Is Ecological Agriculture Sustainable in China?

The initial impetus away from the collective and towards more privatised forms of agriculture in the countryside in the late 1970s came from below, from discontented elements in Anhui and Sichuan, two of China’s poorest provinces. After some initial prevarication, the reforms were taken up and pushed through by the central government with such aggression and alacrity that by 1982 almost all collective property, including land, had been distributed on a household-by-household basis, and responsibility for agricultural production transferred from the brigade (dadui) and work team (xiaodui) to the family (jiating). The new era of family farming had begun.