School of Geography - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemExemplar emulation and journalism: the rhetoric of the Zhao Zhankui campaign in Yan'an( 1993)The subject of my thesis is the role of the Chinese press in exemplar emulation campaigns. By examining one such campaign in the early years of the Chinese Communist Party and locating it in a tradition that began before Communist history and has continued to this day, I will demonstrate how the press played a vital part in social transformation by propagating new meanings of events and generating new modes of social action.
-
ItemChina's grain production: government policies and their impacts since the 1950s( 1991)China has long been known as a large agricultural country. Agriculture plays an important role in the Chinese economy. Grain, in particular, provides a foundation for this country.l As China has to feed 22 percent of the world's total population with only 7 percent of the total arable land on the earth, food production continues to be the most fundamental task for the Chinese government and the Chinese people. Since the founding of the People's Republic, the Chinese government has initiated a series of agricultural policies to deal with grain production. During the past four decades, government policies have strongly influenced Chinese grain production: favourable policies producing fast increases in grain production and for the whole national economy the appearance of prosperity, unfavourable policies meaning stagnations or declines in grain output and suffering in the national economy. For example, when policy failure led to serious grain shortfalls from 1959 to 1961, the national economy was also grim. Successful reform during the late 1970s and the early 1980s promoted rapid growth in grain production and optimism in the national economy. Due to the importance of grain in the national economy, it is necessary to explicitly examine the relationship between government agricultural policy and grain production. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse systematically the agricultural policies and their impact on grain production during the past four decades. In China, government policy affects grain production through three main channels. The first channel is production organisation, which concerns ownership of land and means of production, as well as the organisation of labour and other resources for grain production. The second channel is the marketing and price system, including types of grain procurement and purchasing price. The third channel is capital investment and technological transformation, which includes sources, quantity and orientation of capital investment, and concrete measures for improving technology. This study traces policies and their impacts on grain production through these three channels.