ABSTRACT
Chinese agriculture is in the process of gradual but nevertheless revolutionary transformation. The land reform made the individual peasant the fundamental unit of Chinese farming. It brought about a shift in rural class composition and an increase in the relative significance of the middle peasants. 1 According to Liao Lu-yen, the Minister of Agriculture, the proportion of poor peasants to the total rural population, which had been 60–70 per cent before the land reform, had fallen by 1955 to 10–20 per cent in the old and 30 per cent in the newly liberated areas, while middle peasants now constituted 70–80 per cent of the total rural population in the former and 60 per cent in the latter. 2 However, the majority of the middle peasants were lower middle peasants, since the two categories of poor and lower middle peasants still formed about 60 to 70 per cent of the village population. 3
