Robert Ash

China's Land Resources, Environment and Agricultural Production

Success in agriculture depends on many factors embracing the natural environment, economic and demographic policy, institutions and technology. Chinas agricultural resource endowment has long encouraged reliance on land-intensive methods to raise farm outputs. Indeed, the record of agricultural growth in China since 1978 is most remarkable for the overwhelming debt it owes to increases in yields per hectare.

The Evolution of Agricultural Policy

The core of this article comprises three sections. The two outer sections are the more substantial and seek to describe and analyse the evolution of agricultural policy in what has come to be regarded as the first and second stages of Chinas rural reform. In between, briefer consideration is given to the transitional year of 1984, when a major change in agricultural policy began to be apparent.

Economic Integration within Greater China: Trade and Investment Flows Between China, Hong Kong and Taiwan

Economic integration is essentially a process of unification – the means whereby coherence is imposed upon previously separate, even disparate, geographical regions. It may be pursued as a domestic or international goal, although the simultaneous attainment of both may prove elusive. Recent efforts towards the creation of formal trans-national, regional economic identities, whether North American (NAFTA), European (EC) or Asian-Pacific (APEC), have sometimes been perceived as a threat to the establishment of a truly integrated global economy. By contrast, the remarkable degree of economic integration already achieved between southern China and Hong Kong (and, latterly, Taiwan) might ironically have a fissiparous effect on Chinas domestic economy. From this point of view, there is a danger that increasing economic integration within Greater China could threaten Chinas national economic identity, or at least compel its re-definition.

Squeezing the Peasants: Grain Extraction, Food Consumption and Rural Living Standards in Mao's China

At the end of Maos life farmers still accounted for some 80 per cent of Chinas population. Its declining share in GDP notwithstanding, agriculture continued to carry a heavy developmental burden throughout the Mao era. The production and distribution of grain – the wage good par excellence – held the key to fulfilling this role. But despite a pragmatic response to the exigencies of famine conditions in 1959–61, state investment priorities never adequately accommodated the economic, let alone the welfare needs of the farm sector. Thanks to the mechanism of grain re-sales to the countryside, the Chinese governments extractive policies were less brutal in their impact than those pursued by Stalin in the Soviet Union. Even so, a detailed national, regional and provincial analysis of grain output and procurement trends highlights the process of rural impoverishment which characterized Chinas social and economic development under Maoist planning.

China's Economy on the Eve of Reform

Pressures for change are inherent in leadership succession under any political system. In China, because of his longevity and close involvement in major strategic initiatives, Mao Zedongs passing was bound to intensify such pressures. When he died in September 1976, Mao had held supreme power, largely unchallenged, for four decades. Since 1949, Chinas economic development had been uniquely, if not consistently, influenced by his personal prejudices and idiosyncratic view of how best to realize the countrys development potential. To argue that post-1978 Dengist reforms were shaped by the Maoist economic legacy is not to suggest that they were its inevitable outcome. Analysis of the recent comparative experience of China and the former Soviet Union shows the fallacy of such simplistic logic. But the origins of those reforms lie in the prior accumulation of experience. It is with these origins and this experiencejudged in their own terms, as well as from the comparative perspective of conditions in the former USSR that this article is concerned. It seeks to determine whether, as of the late 1970s, Chinas prior pattern of development or existing economic structure gave it inherent advantages in implementing reforms. Contrary to what others have argued, we find that such advantages were by no means self-evident and in some respects China was disadvantaged vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union.

The Peasant and the State

The institutional framework of agriculture defines the context in which the relationship between the peasant and the state is enacted. In China from the mid-19SOs until 1979 that framework was characterized by a collectivist and interventionist ethos. The state-peasant relationship weighed heavily in favour of the state. The three tiers of agricultural organizationcommune, brigade and production teamfacilitated control of the economic activities of individual peasants by the government, whether at central or local level. Individual initiative was largely limited to those activities which could be carried out in spare time or on private plots. The relationship between effort and reward was frequently tenuous and distribution was guided by egalitarian principles. The inherent disadvantages of such a system from an individuals point of view had to be set against undoubted benefits which accrued to the state. The collective framework conferred upon the state great economic power in both the day-to-day running of agriculture and the formulation and implementation of longer-term planning. The system facilitated the fulfilment of goals set by the state, even when these conflicted with the self-interest of peasant producers.l It is true that in the early 1 960s the retreat from the more radical phase of the Great Leap Forward was accompanied by decentralization of decision-making and an extension of private economic activities in the countryside (including the introduction of contractual arrangements with individual households). Such initiatives were, however, shortlived and although the reaiEfirmation of the pre-eminent role of the production team as the basic unit of production and accounting was maintained throughout the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s, claims of lasting institutional stability need to be set in the context of

China's Economic Reform. A Study with Documents

Chapter 1. Chinas economic reform strategy: historical overview and chronology Chapter 2. Chinas economic reform strategy: documents Chapter 3. Creating a market oriented economic and industrial system: introduction and documents Chapter 4. Industrial change and industrial upgrading: introduction and documents Chapter 5. Chinas agriculture during the period of reform: introduction and documents Chapter 6. Population and labour: introduction and documents Chapter 7. Foreign economic relations: introduction and documents Bibliography

Hong Kong in transition : one country, two systems

Part I: The Hong Kong Business Environment Part II: Government and Politics Part III: Law and Legality Part IV: Journalism and the Media

Loss‐making and the financial performance of China's industrial enterprises: Data from the new accounting and statistical system

Massive losses and falling profitability in Chinas state‐owned industries have attracted widespread attention in recent years. This paper, based on data from Chinas new industrial accounting and statistical system, examines the performance of these industries from two perspectives. The first is the comparative performance of state enterprises under central and regional control. The second is the way in which the enterprises have disposed of pre‐tax profits. The findings suggest that the increasingly competitive environment in which state enterprises have to operate and the transitional nature of their institutional arrangements are major factors which have contributed to the problems which they face. It is further argued that the existence of such problems is likely to be the source of considerable pressure on the future development of Chinas capital markets.

Economic Relations between Taiwan and Europe

The Development of Taiwans European Trade and Outward Investment in a Global Perspective Analysis of Taiwans economic experience since the 1950s highlights the critical importance of the external orientation of Taiwans development strategy. In particular, foreign trade has played a pre-eminent role in generating economic growth and associated structural changes. From the late 1950s until the 1980s, in common with the other East Asian “dragon” economies (South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore), Taiwan exhibited some of the classic hallmarks of trade dependence. Few would deny that the performance of its foreign trade sector – especially the linkages that were forged between the expansion and diversification of trade links overseas, and domestic industrial transformation and modernization – have been a key ingredient in the emergence of a “Taiwan development model.”