This article delineates new approaches to the study of food and famine in Chinese history. Drawing primarily from the three other articles in the symposium, the author asks in what ways the Chinese state, primarily in the high Qing period, affected population growth, agricultural production, natural cycles, and food distribution, and what a historical perspective suggests about the People's Republic of China's efforts to feed its population.
This paper explores receptivity to agrarian change in a Malay rice farming village in Negri Sembilan in 1958–59. Villagers, who earlier were extremely resistant to agricultural change, were at that time experiencing an acceleration and convergence of several trends, among them population growth, governmental attempts to introduce new techniques in food production and increasing reliance on cash crops to buy food. A gradual acceptance of agricultural change was beginning to occur but acceptance was highly selective and the basis of selectivity was not immediately apparent. This paper attempts to specify factors responsible for the selective use of new techniques as well as those crucial to overall change.
This chapter deals with the dynamics of population structure and the ethnic composition of the North Caucasus within the recent hundred years. It also discusses changes in the administrative divisions of the region during that period. For each administrative area of the North Caucasus, the chapter describes the distribution of its population across geographical zones and major migration processes observed in the Soviet and post-Soviet epochs. This chapter also evaluates the size of each ethnic group from a historical perspective and presents changes of ethnic proportions which took place in the administrative areas of the North Caucasus in the time of the USSR and afterward. Special attention is paid to urbanization and to population growth in ethnically mixed zones, especially in the recent decades. It is shown that the Republics of the North Caucasus differ considerably in different ethnic groups. In addition, this chapter also presents the history of the formation of national Republics in the North Caucasus.
Introduction: Food, Famine, and the Chinese State
