A REVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHINESE AGRICULTURAL MECHANIZATION

Taking the style of management as a criterion, the authors of this paper divided the course of the development of Chinese agriultural mechanization into three periods covering the fifties and the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties respectively. They are the periods of mechanization managed mainly by the state, by the collective and by the household.During the course of more than thirty years, the authors stated that tne Chinese agricultural mechanization had obtained the following big achievements. The agricultural productive force been strengthened; a rather big scale of agricultural machinery industry and the central and regional organizations of agricultural mechanization services been built up; a big amount of techenical personnels on agricultural mechanization been trained. Also accumulated the following experiences:"necessity" is the motive force to develope agricultural mechenization; the development of agricultural mechanization must be consistent with the level of the national economy; the manager of the agricultural business must have the right to determine how to develope his farm mechanization; commodities of agricultural machinery must be complete in varieties and satisfactory in services as required; the better style of agricultural mechanization management is to operate by the peasant household and to provide services for them. Also suffered from a lot of mistakes and lessons: an one-sided view to understanding of agricultural mechanization; the influence of the Left Thinking; the diversity and duplication of the distribution of agricultural machinery industry; management mainly by administrative approches; neglection on the "software" of agricultural mechanization both in reseach and in education.