ABSTRACT
The Chinese government, for over a decade, has been carrying out rural economic reforms by employing a policy of decreased control over production, market activities, and income distribution in order to provide an incentive structure favouring increased production, and especially commercial production in the rural areas. The poverty problem touches some especially sensitive nerves, as many of the poverty areas are also ‘old revolutionary base areas”, a wellspring of support for the revolution, while others are inhabited by minority peoples whose relationship with the Han dominated government has long been problematic. Poverty is often reflected in a combination of low incomes and inadequate food consumption. Food security for the whole population was one of the major goals of the Chinese government in constructing “socialist” China - a goal for which great efforts were exerted. Poverty reduction can be called another major objective of the formation of agricultural producers’ cooperatives and the people’s communes in the 1950s.
