This mitigated many of the worst excesses of mass urbanisation, but it had real costs in terms of efficiency. The agricultural sector has not benefited as much as it could from industrialisation, capital formation and technological upgrading in urban areas. In developmental terms, rural China is being left behind.
The new agricultural policies aim to address some of the obstacles to rural development by improving security of land tenure, reforming residency mobility, increasing access to credit and by promoting the development of "large and powerful" commercial agribusinesses and "corporate champions" in rural areas.
In the coming years we can expect to see a powerful combination of preferential policies from the state, experimental development zones, foreign investment and technology transfer and bottom-up entrepreneurialism driving development in the Chinese agricultural sector. Chinese agriculture will become more competitive, but it will need help to get there.
This presents exciting opportunities for New Zealand. This country has a well-developed and highly competitive agricultural sector with leading models of agribusiness organisation, agriscience research and education, and well-developed vertically integrated production, processing and distribution chains. New Zealand companies are already involved in rural China, including Fonterra's dairy farms in Hebei Province and Global Horticulture New Zealand's kiwifruit production and processing operations in Shaanxi Province.
The New Zealand-China story to date has largely been about what we can sell to China. The next chapter will be more about what we can do to help China feed itself.
Investing in rural China: New Zealand agribusiness and the local global nexus
Jason Young is conducting a three-year research project on New Zealand agribusiness investment in rural China, supported by a $345,000 Fast Start Marsden grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand.
His project will explore the interaction of international agribusinesses in China with local development conditions. Though the agricultural sector is increasingly welcoming of foreign investment and joint ventures to promote agricultural best practices, to encourage technology and knowledge transfer and to modernise the agricultural sector, very little is known of how international agribusinesses operate in rural China.
This project will document those practices using New Zealand case studies in Hebei, Shaanxi and Guizhou, and explore the evolution of rural institutions to identify the role of investment in the development of rural China.
Jason Young is a research fellow at the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre and lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington.