In particular many poor and lower middle peasant women are in urgent need of help to solve their practical problems in life so that they may do more work for their teams. For example, how are they to solve the problems of child care, cooking, making clothes and shoes etc.? * * * We should appreciate that only when these problems have been seriously solved can women be freed from their worries and their enthusiasm for collective labor reinforced.289 Hence the problems of child care for village women still awaited a solution. Even if women got collective child care for their children, they still did not stop worrying about them, which hampered their work zeal: If we put our children first, small difficulties will be big ones, we must believe that child care stations can bring up children better than we ourselves.289 A regional conference on women's work held in Huhehot, November 6-17, 1972, particularly stressed that: It is necessary to take actual conditions into consideration and gradually restore and improve child care, care for babies and women and child health organizations.200 That might imply that there were fewer child care stations in operation than during the peak in 1958-59. In one region of Shansi province over 9,400 child care stations took care of 106,000 children in 1972.291 That would imply 12 children on the average for each station. During my own visit to China in February-April 1973, model communes outside Peking, Nanking, Shanghai, and Wuhan had as a rule child care stations. Most of them were run by the production brigades. A number of children however, were cared for by their grandmothers. With increasing diversification of the economy in the rural people's communes, the number of women working full time will increase and so will the demands for more and for permanent child care stations. The combined effects of a sequence of good harvests, a higher educational level, delayed marriage, and family planning make the expenses for child care a more marginal burden than it was in the 1950's. Women working in the 1970's are better educated, work more years before marriage and have one child less than in the 1950's. Hence rural people's communes will gain more on organizing child care in the 1970's than they did earlier. 288 Editorial, "Fully arouse rural women to take part in collective labor," Pei-ching jih-pao (Peking Daily), 1965.10.11. in SCMP, Supplement No. 148, 1966.3.1., p. 30. 259 Editorial, "Sisters, Become Perfect in Fighting Enthusiastically for Production," CKFN, No. 16, 1964, p. 1-3. 290 (italics mine) 291 "Inner Mongolia holds Regional Conference on Women's Work," Inner Mongolia RS in Mandarin, 11 00 GMT, 1972.11.20. in FBIS-CHI-72-229, No. 229, vol. 1. p. F 1, 1972.11.27. "Shansi Region Women's RS, Role," Taiyuan Shansi RS, in Mandarin, 23.00 GMT 1973.1.17. in FBIS-CHI-73-13, No. 13, vol. I, F 3, 1973.1.18. CHINA'S AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION BY HENRY J. GROEN AND JAMES A. KILPATRICK CONTENTS Page I. Introduction___. II. China's resource endowment. A. Land.-- B. Population.. III. Agricultural policy A. The background of policy. B. Policy in the 1950's C. Agriculture first.. D. Related policies.. E. Planning and organization_. IV. Agricultural output- A. Grain crops.. B. Industrial crops C. Livestock and other products V. Factors of production and technological modernization. A. Land use and cropping patterns.. 1. Grain crops - 2. Industrial crops 3. Multiple cropping- 608 609 609 612 612 612 613 614 617 618 619 620 620 621 622 624 624 624 626 626 627 B. Grain imports and the stability of agricultural growth.. 635 636 636 637 639 639 VIII. Near and longer-term prospects for food production --- TABLES 1. China: Estimated seasonal rice crop statistics for 1976- 625 2. China: Imports of grain, calendar years 1961-78 640 3. China: Trade in major agricultural commodities - - 641 4. Estimated Chinese per capita food consumption, nutrient values. 5. China: Grain and cotton production estimates-- 645 649 Agriculture in the People's Republic of China is a mixture of modern and premodern elements. Elements of the traditional agricultural system continue to exist throughout the countryside, and in most areas modernization has proceeded slowly. Even where modernization is most advanced, traditional methods have persisted and been adapted to take advantage of new inputs and methods of production. In most respects agriculture remains today what it has always been-subsistence-level production involving the great bulk of the labor force. Despite the large proportion of workers now involved— 80 percent of the labor force-agriculture accounts for less than onefourth of China's gross national product. Since 1949 agriculture has grown much slower than industry. Because of its strategic place in the economy, it nonetheless is accorded the highest degree of importance in development plans. The agricultural sector's primary role is production of food. The Chinese must feed nearly one-fourth of the world's population-1 billion people on the products of only 7 percent of the world's arable land. This is accomplished by an intensive system of agriculture which is as much like gardening as it is like farming. Agriculture also provides raw materials to industry, and in turn it has increasingly become a market for many of industry's products. In addition, agriculture provides products for export and is the country's most important source of foreign exchange earnings. These earnings more than pay for the grain, sugar, and other agricultural products which are imported. Because of this central role, fluctuations in agricultural production have a disproportionately large effect on the rest of the economy. The Chinese do not view agricultural development as their most significant ultimate economic aim. It is important in the long run mainly as a means of supporting industrialization. At the present stage of economic development, however, planners and leaders acknowledge that agriculture must have first priority. This paper is devoted mainly to describing the present situation in Chinese agriculture and its recent development. Because of the sheer size and complexity of the agricultural sector, change is slow and growth is hard won. Evaluation of agriculture's present ability to meet the demands of the economy provides some insight into the likelihood of future demands being met. The main body of this paper consists of seven sections. Section II, which is on resource endowment, gives some perspective on the problem of feeding a huge population on a limited amount of arable land. Section III describes changes in agricultural development policy over time. Section IV discusses grain production, which accounts for nearly one-half the total value of agricultural output, |