Sichuan's Agriculture: Depression and Revival

Abstract

Most studies of Chinese economic policy have discussed the topic at the national level. However, policy has frequently diverged from province to province. If the provinces had been independent states, no doubt they would have attracted considerable individual attention, because in population and area many are much larger than most national entities. More especially is this true of Sichuan. No other unit of a hundred million people is so cut off from the mainstream of international life and, indeed, from that of the rest of its own country, than this vast province (or, perhaps, is it that the rest of the world, and of China, is cut off from Sichuan?). This article discusses aspects of the province's agricultural policy from 1949 until the present time. Sichuan was traditionally regarded as a land of agricultural plenty, but difficult of access. Its reputation as 'a heavenly kingdom' was balanced by the proverbial warning that 'the road to Sichuan is as hard as the road to heaven'. The Sichuanese have a reputation for unruliness: 'When the world is in disorder, Sichuan is the first to be disordered. When the world is at peace, Sichuan is the last to be at peace'. In the two decades between the world wars, Sichuan lived up to this reputation, being ravaged by a series of war-lords. Modern ideas had indeed reached the province, for it was plans for railway building in Sichuan which sparked off the 1911 Revolution. However, typically, it was another forty years before railways were actually built in the province. The not inconsiderable economic development and intellectual changes which occurred in east China, especially in the great seaports, in the 1920s and 1930s, touched Sichuan much less. To the 'down-river people' who, with the national government, took refuge there after the Japanese invasion of 1937, the province exemplified the backwardness from which China was to be rescued.