Studying WWI Germany and Britain as successful examples in securing food supply under blockade and unlimited submarine warfare, these war economists hoped to design a wartime economy involving mobilizing and planning characters. The wartime supply for them would be a very difficult task, given the loss of coastal provinces in the potential war meaning declining supply of grain, and the mobilizing of laborers in the army meaning increasing demand for grain. With the economic plans setting up targets for grain requiring collection, war economists hoped for the state to mobilize rural society to increase grain production by promoting land reclamation and introducing new agricultural techniques.
After the outbreak of War of Resistance in 1937, despite initial inaction, the Nationalist government launched a national food management scheme in 1940. The actual plan synthesized the grain supply with the crumbling national finance. The paper evaluates different wartime food policies, including land reclamation, fertilizer promotion, multiple cropping system promotion and, most importantly, the collection of land tax in-kind. The paper shows how the institutional innovation of the tax collection system secured both the flow of national tax revenue and the food supply of frontline troops. However, this crisis-solving policy comes with the further degradation of farmer’s life and the acceleration of ecological collapse, leaving a long-lasting impact on the making of command economy in the post-war Nationalist and Communist era.
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