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发帖数: 2152 | 1 http://www.ggdc.net/MADDISON/China_book/Chapter_1.pdf
Official Encouragement of New Crops, Multicropping, Higher Yields and
Diffusion of Best Practice Technology
Another feature of Chinese agriculture was its centrality in economic policy
. Like the eighteenthcentury French Physiocrats, the Emperor and the
bureaucracy thought of agriculture as the keyeconomic sector. They helped
develop and diffuse new seeds and crops by technical advice. They
commissioned and distributed agricultural handbooks, calendars etc. They
ensured that the advice
they contained was adopted by selected farmers in different regions. Bray (
1984) cites extensive
bibliographies which show the existence of more than 500 (mostly official)
works on Chinese
agriculture (78 pre Sung, 105 Sung, 26 Yuan and 310 Ming–Ch’ing texts).
From the tenth century
they were available in printed form. The most remarkable was Wang Chen’s
Nung Shu. This
exhaustive treatise on agricultural practice had many illustrations, with
the intention of diffusing
knowledge of best practice North Chinese techniques to the South, and vice
versa. The original
version (1313) of this oft cited work was lost and many of its illustrations
were redrawn in subsequent
editions (see Bray, p. 63). She used the edition of 1783. This official
Chinese literature had no
counterpart elsewhere in Asia (except in Tokugawa Japan) and for a very long
period in Europe. In
the Roman period there were treatises by Columella and Varro, but European
works in this field did
not reappear until the fourteenth century. By 1700, according to Bray, the
volume of European
agricultural publications had caught up with the Chinese.
China’s territory stretches over many climatic zones, and its biodiversity
is richer than Europe
because glaciation was less severe, and ancient botanical species were
preserved in greater numbers.
In the Imperial period, China adopted and diffused a number of new crops
which became important.
Tea spread widely and was subject to taxation in the T’ang dynasty. Cotton
was introduced in the
Sung period, and began to be widely used for cloth in the Yuan dynasty —
prior to this ordinary
people wore less comfortable fibres such as hemp or ramie. Sorghum was
disseminated widely after
the Mongol conquest. Crops from the Americas were introduced in the mid–
sixteenth century. Maize,
peanuts, potatoes and sweet potatoes added significantly to China’s output
potential because of their
heavy yields and the possibility of growing them on inferior land. Tobacco
and sugar cane were
widely diffused in the Ming period.
From early times Chinese farmers succeeded in getting higher yields from
their seeds than
Europeans. Seeds were planted in rows with drills in North China; seed beds
and transplanting
techniques were used in the Southern rice growing areas. In China, wheat and
barley yield/seed ratios
were about 10:l in the twelfth century (Bray, 1984, p. 287) and a good deal
better for rice. Slicher van
Bath (1963) suggests that the typical medieval European yield/seed ratio for
wheat was 4:1. Duby
(1976, pp. 25–26) cites even more miserable results, and a 4:l yield is not
out of line with what
Mayerson (1981) cites for Roman times. It was not until the eighteenth
century that European
agriculture began to show serious improvement in this respect.
With official encouragement, early ripening seeds were developed which
eventually permitted
double or even triple cropping of rice. Until the beginning of the eleventh
century, the total time for
rice to mature was at least 180 days (4–6 weeks in a nursery bed and 150
days to mature after
transplanting). The Sung emperor Chen–Tsung (998–1022) introduced early
ripening and drought
resistent Champa rice from Vietnam. Over time, this made double cropping
feasible and allowed
extension of cultivation to higher land and hillier slopes. The original
Champa rice matured 100 days
after transplanting. By the fifteenth century there were 60–day varieties.
In the sixteenth century 50–
day varieties were developed, in the eighteenth a 40–day variety, and in
the early nineteenth a 30–day
variety became available (see Ho, 1959, pp. 170–74). Government policy also
encouraged
intercropping in the North and promoted expansion of wheat as a second crop
in the South.
Chao (1986, p. 199) suggests that the Chinese multiple cropping index was 0.
6 in the Han
dynasty in the first century (i.e. 40 per cent of land was left fallow on
average), rose to 0.8 in the
eighth century (T’ang dynasty) and to 1.0 under the Sung (i.e. on average
there was no fallow at that
time). Rice/wheat double cropping was stimulated in the South by policy
incentives of the Sung
dynasty, but double cropping of rice expanded rather slowly. He suggests
that the double cropping
ratio reached about 1.4 in the nineteenth century, then fell with the
opening up of Manchuria from the
1860s when settlement by Han Chinese was permitted but where the climate did
not allow double
cropping. In the 1930s to 1950s the coefficient was about 1.3 and by 1995
had risen to nearly 1.6.
The figures quoted above are averages for the whole country, but the
situation varies a lot by
region. In the northeast and northwest the cropping index was about l in
1990 and slightly less in
Heilungkiang and Inner Mongolia. In Eastern China the average was nearly 2
with a high of 2.53 in
Kiangsu. Further South it was 2.44 in Kiangsi and 2.25 in Kwangtung (see
Colby, Crook and Webb,
1992, p. 24).
In Europe, widespread use of fallow was common in medieval times (see
Slicher van Bath,
1963, pp. 243–54), and it was not until the development of crop rotation in
eighteenth century
England and the Netherlands that fallow began to disappear. For Europe as a
whole the twelfth
century Chinese situation was not achieved until the twentieth century. | e****i
发帖数: 2152 | 2 From early times Chinese farmers succeeded in getting higher yields from
their seeds than Europeans. Seeds were planted in rows with drills in North
China; seed beds and transplanting techniques were used in the Southern rice
growing areas. In China, wheat and barley yield/seed ratios were about 10:l
in the twelfth century (Bray, 1984, p. 287) and a good deal
better for rice. Slicher van Bath (1963) suggests that the typical medieval
European yield/seed ratio for wheat was 4:1. Duby (1976, pp. 25–26) cites
even more miserable results, and a 4:l yield is not
out of line with what Mayerson (1981) cites for Roman times. It was not
until the eighteenth century that European agriculture began to show
serious improvement in this respect. |
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