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How Much Grain Does Communist China Produce?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Robert Michael Field
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How much grain does Communist China produce? Is total production over 200 million tons, or is it as low as 175 million tons? The purpose of this brief article is to explore the differences among presently available estimates of grain production in Communist China and to point out some of the implications of these differences.

Type
Recent Developments
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 33 , March 1968 , pp. 98 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1968

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References

1 For a brief description of experiments with the use of barn yield in 1958 and 1959, see Li, Choh-ming, The Statistical System of Communist China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 124Google Scholar.

2 An official statement typical of those made by Chinese officials in recent years is that of Chou En-lai to the National People's Congress in December 1964. He said: “after the successive increases in output in 1962 and 1963 and the still better harvest this year, agricultural production has reached the level of the high yielding years of the past.”

3 This partition is accomplished in the following manner: Let O, S, and Y be the output, sown area, and average yield in 1957 and O+ΔO, S+ΔS, and Y+ΔY be the output, sown area, and average yield in 1965. Because output is the product of sown area times yield,

O+ΔO = (S+ΔS)(Y+ΔY)

Then, if the multiplication is carried out and the 1957 output subtracted from both sides of the equation, the change in output between 1957 and 1965 is

YΔS+SΔY+ΔSΔY

This expression shows the sources of the change in output The first term shows the effect of the change in sown area, the second term the effect of the change in average yield, and the third term the effect of the interaction between the changes in sown area and yield. The change in output due to this interaction is divided evenly between the other two. For a more complete discussion of this technique, see Mills, Frederick C., Productivity and Economic Progress (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952)Google Scholar.

4 Availability is considered to be domestic production plus imports lagged by six months to allow for delays in distribution. The data are from Larsen, Marion R., “China's Agriculture Under Communism,” An Economic Profile of Mainland China, I, p. 246Google Scholar. For several other estimates of production in recent years, see my article in Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, op. cit., p. 293.

5 Liu, Jung-Chiao, “Fertiliser Application in Communist China”, The China Quarterly, No. 24 (10–December, 1965), pp. 43–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Klatt, W., “Comment on ‘Economic Growth in China and the Cultural Revolution,” The China Quarterly, No. 31 (07–September, 1967)Google Scholar.

7 Jones and Perkins accept the reconstructed “official” estimate of grain production, whereas T. C. Liu and Eckstein both use Wenmohs' estimate.