China's Peasant Agriculture and Rural Society
China's Peasant Agriculture and Rural Society

Author: Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 131728545X

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China's agriculture and rural society has undergone rapid changes in recent years. Many poorer farmers and younger people have moved to cities, and yet China has an immense challenge to feed a growing and more affluent population. This book provides a ‘bottom-up view’ of China’s agriculture, showing how the many millions of Chinese peasants make a living. It presents a vivid description of the mechanisms used by rural households to defend and sustain their livelihoods, increase their agricultural production and improve the quality of their lives. The authors examine the newly emerging trajectories of entrepreneurial and capitalist farming and assess whether such alternatives will be able to meet the enormous social, economic and environmental challenges that China faces. The book also explores the paradigm that has underpinned the organisation and development of China’s agriculture from ancient times to the present day. This shows the importance of balancing in the Chinese model as compared to the one-sided imposition of continual modernization in the western model. It is argued that such balancing is at the core of the current Sannong policy, referring to the three ruralities of food sovereignty, wellbeing for peasant households and an attractive countryside.

This Bittersweet Soil
This Bittersweet Soil

Author: Sucheng Chan

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 9780520067370

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The role of the Chinese in California agriculture during the later decades of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century was an integral aspect of the agricultural history of the western United States. Although the number of Chinese involved in agricultural occupations at one time never exceeded 6000 to 7000 workers, their lack of numbers does not diminish their impact. Author Chan, of Chinese origin, has made extensive use of census records and county archival sources to produce the first full history of the Chinese in California agriculture.

China's Great Economic Transformation
China's Great Economic Transformation

Author: Loren Brandt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-04-14

Total Pages: 887

ISBN-13: 1139470949

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This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The editors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectorial development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt.

Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan
Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan

Author: F. H. King

Publisher: Global Oriental

Published: 2011-04-06

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 9004217908

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First published in 1926, this classic survey, which includes nearly 250 photographs, examines the traditional farming methods of the densely populated lands of China, Korea and Japan and shows how fertility can be maintained over many centuries through conserving and utilizing natural resources. In the Introduction, the author notes: ‘The United States as yet a nation of but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land with more than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman and child, while the people whose practices are to be considered are toiling in fields tilled more than three thousand years and who have scarcely more than two acres per capita, more than one-half of which is uncultivable land.’ Researchers and scholars in the fields of human geography, regional studies and earth sciences, as well as social and economic history will welcome this landmark study being returned to print.

Exemplary Agriculture
Exemplary Agriculture

Author: Sacha Cody

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-02-25

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9811337950

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This book is an important contribution to our understanding of food in China through an ethnographic case study of an alternative food movement in Shanghai and the surrounding countryside. Cody examines a group of middle-class urban residents who move to the countryside to establish small-scale and independent organic farms. The book explores the complex relationships movement protagonists have with customers in the city, rural neighbours in the countryside, volunteers on their farms, intellectuals involved in rural reconstruction initiatives as well as the organic items they produce. In doing so, Cody provides valuable insights into the urban/rural dichotomy and questions of morality in China today. This book speaks to several concerns associated with the accelerated modernization China and other Asian nations are experiencing, including food safety and class relations. It will appeal to scholars and practitioners across a range of fields including anthropology, food studies, rural development and China Studies.

Challenges and Opportunities for Chinese Agriculture
Challenges and Opportunities for Chinese Agriculture

Author: Wensheng Chen

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-07-06

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 9811535361

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This book elaborates on the transformation of agricultural development in China into the construction of a “resource and ecologically sound society”, and the coordinated development of industrialization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization in China. It focuses on the multiple goals of transforming the Chinese agricultural development model, inner motivations, approaches, and supporting systems under environmental and resource constraints. The author endeavors to build a theoretical framework for transforming agricultural development model in the construction of a “resource and ecologically sound society". To achieve this, the author addresses successively across seven chapters issues such as the multiple goals of China’s agricultural development transformation under resource and environmental constraints, the transformation of the utilization mode of resources, “resource and ecologically sound agriculture”–oriented agricultural production system transformation, the transformation of commercialized rural service system, and institutional innovations in the “resource and ecologically sound” agricultural transformation.

Red Revolution, Green Revolution
Red Revolution, Green Revolution

Author: Sigrid Schmalzer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-01-20

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 022633029X

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In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere—and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today’s sustainability and food justice movements. This history of “scientific farming” in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.

Insights into Chinese Agriculture
Insights into Chinese Agriculture

Author: Yunhua Zhang

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-06-29

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9811310505

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This book uses simple economic theories to explain how China's agricultural economic phenomena exists in reality. It also helps the reader to get a clear understanding of economic phenomena, insight into the "hog cycle" and "food safety," as well as other economic and social phenomena. The language of this book is not only easy to understand, but also uses ancient poetry and humor to make the subject interesting, as it speaks to the history and current situation of Chinese agriculture. It also opens a window for the people to read about agriculture. This is a unique book on agricultural science that fills an important gap in works on agricultural science and agricultural economics.