Wartime Seed Promotion and the Practical Shift in Republican China’s Agenda of Agricultural Improvement

Developing new seed varieties and maintaining their quality were central to China’s state-led project of agricultural modernization. From the late nineteenth century onward, expanding state control over seed selection and breeding—aimed at increasing yields—proceeded alongside the establishment of central and local agricultural extension institutions. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Republican regime invested in financial, bureaucratic, and research institutions to promote new agricultural technologies. Although the wartime rural economy has often been portrayed negatively, the Nationalist state continued to pursue agricultural modernization during the 1930s and 1940s.

This article examines the discourse and practices of agricultural improvement in Republican China from the early 1930s to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Based on local officials’ firsthand experiences, this article argues that the wartime pressures redirected state priorities from research toward large-scale practical extension work, bringing grassroots officials into direct engagement with rural society. In their efforts to promote new seed varieties, these officials encountered mismatches between experimental data and field conditions, incomplete bureaucratic arrangements, and land-tenure constraints. Their everyday experiences raised questions that official rhetoric could not fully address, pushing them to reinterpret and reshape the official discourse of agricultural improvement from the ground up.

By combining English- and Chinese-language scholarship with local-level evidence, this article shows that agricultural propaganda was not just transmitted from the state downward but was continuously reformulated through local practice. Crisis-driven adaptation thus reshaped both agricultural work and the meanings attached to modernization, offering a new perspective on how state agendas were negotiated in Republican China.