Agriculture, the Base’

In the context of Chinese history, thirty years is not a long time. But the period since the promulgation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 is as dramatic as any in Chinese history. The People's Republic came into being as a result of a peasant political movement. The rural experience is a key to understanding the success of that part of the Chinese revolution that culminated in 1949. And in the period since then that experience has continued to be significant, although the problems of administering the Chinese state and charting Chinese society on a new socialist course have also involved an urban population and categories distinct from that of the peasantry. At no point in the past thirty years has China's rural sector been unimportant, although for a brief period in the early 1950s, under the particular dominance of the Soviet Union, an emphasis on heavy industry temporarily reduced the centrality of agriculture and rural development. By the middle of new China's first decade the age-old Chinese pressure of population and resources had restored agriculture to predominance. Agriculture and industry were together to form two points of advance in China's quest for modernity. The centrality of agriculture in China's developmental path has been maintained throughout the third decade of the People's Republic of China. Despite certain policy shifts

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