Land Use And Rural Development: A Case Study Of China

China is the second largest economy in the world. It has become the fastest growing economy in the world with an average rate of 10% for the last thirty years. The largest exporter and second largest importer of goods has brought China to be ranked first in the foreign exchange reserves. The country with thousands of years of history, started off and continues today as mostly an agrarian economy. Over time China's economy continues to change and prosper. Starting with the first economic change in the early twentieth century, which occurred when the GMD (the Nationalist Party) lost control due to its poor economic performance. This in turn led to their defeat by the CCP. During that time many peasants lost their farmland and this led to a peasant

China has changed in certain ways and remained the same in others from the early Golden Ages to the late 1900s. China has experienced a series of cultural and political transformations, shaping the lives of many Chinese citizens. Culturally, the country’s art and literature hardly changed for almost eight hundred years. Along with their culture, China remained politically the same from the beginning of the Golden Ages all the way until the 1800s. On the other hand, China’s government and society were restructured after new leaders took over. From a monarch to total communism, China’s society had a multitude of new ideas and policies they had to adapt to.

Rome and Han China had relatively different approaches to land ownership as a means of imperial

China remains a current world super power that has been around for thousands of years. It was one of the first civilizations ever created and it has evolved into an enormous country. China is a large territory, but only 10% of the land can be farmed on. This continues to be a tremendous problem, especially with the large population that mostly lives in rural areas. In the past China was seen as a fragile nation that was still stuck in the past, although after the Four Humiliations this began to change. The Four Humiliations were a group of events that forced China to modernize due to the losses it faced. After the last of the four humiliations and the fall of the dynasty era during 1911, China began to catch up to the westernized world by modernizing their government, military, and education. The Chinese

It called for huge communes in rural areas, which ended private property in the countryside. The Liang family experienced this both by the hunger they felt while still in Changsha, and later on when they joined the countryside.

The Chinese government owns all the land and protection of property is decreasing. The corruption of the Chinese government continues as they reject core reforms such as disclosure of assets by officials, oversight of bodies, and lifting political restraints on citizens. To continue the problem China has a weak financial regulation, use of debt to overproduce, the culture of saving and not spending, and profound fear of innovative ideas. However, China’s use of

China In a Different Light In the book Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler proves that China is more diversified than it is perceived by most scholars and researchers. In his first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze 2001, Hessler analyzes the social structure of China where he was a volunteer as a peace corp member. In his work, he created a mentality of a well-structured society where the majority of people struggled to support their culture. The second book, Oracle Bones, gets more exquisite details of the changing China and the rapid changes in the country to meet the demands of globalization, internationalization, and integration.

China has reached a milestone in terms of achieving its centenarian goal of making China a prosperous nation once again. One of the ways that it has done this is by having steady economic growth even in the midst of an economic crisis. Not only has China’s economy grown, but its standard of living has also improved, it has achieved this by spending 70 percent of its fiscal revenue towards improving people’s standard of living. China has also pushed more anti-corruption reforms and has made efforts towards widening its economy by setting up freer trade.

explained, in part, by the historical and political evolution of China as it emerged from

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Maoist government in China implemented a socialistic economy wherein the state controlled nearly every aspect of national and economic development. The process of making the Chinese economy public took the better part of the decade, but resulted in an explosive rate of expansion. Both the nation’s industrial and agricultural sectors grew exponentially until finally reaching a tapering off point during the late 1960s.

Physical geography has shaped China’s history through major rivers allowing new transportation, mountains dividing culture, along with plateaus creating sustainable farm land. Rivers have been a key characteristic of the development of Chinese civilization. A major river in China, the Yellow River has been able to support a major transportation and shipping artery throughout the country. This has allowed for the bringing of materials and people to new locations. Mountains have been able to separate different ethnic groups and tribes which have created different religions and rituals in China. This has led to the formation of new traditions and differences based on location. The Loess Plateau is a major geographical feature in China which has

More to the south of modern Shaanxi area, where the part of the Chinese population was greater than in the west, agriculture was the main economical tradition. The largest part of the territory was owned by the state or the emperor and was given to farming peasants who in turn had to pay taxes. Most other parts belonged to the Tangut aristocracy and to state officials, but also to Buddhist and Daoist monasteries. Only few peasants and private persons owned larger parts of land, but it was allowed to open up and to new land in mountainous and remote areas.

Most importantly, the reestablishment of the hukou system in the early sixties, preceding the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward plan, affected factories in China heavily. By law, every worker in the city needed a hukou, an urban residence permit, in order to be allowed to work. This created a huge conflict between China’s urban and rural citizens as it was made extremely difficult for people from rural areas to get hukous, which of course everyone wanted (Naughton, pg. 118). Because of this, the urban and rural areas started to develop in very different ways since city folk had primary access to food, even during the nationwide famine. However, even with the societal uproar, the Chinese government did not make

Fock, H K. Y. and Woo. K.S. (1998). The China Market: Strategic Implications of Guanxi. Business Strategy Review, 9(3):

In accordance to this, China went on a construction binge. Whole factories were purchased from abroad while others were built with local resources. By 1978, the frenzy for new projects reached a level that reminded some people of the Great Leap Forward. In an effort to promote agricultural production, the government released many of the restrictions on the 'spontaneous capitalist tendencies' of the peasantry. (173) In the late 1980's, the government decided to expand the scope of private marketing. The next step was to increase the amount land assigned to the peasants. The peasants were now not responsible to the government for the use they made to the private plots. They simply could grow what they wished, for the sale to the government or to private markets. This led to furious rebuilding and inflow of foreign investments. All this enabled China to remake itself into Asian's hub of finance, trade and culture.