ABSTRACT
Against the backdrop of industrialization, urbanization, and an aging population in China, modernizing the country's agricultural industry is imperative to ensure food security. This chapter first looks back at the evolution of the systems governing agriculture in China. Then, aimed at the most outstanding issues facing rural operating systems, it suggests specific policy recommendations with regard to how to change systems and speed up the process of modernizing agriculture. Modernizing agriculture will in turn require the support of the "new-style agricultural operating system", which is based on the household contracting system, its core operators are "new-style" operators, and it is supported by "socialized" [nongovernmental] services and financial services. The main tasks should be to promote agricultural modernization, to develop new-style agricultural economic entities and to improve the new-style agricultural operating system. In order to construct a new-style agricultural operating system, the focus should be on the proper handling of several important relationships.
