Chapter 2 Painful Exploration of Agricultural and Rural Development

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the development path of its agriculture and rural areas proved extremely rocky, but it did move forward via twists and turns. From the early years when people had nothing but the rubble of war, to the fervid rush to establish people’s communes; from land reform to the collective ownership of rural land; from the traditional business pattern of single family operation to the mutual benefit rural cooperative system; from the patriarchal governance mode to democratic management involving all peasants in rural areas, China tore itself away from millennia-old traditions, driven by an insatiable yearning for the future, but with confusion in how to explore it. Passion and achievement, cost and frustration were the twins of that era, a legendary era for China’s development DNA. It predestined the unique path of China’s rural modernization, and, to a great extent, the special nature of her modernization too.