To the north arena of Chinese agriculture, the Central Plain is flanked by the Gobi desert and beyond that a belt of steppe that continues westwards across Eurasia. In Western Asia early crops were processed for a flour-focused food system. While grinding stones were used in prehistoric China, boiling and steaming of grains and other foods appear to have been and remained the predominant East Asian methods for preparing foods. The ultimate expression of the East Asian culinary selection of grain quality is found in the sticky cereals, including sticky rice and sticky millets. Analyses of phytoliths recovered from Pleistocene caves on the southern margins of the Yangtze basin have also led to suggestions of Pleistocene rice domestication in the region, although clear criteria for determining either cultivation practices of rice have been lacking. While agriculture in the Yellow River region diversified through secondary domestications and adoptions and developed an ideology of diversity, early Yangtze agriculture was single-mindedly about rice.

The most fundamental issue surrounding the 2nd Five-Year Plan was the prospect for increasing the rate of growth of Chinese agriculture. The Great Leap Forward was predicated on Mao Tse-tung's misunderstanding of the constraints facing Chinese agriculture. In large part the labor mobilization strategy was directed toward water conservancy and irrigation projects that were expected to raise crop yields substantially. The Chinese famine, by comparison, took from three to five times that number of lives and even surpassed the Soviet famine in proportional terms if Western estimates of excess mortality are used in place of the official figures. In higher-stage Agricultural Producers' Cooperatives (APCs), net income was distributed to APCs members according to their labor contributions. The recovery of production and other measures led to the reestablishment of price stability, particularly in rural markets. Industrial recovery was far more rapid than that of agriculture. The recovery of industrial and agricultural output is reflected in China's national income.

This chapter provides an analysis of the structure and development of Chinese agriculture in the nineteenth century and its implications for the rest of the economy. It discusses the single rural handicraft in the nineteenth century. The agricultural sector of the Chinese economy in the last decades of the Ch'ing dynasty was characterized by a factor mix in which land and capital were in short supply and the superabundance of labour was subject to some diminishing returns. Handicraft and modern industries in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century China were subservient to foreign capitalism. The economy of late-Ch'ing China was, at its given level of technology, characterized by a high degree of commercial development. Goods and traders moved extensively throughout the country and, to a limited extent, the domestic economy had developed links with the world market. In brief, the fiscal system of the central government like other aspects of its administration was quite superficial.