La politique agricole en Chine : une esquisse de son évolution

In 1976 China is to begin its fifth five year plan. The first five year plan was published in 1956 (its fourth year) and in the same year proposals for the second plan were made known ; nothing else has been published concerning the subsequent plans themselves. It is difficult to know what official policy is. However there have been numerous, though scattered, reports on the situation of agriculture in various regions of the country over the past years. Most of these reports are of model areas. Model reports seems to constitute a political literary genre proper to the Chinese. This paper discusses the function of models and uses model reports as the principal heuristic device in sketching the development of policy. The whole discussion of present policy is placed in the context of the basic problems which Chinese agriculture faced in the thirties and forties as well as the serious crisis at the end of the fifties. Present policy gives primacy to the development of agriculture. The position of the central government is primarily one of supporting agriculture ; agriculture is done on the local levels. There are five areas in which this support is manifested : finance, commerce, planning, socialist management and productive inputs. In each of these areas of macroeconomic policy, central government activity in the past fifteen years has shifted to a more vigorous support of agriculture. On the microeconomic level, local units are to be integrated into the above systems. Local policies are characterized by intensive use of labor, soil and water conservation, introduction of new techniques and inputs, diversification of the local economy, self reliance with repsect to capital and labor, and socialist management.