This publication reviews the practices and policies of Internet Plus agriculture business models in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It analyzes the agriculture value chain model, rural e-commerce platform, and Internet Plus agriculture service model. The Internet Plus rural economy is an emerging driver of comprehensive development in the PRC as a new production management and marketing tool for farmers and farmers' cooperatives. Its potential is seen as a foundation for vitalizing the countryside and key to achieving agricultural modernization.

This book analyses and critically evaluates the development of two key components of China’s economy: the network of productive enterprises, and the national innovation system, from the inception of market-oriented reforms to the present day. The approach is a partly novel one, albeit inspired to classical political economy, rooted in the structure and evolution of social relations of production and exchange and of the institutional setting in these two crucial domains. The main findings are twofold: First, the role of planning and public ownership, far from withering, has being upheld and qualitatively enhanced, especially throughout the most recent stages of industrial reforms. Second, enterprises are increasingly participating - along with universities and research centers - in a concerted and historically unparalleled effort to dramatically upgrade China’s capacity to engage in indigenous innovation. As a result, China’s National Innovation System has been growing and strengthening at a pace much faster than that of the national economy as a whole. The book also presents a speculative and provisional perspective on the validity, and meaning, of the claim that the country’s socioeconomic system is indeed a form of socialism with Chinese characteristics. It will be on interest to students and scholars researching China, politics, and development economics.

Despite reports of food safety and quality scandals, China has a rapidly expanding organic agriculture and food sector, and there is a revolution in ecological food and ethical eating in China’s cities. This book shows how a set of social, economic, cultural, and environmental conditions have converged to shape the development of a "formal" organic sector, created by "top-down" state-developed standards and regulations, and an "informal" organic sector, created by ‘bottom-up’ grassroots struggles for safe, healthy, and sustainable food. This is generating a new civil movement focused on ecological agriculture and quality food. Organic movements and markets have typically emerged in industrialized food systems that are characterized by private land ownership, declining small farm sectors, consolidated farm to retail chains, predominance of supermarket retail, standards and laws to safeguard food safety, and an active civil society sector. The authors contrast this with the Chinese context, with its unique version of "capitalism with social characteristics," collective farmland ownership, and predominance of smallholder agriculture and emerging diverse marketing channels. China’s experience also reflects a commitment to domestic food security, evolving food safety legislation, and a civil society with limited autonomy from a semi-authoritarian state that keeps shifting the terrain of what is permitted. The book will be of great interest to advanced students and researchers of agricultural and food systems and policy, as well as rural sociology and Chinese studies.

This report presents the findings of an assessment on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to improve food production and distribution in the People's Republic of China. The analysis focuses on e-commerce in rural areas of the country and provides policy recommendations to promote the use of ICT in the agricultural supply chain. The report documents the trends in ICT application by farmers and its impact on income and livelihood. It also identifies the major constraints to and enabling factors for such ICT applications.

China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

The economies of the People's Republic of China and India have seen dramatic growth in recent years. As their respective successes continue to reshape the world's economic landscape, noted Chinese and Indian scholars have studied the two countries' development paths, in particular their rich and diverse experiences in such areas as education, information technology, local entrepreneurship, capital markets, macroeconomic management, foreign direct investment, and state-owned enterprise reforms. Drawing on these studies, ADB has produced a timely collection of lessons learned that serves as a valuable refresher on the challenges and opportunities ahead for developing economies, especially those in Asia and the Pacific.