ABSTRACT
The current economic reform has touched all aspects of society - including the political system - so that a new framework seems to be emerging for Chinese socio-economic development. Initially, the reform started from the agricultural sector which involved 80 per cent of the population at that time. Thus the course of reform in agriculture has had a strong impact on the development of China as a whole. Institutional and organisational changes in agriculture are generally regarded as having made the most significant contributions to reform: instead of the production teams of the people's communes, individual peasant households have become the basic units of agricultural production and consumption. These changes have inevitably led to a change in the part that the government has played in agriculture.
