By the time the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, virtually all arable land was under cultivation; irrigation and drainage systems constructed centuries earlier and intensive farming practices already produced relatively high yields.
This was a crucial influence on the theories of the French school of political economists, the Physiocrats, who like the Chinese philosophers insisted that agriculture, rather than commerce or industry, was the only source of true and enduring wealth.
[7]: 81 Increased yields could not keep pace with a population that benefitted from a major decrease in mortality (due to successful public health campaigns and the end of war) and a high fertility rate.
[23]: 207 By the late 1970s, years of China's "normal socialist agriculture" resulted in an increase in per capita staple crop production and had remedied most of the short-term ecological damage that had occurred during the Great Leap Forward.
By the end of 1984, approximately 98 percent of the old production teams had adopted the contract responsibility system, and all but 249 communes had been dissolved, their governmental functions passed on to 91,000 township and town governments.
Towns, villages, and groups of households referred to as "rural economic unions" established small factories, processing operations, construction teams, catering services, and other kinds of nonagricultural concerns.
Many township, town, and village governments also engaged in major entrepreneurial undertakings, establishing factories, processing mills, brick works, and other large-scale enterprises.
Finally, the maintenance and operation of public works, such as irrigation systems, power plants, schools, and clinics, generally still was regarded as the responsibility of the collective administrations.
Some possibility for expansion existed in thinly populated parts of the country, especially in the northeast, but the growing season there was short and the process of land reclamation prolonged and costly.
Although much of the soil is acid red clay, the heavy use of fertilizer (at one time organic but by the mid-1980s also including a large proportion of chemical nutrients) supports high yields.
Compared with the south, soils in the north are generally better; however, because of the shorter growing season and colder, drier climate, yields per cultivated hectare tend to be lower and irrigation less extensive.
In addition to capital, China had available a supply of skilled labor and a stock of technical information on seed varieties and fertilizer use despite the damage done by the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).
The mutual aid system was kept simple at first, involving only the temporary sharing of labor and some capital; individual households remained the basic unit of ownership and production.
The production targets were not accompanied by a sufficient amount of capital and modern inputs such as fertilizer; rather, they were to be reached in large measure by heroic efforts on the part of the peasants, often beaten into submission by overzealous party cadres.
Records show despite famine and widespread starvation in the countryside, Beijing still denied the existence of any agricultural problems and continued to send grain and other food resources abroad to the USSR, East Germany and Albania.
Focusing these inputs on the high- and stable-yield areas meant that parts of China that were already advanced tended to be favored over backward or less-developed regions, thus widening a gap that already had potentially serious implications.
When the party leadership began to evaluate progress in the agricultural sector in the light of its campaign to move the nation toward the ambitious targets of the Four Modernizations, it noted disappointing failures along with some impressive gains.
Between state institutions at the national level and the townships and villages at the base of the administrative hierarchy were various provincial-level, prefectural, and county-level government organs that also administered programs, including some agricultural research and extension activities.
Forces of self-sufficiency continued to play an important role in decision making, especially as farm households allocated resources to ensure their own food grain rations.
They nominated candidates to administrative posts and approved applications for military service, jobs, and opportunities for higher education (see Rural society in the People's Republic of China).
The government procured grain and other agricultural products from the peasants to supply urban areas and food-deficient regions with subsistence and to provide raw materials for textile and other light industries.
In addition, government control of water and electricity supplies provided the state with an important lever to induce farmers to comply with political policies and economic plans.
[28]: 155 This practice began to decline after 1911 under the influence of modern concepts of public health, although the efficacy of the system for using human waste as manure meant that these changes were slow.
China's statisticians define grain to include wheat, rice, corn, sorghum, millet, potatoes (at one-fifth their fresh weight), soybeans, barley, oats, buckwheat, field peas, and beans.
Winter wheat, which in the same year accounted for about 88 percent of total national output, is grown primarily in the Yangtze River Valley and on the North China Plain.
Animals that provide draft power for crop cultivation and rural transportation include water buffalo, horses, mules, donkeys, oxen, and camels.
In addition to improving the principal yield of agricultural units, the post-Mao economic reforms greatly stimulated sideline production in rural areas.
Sideline industrial activities also included processing cotton, grain, and oilseeds; mining coal, iron ore, and gold; and dredging gravel and sand.
In rural areas, imports helped reduce the pressure for more procurement, freeing resources for increased consumption or investment in local agricultural programs.
Success in reducing agricultural imports depended on the development of domestic sources of supply, for which China hoped to rely in part on new production bases for marketable crops.