ABSTRACT
Rural industrialization was a key goal of the Great Leap Forward and remained a consistant aim even after the “three hard years” forced the dismantling of many rural industries in the early sixties. The more developed industrial units were encouraged to aid their neighborhood and country cousins with gifts and loans of equipment, personnel, and advice. The reasons for development of collectively owned rural industries were straightforward. China’s peasants must feed almost a quarter of mankind with only 7 percent of the world’s cultivated area. The regions in which rural industry provides a significant and growing proportion of the total product of the rural economy are also the regions with the highest per capita rural incomes. Pollution has become an intolerable problem in many Chinese cities, and city governments have begun banning many polluting industries, particularly some of the neighborhood factories that had become a real health hazard to nearby residents.
