China Agriculture

RURAL CHARACTER 
China remains predominantly 
rural despite attempts since 1949 to industrialize the country. Even in the major cities, open markets-aid bicycles, trucks, and beasts of burden loaded down with fresh produce to sell there-are still part of urban life. The fact that China is almost self-sufficient in food is remarkable when you remember the size of the population and that, with most of the country either mountain or desert, only a small percentage of land is fit for cultivation.The wiliness and perseverance of the Chinese peasant are legendary, hence Mao Zedong's dictum, in his misguided attempts to reform China, to "learn from the peasant." This did not stop him, unfortunately, from trying to impose ideological (: teas on these same farmers that led to the death by starvation of millions during the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1959.

LAND SCULPTURE Such is the long-standing relationship between the Chinese farmer and the land that the very landscape is often defined by human activity. The most obvious example of this is terracing; a technique developed to make the most of undulating or hilly countryside.

 Taking the train from Changsha to Guangzhou in midsummer, skirting the curving contours of tiers of densely planted land, or driving from Chongqing to Dazu when the market day, Yunn n provincc: fast-food has reached China, but out of town it's still the fresher the better rice is still under water, you cannot but admire the industry, ingenuity, and regard for nature that has gone into the working of Chinese farmland.

 LAND MANAGEMENT The fact that there are so few roads in China (and those that exist are very narrow) is because every piece of land is precious. Water is precious, too, and a single canal will provide irrigation for a succession of fields, while mud from its bed will be used, along with animal dung and human waste (still collected from cities), as manure.

Fuel, too, must be managed with care. Thus in the north, houses are traditionally built facing the south and the sun, away from the harsh desert winds from the northwest. In poorer areas, a large portion of the interior of the house is given over to the kang, a raised brick platform heated by the stove or by

straw  fires from outside and which its rural character may serve as a bed. Such arrangements are becoming rarer as farmers  prosper. Yet the same prosperity is bringing a new set of dilemmas, not just for farmers but for the whole of China-how to modernize without throwing half a billion people out of work and how to feed the population as the expansion of cash crops eats into land traditionally used for staple crops. Since the demise of the commune-system in the 1980s, farmers have been responsible for providing quotas of staple crops to the government, in return for which they are allowed to rent a limited amount of land from the government on a 15year lease and earn what they can from it. So long as farming remains largely manual, the rural population remains employed. But as entrepreneurial farmers, earning a private income from their leased plots, increasingly turn to mechanization encouraged by Western agronomists, the stability of the countryside does not look likely to last, especially as in some areas the rural economy has stagnated, bringing social unrest.