The Persistent Rural Crisis in Asia

F ROM ITS EARLIEST YEARS the Institute of Pacific Relations and its successive Research Secretaries, J.B. Condliffe and W.L. Holland, were concerned with agriculture in China and Asia. This concern took a number of forms, notably the support given to the Chinese land utilization study directed by Buck and to the study of land and labour in China by Tawney, for whom W.L. Holland acted as a research assistant and secretary. The Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations recognized that the future of China as well as China's role in the world were inextricably connected with the performance of Chinese agriculture. Tawney put it well in his presentation to the Shanghai conference of the Council in 1931 where he argued that the combination of an immense population with both the limitations of arable land and the defects of economic and social organization was impoverishing China.' Buck, in more cautious terms, saw the problem of rural China as that of a large population in relation to land resources which were used inefficiently as measured by life expectancy, as well as by nutritional and living standards.2 Some years later the International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations joined with the Food Research Institute at Stanford to sponsor a more general survey of Asian rice agriculture. The authors, V.D. Wickizer and M.K. Bennett, wrote in their conclusion that the increasing pressure upon food resources taxes man's ingenuity in making adjustments, and under certain conditions the result is a gradual lowering of consumption levels. This, apparently, is what has been happening on a large scale in Monsoon Asia during the past decade or so [1921-1941?]. The relationship between food supply and population is of special importance because of its bearing, real or imaginary, upon the causes of war.3

Agriculture · Arable land · Archaeology · China · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Geography · Ingenuity · Life expectancy · Political science · Population · Sociology · Demography · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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