Modernising agriculture

Underpinning this chapter is a success story in which China has been able to feed its people largely from home-produced food despite the population growing by 400 million since 1980. The move away from collectivism to individually operated family farms but with land owned by the state has seen government support that directs agriculture in various ways. Price supports and state-controlled markets have given way to commercialised systems of production, processing, and sales. Policies to support farmers modernise production systems have been widespread, though hampered by the very small units of production. Hence, policy has promoted increases to farm sizes through various land circulation measures. Land circulation applies to use rights rather than land ownership but rural-urban migration has created opportunities for transfers of use via leasing, reallocations, and introduction of land certificates. Government has also been highly active in reorganising the structure of agriculture via land consolidation, which has operated formally for over 20 years. Consolidation has tackled both small size of farm units and their fragmentation, endeavouring to create larger working farm units capable of using machinery. The chapter reports on various trial consolidation schemes. Land engineering activities have been a constituent part of many land-consolidation schemes. These have been aimed at improving land productivity as well as reorganising the structure of farming, including converting construction land. Land engineering has been extensively applied in parts of the Loess Plateau, contributing to yield increases for the major crop, maize. One of the ways in which scale efficiencies have been injected into agricultural production has been through the role of the so-called dragonheads, or modern agribusinesses, promoted by government since 2000. They take the form of large agricultural industrialised corporations, in which farm households usually produce on contract to a company, which controls processing and marketing, most commonly in the livestock sector. Their numbers have grown rapidly, spreading into grain production, and playing an increasingly important role in providing food for the major cities, though with varying models of operation and relationship with farm households. Closely related to the rise of the dragonheads have been reforms to agricultural marketing, with a dramatic shift from state control and price regulation, with market centralisation for food items abolished in 1993. Farmer marketing co-operatives have been one development to take advantage of scale economies, but dragonheads have also been involved through government-promoted vertical co-ordination. Contract production for supermarkets and e‑commerce are amongst several significant marketing developments. While the book emphasises the significance of central government as an overarching director of new measures and regulations to stimulate agricultural production, it recognises that the myriad of initiatives and new measures have not always been well received by the farming community. Hence, this chapter includes a section devoted to some of the resistance that government has encountered to its plans. It looks at the mixed response to the land and housing dispossessions that have been enforced in some areas. Especially with the large-scale consolidation programmes, rural residents have been moved in large numbers to new apartment blocks and out of housing they may have occupied for decades. Although frequently hidden from public view by government-controlled media, there are various reports, including in academic studies, that form the basis for this section.