Abstract
It has been about 20 years since the Household Responsibility System (HRS) was founded in China as a fundamental agricultural management system. A second 30-year HRS was established about 5 years ago based on the policy of ‘no change in 30 years’. Recently considerable attention has been given to how farmers become aware of this system, and especially how they understand the new policy of ‘no change in 30 years ’. This paper reports an investigation in two regions in west China, and tries to clarify the related issues.
We found the following: 1) The Household Responsibility System is suitable for investigating the state of agriculture in a certain region. 2) It is very important that the government really enforces the policy of ‘no change in 30 years’ and protects the farmers have stable and long-term's farmland use-rights. 3) In rural communities the social security system should be established in order to lower the farmland's social security function. 4) If farmers can work in other industries and transfer their farmland use-rights, then the scale of management will expand.
