ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some notion of the size and nature of China's internal commerce before attempting to appraise its impact on agricultural output. Shipments of agricultural products out of rural areas to domestic and foreign markets thus probably amounted to about 400-500 million taels, or under 7-8 per cent of farm output. Perhaps government policy was more anti-commerce in its orientation in past periods, but generally conditions would seem to have favored trade more or less on the scale of that in the nineteenth century. By 1900-1909, farm and processed farm product exports had risen to just under 2 per cent of the gross value of farm output. These changes put increasing pressure on the agricultural sector throughout the 1950's, a kind of pressure that must have had an adverse effect on farm output.
