The grain output in China in 1974 was not only, as Robert Michael Field noted in The China Quarterly No. 65, “ far larger than output claimed for any previous year ” ; it was also far larger than the estimates made by most western economists concerned with China. Such observers, believing that agricultural production in China was “ stagnating,” had estimated Chinese grain output for 1974 as being between 255 and 259 million tons. Peking's announcement that 1974 grain output was 274-9 million tons thus set up a contradiction: either those western economists had been far off the mark in their extrapolations of growth or the Chinese figure was somehow misleading. Field opts for the second explanation.