1975-1976 Photos China Agriculture Pre-Industrialization

This collection of photos was taken by Roger Blobaum in 1975 and 1976 near the end of the Cultural Revolution when almost all of China’s food was being produced in a nationwide system of party-controlled agricultural communes. Roger had total freedom to take pictures during five weeks of travel in China, most of it in the countryside.

Producing China’s Food on 50,000 Party-Controlled Agricultural Communes: Roger’s 1975 Trip Report and Photos

By Roger Blobaum The narrow highway connecting Nanking and Yangchou is a maze of bicycles, two-wheeled carts, and other slow-moving vehicles that challenge a bus driver’s patience and overworks the loud horn that helps clear the way. Unusual obstacles include a stretch where rice is spread to dry in the sun on half the black-topped road. In fields along the way, thousands of men and women work the land with hoes and other tools as their ancestors have for centuries. Others with baskets and shovels clean silt from irrigation ditches, spread compost, scrape mud from canals and fish ponds, and level fields. Water buffalo sun themselves here and there and occasionally one is seen pulling a plow. The only evidence of mechanized farming in this typical rural scene in Kiangsu Province are a few tractors, both small hand types and old Russian-made models, pulling carts along the road, and the overhead lines that carry power to irrigation pumps and other rural electric outlets. Is this the agricultural system the People’s Republic of China relies on to produce food for a population estimated at between 800 and 900 million, and climbing? How is starvation avoided with such backward methods in a…

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