PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

The great changes in China’s social and economic situations since 1978, especially the changes in the agricultural developments, was , in the field of economy, begun with the establishment and all-rounded practice of the Household Contract Responsibility System. In other words, that was begun from the changes and renovations of the land propriety orders in the countryside. The negation of the People’s Commune System and the establishment of the Household Contract Responsibility System have given the laborers the direct and exclusive rights to utilize and benefit from the agricultural producing material and the comparatively independent rights to dispose them. The systems, meeting the essential requirements of the agricultural production under the historical period’s productive force, have overcome the phenomena that under the old agricultural operational patterns, the costs of agricultural production and beneficial results had no direct relationship with the laborers’ farming productivity.And the decisive plans for agricultural production were irrational while the resources waste was serious; and therefore increase the laboring productivity and the benefits from the investments in the agricultural resources; and at the same time brought the public agricultural facilities ( like water conservancy projects ) invested and constructed by our country in the past 30 years into full play; forcefully promote the growth in the agricultural production. However, neither the agrarian reform early in the foundation of the People’s Republic of China nor the Household Contract Responsibility System since 1978,  due to special national conditions that in China, there are fewer lands than its living populations and the basic requirements to stable the society that all the citizens are supplied with foods, has changed the traditional patterns of the super small-sized operations of farmers under the evenly-assigned farmland system. The important roles in the agricultural developments that this land propriety orders had once played in the past 20 years should be positively recognized and it was necessary and irreplaceable choice under the certain historical circumstance in China. And with the further growth in Chinese social reforms and economic developments, the inborn series of drawbacks of the system have gradually appeared: first, farmers dared not give a effective and long-term investment in the farmlands, because the unclear concept of the “ collective ” as in the sentence, farmlands are collectively-owned and household-operated. With the change and increase in the populations of the collective, the household-operated farmlands will have to be re-allocated accordingly, therefore farmers always used the farmlands but not kept them fertile; they adopted the myopic behavior and resulted in the decrease in the soil fertilities. As to the fundamental facilities that are to be used in a long run, they have not yet been constructed. Second, under the limitations of the incomes, results-foreseeing and risks analyses, the circulation and rational collations of the land sources were not achieved in a larger scale. Third, due to the unclear definition of the land propriety orders, the representatives of the collective ( the person responsible for the teams of villagers, village cadres even the governments at the village and town levels all considered themselves representatives of the collective ) were all given the eventual rights to re-allocate and dispose lands, while the transfer of the lands did not benefit the laborers, thus the peasants will not gain benefits though they hold the rights to use their farmlands. Fourth, the more important is that high-degree scattering small-sized farmers operational patterns under the welfare-like evenly-allocated land system, together with the large scale hidden surplus labor forces ( at least 0.14 billion as estimated by Mr. Zhong Pengrong in 1999 ) have kept the productivity at very low level, made the benefits from farming far below those of other industries and made farmers add the living expenditures for those surplus labor forces to the production costs of the agricultural products, which led to a great fall in peasants’ saving rates and their potentiality to broaden production and therefore, they can never conduct the reforms of the traditional agriculture. Under the conditions of the low productivity and the above-mentioned high production costs, once the Chinese agricultural products are put on the international markets, China will suffer from a serious agricultural crisis and the bankruptcy in countryside. This has become an another challenge for Chinese people:

The reforms of the management and administration system of arable lands in future China, that is, whether China can and how China will change the scattering super small-sized farmers’ operational patterns under the evenly-allocated land system; how China can adopt the road of appropriate management of scale, increase productivity and reform the traditional agriculture. (page home)