ABSTRACT
“Agriculture is the root” was a Maoist slogan emphasizing the importance to the revolutionary state of peasant support for the traditional grain tax. Field mechanization and a rise of triple cropping in the late 1960s and early 1970s used technologies that freed large amounts of labor from land. This “green revolution” came from agricultural extension: walking tractors and rice transplanting machines, and new seeds for grains that used the sun’s energy to yield more edible calories rather than long stalks. “Miracle” rice required more fertilizer (increasingly inorganic) and more reliable water, as supplied by canals during dry spells and by tube wells in soggy seasons. On the Yangzi delta, two new conditions appeared: First, the productivity of rural labor rose. Second, the state could not take its previous high rake-off from agriculture (or industry), because it lost much of its monitoring ability through Cultural Revolution abuse of its own bureaucrats in the late 1960s. Centralists lost power to local leaders.
