ABSTRACT
Farmer innovation and self-organisation, as shown in Chapter 2, is particularly important to the marginal areas, not only because the marginal environment constrains communication between farmers and professionals, but also because the CDR of the environment are constraints on the application of convenient technological systems and innovation models. The necessity of farmer innovation and self-organisation is particularly important in the era of economic liberty and globalisation, wherein more capital flows from marginal to core areas, resulting in increasing regional gap and income inequalities. In this respect, perhaps, China’s experience is particularly salient due to both its impressive achievement in economic transition from a planned to a market system, and its concentrated efforts against rural poverty and regional inequality. Many questions arise: Where are its marginal areas and how seriously has China suffered from the marginalisation process? What are the impacts of marginalisation on rural poverty reduction and environmental sustainability? How effectively has the Chinese government coped with challenges of marginalisation in general and rural poverty and ecological degradation in particular? These issues are addressed in subsequent chapters. This chapter attempts to conceptualise the core-marginal division, the marginalisation process and the impacts on the government’s PRP in China’s market economic era, whilst Chapter 4 takes Shaanxi province as an example to reveal the environmental effects of marginalisation, and of the government innovation strategy. The next section briefly introduces the geography of rural China, leading to a core-marginal division. This is followed by a description of the regional development and marginalisation process. Section 3.3 draws attention to the impacts of marginalisation on the government’s PRP. Linked with the theme of SRL, the final section summarises the findings from secondary data analysis and raises a list of further questions, which the fieldwork in rural Shaanxi sought to answer.
