ABSTRACT
Collectivised agriculture in China has now run the whole gamut of the possibilities of socialist farming, producing a richer variety of experience than in any other Communist country. In the Far East, China's agricultural record, though respectable, is much inferior to that of Japan, Taiwan or South Korea. The fulcrum of the agricultural changes of the past two years lies in the 'production responsibility systems'. The scarcity of grain is still a tight constraint both on development and on the increase of welfare. To some extent, the leaders and the cadres of the Cultural Revolution years have been made whipping boys for deficiencies in Chinese agriculture which are centuries old. China has not had, at least in her later history, the symbiosis between hill and plain, upland pasture and lowland arable, so typical of European agriculture and so central to the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century.
