increasing by between 1 and 2.3 per cent in Latin America, the Middle East and
Asia. This was associated with a much lower share of agricultural land planted
with modern varieties of seeds (23 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa compared
with 50–80 per cent in the other three regions (Sachs et al 2004:138).
From the early 1950s to 1978, despite its low-income status,Chinapursued
a high-technology strategy. The state mobilized enormous resources, creating
elite research institutes such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Government
expenditure on R&D peaked in 1964 at 1.7 per cent of GDP – a very large share
for a low-income country. Military technology ‘successes’ included the atom
and hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles. Not all technological
efforts were successful, however. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1958, was
supposed to be a strategy of ‘appropriate technological change’, or as Mao
called it, a ‘strategy of walking on two legs’, whereby rural and urban industri-
alization would take place at the same time. Rural industry, Mao argued,
offered a means of reducing underemployment in rural areas and saved on
transport costs. Steel production,much of it in small-scale rural industry,
(known as backyard furnaces) increased from 4.5 million tonnes in 1956 to
18.7 million tonnes in 1960. Targets were even more ambitious, 50 million
tonnes for 1960, rising to 80–100 million tonnes by 1962. The rural workforce
lacked the relevant skills for industrial labour and output was of inevitably
poor quality. There are many anecdotal stories of huge quantities of sub-stan-
dard steel rotting away in rural areas. The effort led to a disastrous misalloca-
tion of resources. Labour was pulled out of agriculture to work in rural industry
(industrial output almost doubled between 1957 and 1960) to such an extent
that agricultural output plummeted by around one-third. Up to 30 million
people are estimated to have died in the ensuing famine.
Chinese yields in key agricultural crops such as rice, wheat, and corn
surpassed world levels by the mid-1990s. This was achieved by little mecha-
nization (tractors),very labour-intensive techniques, a great deal of fertilizer
and land irrigation networks which in turn were created by the massive labour
mobilization campaigns of the Maoist era (Naughton, 2007:265). Per capita
grain output increased from 300kg in 1955–57 to 400kg in 1984. This was
based on an indigenous technological effort to replicate many technologies
that had been pioneered in the West. In the 1950s China built an agricultural
research network that linked local services up to the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences at the apex. This was complemented by the world’s largest
seed production and distribution system. By 1957 1,400 seed stations and
1,900 breeding and demonstration stations had been created across China
(Bramall, 2009:221). There was a complementary massive expansion of rural
infrastructure. Starting in the early 1950s, irrigation projects were built by
labour mobilized by collectives during the slack season. The irrigated areas
grew from 16 million hectares in 1952 to 36 million in 1975 (Naughton,
2007:259). There were some notable technological gains. These included the
introduction in 1961 of hybrid maize, extended so successfully that by 1990
about 90 per cent of the area sown was using this hybrid variety. Hybrid rice
108 Sources of Growth in the Modern World Economy since 1950