Chinese agriculture: A quantitative look

Chinese agriculture has undoubtedly achieved a significant increase in gross agricultural output since the beginning of the new regime. However, for lack of sufficient information, it is difficult to make quantitative estimates of such an increase. Knowledge of the Chinese agriculture even before the Communist take‐over is far from complete. This is a further handicap in an assessment of the contribution of recent developmental efforts. There is some qualitative evidence in historical writings^l which suggests that the level of pre‐modem agricultural technology and practice in China was already very high² long before the present century but the quantitative information available from such historical studies is fragmentary, and often inconclusive. Even when reasonably reliable information seems to be available, its representativeness is open to question. The only reasonably representative account of the Chinese agriculture is available for the early 1930s in Buck's Land Utilization in China. Except for the first decade of the Communist rule in China, the quality of statistics deteriorated markedly. Any attempt, however painstaking, to estimate the rate of growth of the agricultural sector or of agriculture's contribution to the gross national product is bound to be nothing more than broad approximations. The aim of this paper, therefore, is not to add one more ‘guess estimate’ to many such estimates of dubious validity that are already floating around. The aim is mainly to point out the limitation of the data on which such estimates are based. It is not an attempt at denigrating the painstaking efforts of careful Sinologists to piece together fragmentary information from both academic and non‐academic (largely intelligence and diplomatic) sources, but to warn the users that an unqualified acceptance of their results³ (e.g. such as the rates of growth, etc.) in comparative studies may not have sufficient justification.