RESEARCH TRENDS IN JAPANESE ON CHINESE AGRICULTURE MANAGEMENT (FOCUSING ON PERIOD AFTER RURAL REFORM IN 1978)

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the characteristics of the Japanese research trend on Chinese family farm management published after the Chinese rural reform in 1978.The whole 152 articles were collected under the keyword of Chinese Agriculture Management through CiNii that is the most reliable academic information database in Japan. Based on article productivity the study extracted the four stage of research development: incubating stage, growing stage, peak stage, and stabilizing mature stage. Research subject categorization unveiled two general research frameworks: macro approach framework and micro approach framework. In the macro framework, farm management is structurally grasped under the relationship with external or environmental conditions surrounding farm management entities. In the micro framework farm management is grasped within internal structural relationship of family based on inputs (land and labor) and output (income). For solving the weakness of Chinese family farm holding a small land, the study extracted two strategic frameworks of integration in farm management: agricultural industrialization and farm cooperative movement. The former is a vertical integration and the latter is a horizontal integration of farm management. Those integrations of farm management require not only macro and micro level research but also mezzo(middle) approach which focuses on the relationships between community or village and farm family. Especially this mezzo approach is important to understand the reality of farm management under the on-going situation in which many farm families depend on both agriculture and non-agriculture jobs. The fact that the dates for publications in China are limited at the macro-level of nation, province and city has created the research tendency towards bipolar differentiation in macro and micro level research. Thus mezzo-level research on towns and villages has become more important.