ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the outlines of the new Chinese approach in agricultural policy. It analyzes the facts which caused the drift to modernization and agricultural reform. The chapter deals with the main steps in the reform and describes the problems and results of the new policy. It focuses on the significance of the agricultural policy to the economy as a whole. The organizational structure and the institutions in rural areas have been changed fundamentally: the people's communes have been dissolved and political, administrative as well as economic responsibilities have been divided at each level of the administration structure. After more than two decades of experiments with collective agriculture, in the 1980s the new Chinese leadership dissolved the people's communes and reestablished peasant agriculture. In 1985, agricultural policy embarked upon a further liberalization of the rural marketing system. China is the first case where a socialist agricultural system was decollectivized in practice.
