Information Alliances: Crop Reporting on China and Taiwan, 1949–61

Building information infrastructure was an important part of national construction on post-war China and Taiwan. With both countries relying on centralized economic planning, their governments sought to create robust sources of information about their changing domestic economies. Surveying agriculture, in particular, was seen as being of fundamental importance, as China and Taiwan remained agrarian economies through the 1950s-1960s. But creating infrastructure for “crop reporting”—also known as agricultural statistics—was a difficult task, with both countries in 1949 lacking trained manpower, a coherent strategy, and resources. On China in particular, false reporting by local officials quickly became an endemic problem. Ultimately, by 1961, Taiwan had largely found solutions to these problems, whereas the Chinese communist government found itself unable to contain fraud in its crop reporting system, leading to excessive grain extraction, and contributing greatly to the massive famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961).

To explain these different results, this paper looks at how both states attempted to create “information alliances” of people, resources, and ideas, that could connect the central state to the grassroots. Both states attempted to train local agents to be responsive to state goals, but during the 1950s, the Chinese government found immense difficulties in doing so. Similar to situation in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), local middlemen used the state’s requests for information as a means of bargaining, and achieving their own parochial goals, largely ignoring Maoist entreaties to be truthful and serve the nation. The government on Taiwan, on the other hand, was aided by historical legacies such as comprehensive cadastral records inherited from the Japanese, robust American aid, and incentive structures that tied local agents to state needs. Taiwan thus emerged as the more centralized state, at least in the area of information, whereas Chinese infrastructure remained largely decentralized and dysfunctional.