Jiangxi Agricultural Reclamation Movement In Collectivization Era (1958～1964)

In 1958, when collectivization era had begun, the Chinese communist party raised a magnificent movement in the whole country, in order to realize the great-leap-forward development of industry and agriculture. Correspondingly Jiangxi province also established the development planning. With grain production of the agricultural production for example, At the second meeting of the second people's representative in 1959, Jiangxi province eventually decided to reach the grain production goal as 13.5-16 billion kilograms.For the realization of grain production plan, Jiangxi province conducted large-scale movement of the land reclamation. The process was divided into two stages:in the first stage, Jiangxi province used the existing land, through the measures of collocting fertilizer to reform middle-and-low-yielding fields, building water-contral project to improve the irrigation conditions, replanting the double cropping rice, improving the density of rice, promotiving the thoroughbred to improve the yield. In the second stage, give priority to reclaiming wasteland, the specific measures were expanding crops, in order to achieve the purpose of increasing food production. In the second stage, there were two forms of reclaiming wasteland: Shangrao zone established some new farmlands by surrounding the Poyang lake in the form of low degree reclamation,middle degree reclamation and high degree reclamation; Gannan zone added the farmlands by reclaiming the waste mountains. The former reduced the capacity of the lake, and the latter destroyed the vegetation, both of them caused the flood and drought. Even though both of the two zones realized the grain output purpose, they also raised serious ecological problems.Thus, for the completion of the central grain production targets, Jiangxi Province assessed the implementation of the Farm movement. In the early, it had achieved some initial success, but this was the cost of environmental degradation. When, the natural environment was changed to extreme forms of disasters, the achievements will be wiped out. Although the disaster relief measures form both central and local, it was too late. Once the environment begun, it was difficult to cure. In this sense, even though the collectivization of agricultural production achieved some success, it also planted seeds of the environment problems. Therefore it was worthy of serious review and reflection.