ABSTRACT
State farms are defined as ‘socialist agricultural enterprises under ownership by all the people’. 1 This ownership status is the feature which distinguishes them from collective agriculture. The management of state farms may be subject to an organ of either the central government or of a local authority down to the level of hsien. 2 State farms are the equivalent of the Soviet sovkhozy and, in their early days, owed much in concept, and sometimes also in organization, to these prototypes. 3 Another debt, this time unacknowledged, was to the large mechanized farms established by the Japanese in Heilungkiang as well as to the great sheep farms opened in ‘Manchukuo’ by the puppet government of that territory and by the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway. 4
