Agriculturalism in China

Description

"Agriculturalism, also known as the School of Agrarianism, the School of Agronomists, the School of Tillers, and in Chinese as the Nongjia, was an early agrarian Chinese philosophy that advocated peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism. The Agriculturalists believed that Chinese society should be modeled around that of the early sage king Shen Nong, a folk hero which was portrayed in Chinese literature as "working in the fields, along with everyone else, and consulting with everyone else when any decision had to be reached."They encouraged farming and agriculture and taught farming and cultivation techniques, as they believed that agricultural development was the key to a stable and prosperous society. Agriculturalism has significantly influenced Chinese thought, and has been viewed as an essence of the Chinese identity."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculturalism)

More information

General articles about agriculture and its environmental impact in China:

M. Elvin (1998) ‘The environmental legacy of imperial China’, China Quarterly 156: 733-756 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741000051328

M. Elvin (2001) ‘Three thousand years of unsustainable growth: China’s environment from archaic times to present’, in Environmental History in the Pacific World, London: Routledge (copy on Moodle)

X. Jiao, N. Mongol and F. Zhang (2018) ‘The transformation of agriculture in China: Looking back and looking forward, Journal of Integrative Agriculture 17(4):755-764, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2095-3119(17)61774-X

D.H. Perkins (2013) Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1968, New York: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315082776