The Farming System under the Rural Land Tenure System of China

Its Institutional Skeleton and Empirical Evidence from Sichuan Province

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the farming system under the Land Tenure System. By the beginning of the 1980s, almost all of the collectives in rural China had adopted the Land Tenancy System, which dismantled collectively operated farming and restored family-based farming such that individual households could now contract for the use of collective land.
Empirical evidence from Sichuan province shows that, contrary to the villages in some of the more prosperous coastal areas, the poor collectives in our sampled area played their roles by levying a heavy tax and fee duty on farmers. Rather than improving the efficiency of individual small-scale farming, the heavy tax and fee duty exploited the profitability of the farmers' agricultural production. Regarding the problem of the heavy financial burden on farming, numerous policies and laws have been implemented, but no effective solution yet exists. Consequently, farmers with very tight land holdings have no other choice than to pursue a way of life in which they cultivate farmland only to provide themselves with agricultural products, while earning income for their life by depending mainly on wage working outside the farm. As more and more of the rural labor force shifts their working time outside the farm, not only is agricultural development depressed, but also the sustainability of the rural community becomes an issue. Clearly how to improve the efficiency of farming system under the Land Tenure System has become a crucial aspect of the problem of maintaining the sustainability of the rural community.