ABSTRACT

Of all cereals, rice is the one popularly associated with China, and is the nation’s most important cereal by far, with a production of 178 million metric tons in 1984. China has long rivalled India as the world’s leading rice producer, and in recent years it seems to have passed India in production, China now accounting for more than a third of the rice production of the entire world (Wittwer et al., 1987: 139-40).1 In the Rice Region as defined by Buck in the village survey (Figure 20), roughly two-thirds of the total crop area was occupied by rice in 1929-33, and this supplied about two-thirds of total calorie intake. No other cereal or pulse approached rice in importance in the Rice Region, with wheat, the runner up, accounting for only 5 percent of the region’s total calories (Figure 21 and Buck, 1956: 211). Rice’s dietary importance may be appreciated even more by noting that in Fukien it was the principal food at all three daily meals (Hurlbut, 1939: 78) and that in rural South China an adult male consumed 470 or 485 pounds of rice a year (C. K. Yang, 1959a: 54). In the Double Cropping Rice Area, which is centered on Kwangtung (Figure 22), the dominance of rice was as great as, or greater than, in any other area of South China: of the double-cropped land, which in the 1929-33 survey amounted to two-thirds of all cultivated land, most involved one crop of rice followed by another, which supplied over three-fourths of total calorie intake (Buck, 1956: 85; Maynard and Swen, 1956: 413).