Chinese History and Statistics -- Page 20

Agriculture

Despite the rapid industrialization of recent years, China remains a predominantly agricultural country. Agriculture has undergone major social and technical changes since 1949, however. Due to a land-reform program initiated in 1949, virtually all large landholdings had been redistributed to the peasants by 1952. Peasant households were first organized into small mutual-aid teams and then into elementary and advanced cooperatives. In 1958, peasant households were reorganized into communes, each of which consisted of a number of villages. The day-to-day work of the commune was organized around "brigades," which served as a link between the commune and the Communist party hierarchy and were assigned production goals by the government. Under rural reforms introduced in 1979, the land was contracted to individual peasant households, giving the peasants more freedom to choose the crops they assigned levels on the open market. The reforms led to dramatic gains in agricultural production and the emergence of millions of specialized households producing cash crops and engaging in nonagricultural activities.

Cultivated land

Of China's total land area, 11% is under cultivation and an additional 43% is in permanent pasture. Much of China's agricultural land is irrigated, especially in the North China plain, the Chang Jiang lowland, and the Sichuan basin, where some of the irrigation canals date back as far as the 3d century BC. Terracing of the land is also a prominent characteristic of Chinese agriculture in hilly areas; the terraces serve both to control soil erosion and to catch the rains of the summer monsoon for flooding hillside rice paddies. Two crops a year, and in places three, are obtained from irrigated land where winters are mild. New hybrid seed strains and the availability of chemical fertilizers further increase the productivity of the land.