Agriculture: An Old Issue Back on the Public Agenda

This chapter aims at introducing historical elements about the past of China’s rural and agricultural policies, which are essential to understand the recent evolution of policies and the way they are implemented in rural areas. The chapter starts by showing how crucial the roles played by peasants, agriculture, and rural areas were in state- and Party-building at the dawn of the People’s Republic of China. However, in spite of their importance in the building of the legitimacy of the state, rural areas progressively received less attention from the government in the aftermath of the first economic reforms. The final subsection of the chapter focuses on the recent willingness of the central state to restore its role in agricultural production activities and analyzes the underlying reasons motivating this sudden shift in priorities.