risk of economic failure of implemented innovations, but also a very short lag between technical or scientific breakthroughs and large-scale diffusion. Elsewhere the process is slowed and made less risky by the need to demonstrate overwhelming economic superiority before a conservative peasantry can be persuaded to adopt.

Secondly, the underlying strategy and objectives of Chinese agrotechnical policy have been well-summarized by Ishikawa as:

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(1) The utilization, as much as possible, of the local resources for agricultural inputs (designated as "traditional" inputs in contrast to "modern inputs"); (2) Economizing, as much as possible, of modern input (here defined as the inputs produced with the use of nonfarm resources); and

(3) Research and development of scientific methods for productivity increase on the basis of traditional inputs or the combination of traditional and modern inputs.

Another way of putting it is that the state has behaved as if it sought to maximize annual output (not output of each crop), subject to a virtually fixed constraint on cultivated acreage, tight constraints on the availability of liquid capital within the rural sector for purchase of outside inputs, but with no constraint on the supply of labor except perhaps in busy seasons. The obvious prescription for new technologies which increase the intensity of labor use (over the year as a whole) has been followed since the 1956 formulation and 1960 ratification of the national agricultural development program, the

• Shigeru Ishikawa, "Agrarian Reform and Its Productivity Effect-Implication of the Chinese Patterns," in The Structure and Development in Asian Economies (Hitotsubashi University Institute of Economic Research, Paper No. 10, September 1968).

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annual grain-yield targets of which are still the major measures of local achievement. As the state has come to recognize the importance of seasonal labor bottlenecks, however, there has been greater emphasis on selected laborsaving innovations.

While at first glance the above objectives seem appropriate for a labor-surplus economy, Chinese agrotechnological policy has at times seemed to ignore (or actively preclude) the existence of off-farm or subsidiary earning opportunities and the desire of the peasant for some leisure. That is, the peasant, unlike the state, has never regarded additional time spent in labor as having zero opportunity-cost, and a times has preferred leisure or lucrative side occupations to the less productive agricultural or capital construction tasks. This conflict of interest on occasion has threatened the principle of voluntarism as applied to the diffusion of state-promoted technologies.

While groping for forms of technological change compatible with the above objectives, the "package" promoted has gone through recognizable stages. In the first stage, which ended with the failure of the great leap in agriculture and the open breach with the Soviet Union, some characteristics of the Soviet technological model were adopted; that is, an emphasis on large-scale, multipurpose water control projects, heavy tractors and European-type plows, a Lysenkian faith indeep plowing and dense planting and a relatively unproductive research program. More recently, features of the Japanese or Taiwanese technological models have been ascendant, including an emphasis on hybrid-seed development, intensive fertilizer use, power tillers, pumps, and other small machines, and a well-organized research and extension network. But these "stages" more largely reflect changes in capabilities, emphases, and regional focae than any deliberate emulation of foreign example.

IMPROVED SEEDS

Because of the complex interrelationships among all factors contributing to the improvement of productivity in agriculture, it is difficult to isolate one factor as more important than others. Nevertheless, it is today common to treat the development and diffusion of improved seeds as the sine qua non of a sustained increase in land productivity, especially in view of the importance of this factor in successful cases of long-term productivity growth such as Japan and the United States.

The rate of growth and timing of the contribution of seed improvement to agricultural development is constrained in three ways:

(1) If the process depends on the traditional method of seed selection, it is limited by the natural rate of genetic mutation and by the thoroughness of the attention devoted to selection by farmers and researchers. Scientific hybridization and other artificial methods can direct and greatly speed up the process of achieving a desirable genetic combination, although selection continues to be important in determining appropriate biological parents and refining and maintaining the characteristics of subsequent generations.

Released by NCNA, Apr. 11, 1960, and reproduced in CB 616.

Strictly speaking, the state has recognized competing uses of labor, but often seems to ignore their economic value relative to the practices being promoted at the moment.

(2) Hybridization requires decisions about breeding objectives, since there may be many characteristics which need improvement and only one or two may be served by a given crossing. Nor will vague objectives, such as "yield improvement," suffice as guidelines, since yields depend on a variety of plant and environmental characteristics. The appropriate objectives are not necessarily the most obvious, and much time may be wasted in pursuing ill-chosen ones.

(3) From initial crossing, through stabilization of characteristics, local trials, multiplication, and distribution, a number of years are required-historically, 12 or 13 in Japanese rice breeding, for example, including 3 years for distribution." While there are ways of reducing this timelag, a too hasty program courts disaster.

The Chinese seed_breeding program initially suffered under each of these limitations. From the start breeders were under party pressure to achieve rapid high-yield breakthroughs." Thus they inevitably relied first on a combination of farmer selection, Republican-period experiment station products, and imported varieties. For example, of 95 improved rice varieties distributed in South China before 1959, only 20 percent were products of post-1949 breeding by professional agronomists; and 40 percent of the improved varieties distributed in North China were Korean or Japanese imports.

The diffusion of improved varieties required the development of an extensive network of experimental stations, which occurred in parallel with the cooperative movement and reached the level of about one station per 8,000 households in 1956. Centralized direction and organization of these institutions apparently were not formalized until 1957, when the Academy of Agricultural Sciences was established in Peking under the Ministry of Agriculture.10 Because of the time required for institutional and technological developments, varieties developed experimentally after 1949 received widespread distribution only from 1958 on.

The primary weaknesses of existing varieties of Chinese seeds included a relative lack of responsiveness to the use of fertilizer and water and inadequate disease resistance (although minimal yields were maintained when subject to pathogens). Overcoming these weaknesses became the primary objective of seed development." However, because of the limitations of the Chinese plant hybridization program in the 1950's, there were few immediate payoffs.

Two of the four most widely planted improved varieties in this period were of foreign origin (an Italian wheat and an American cotton variety).12 However, foreign varieties did not always prove superior under Chinese conditions, and wholesale borrowing was not feasible. Some foreign varieties proved valuable because of their resistance to

•Matsubayashi Minoru et al., eds. Theory and Practice of Growing Rice (Tokyo: Fuji Press, 1968). pp. 69-72 and 75. Chiang Yin-sung, "A Survey Report on the Experimentation, Demonstration, and Promulgation of Kui-hua-ch'ou'," Chung-kuo nung-pao, September 1957, p. 27.

Compiled from data in Ting Ying, Chung-kuo shui-tao tsai-p'el hsuch (Study of Chinese Paddy Rice Cultivation) (Peking, 1961), pp. 257-61, 269-74, 277-78, 282-84, and 288-90.

Data from Nai-ruenn Chen, Chinese Economic Statistics (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), Table 5.101, p. 369, and Table 5.104, p. 370.

10 Shahid Burki, A Study of Chinese Communes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 48. 11 Po Mu-hua, "Origins of the Varieties of China's Crops," JMJP, December 11, 1962.

13 Ts'ai Hsü, "Problems in the Breeding and Promulgation of Good Varieties," JMJP, October 9, 1962.