Rice Farming vs Wheat Farming in China
Introduction
This post discusses how rice and wheat farming would produce different outcomes on the culture and psychology in of the Chinese people. For most of Chinese history, the majority of people lived in a rural agrarian society. Today, over 300 million of a total of 1.4 billion Chinese are still farmers and agriculture remains a large influence on the lives of many people. Professor Thomas Talhelm from the University of Chicago and his associates produced a paper in 2014 arguing that rice and wheat farming produced difference outcomes in culture, psychology, and eventually determined political institutions. Their research was conducted in China as the country has a convenient north-south split between its rice and wheat producing regions. Their results found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north.
Agricultural History of China
To understand how rice and wheat farming could impact Chinese society, we first require a rough understanding of agricultural development in China. Primitive agriculture began in the Loess Plateau of the Yellow River Basin. Primitive agriculture is what the name suggests, where farmers practice subsistence farming on small patches of land with the utilisation of simple tools like a hoe and scythe, it encouraged a people to be sedentary as it removed their need to constantly travel to find food. As generations pass, populations increase, settlements grow, and agricultural practices improve such as the saving of cropland and water resource management. A cumulative effect on societal and subsequent agricultural development occurred and primitive agriculture evolved into traditional agriculture.
Traditional agriculture is characterised by the use of fertiliser and intensive cultivation. Crop yields per unit of land area is continuously improved with the recycling of nutrients and the maintenance of soil fertility. Methods such as crop rotation are used, where farmers keep certain fields fallow to restore its nutrients. Traditional agriculture in China stands out for prompting the construction of many large-scale irrigation and water conservation projects. Famous ones being the Du Jiang Yan Dam 都江堰 (256 BCE) in modern Sichuan province, the Karezin 井渠 (Jingqu) system in modern day Xinjiang province, where underground water is brought out to turn an area of desert into oasis, and the Grand Canal, an inland waterway stretching past eight provinces of China. The Grand Canal provided irrigation by adjusting water distribution and a highway for the transport of goods. Farmers also made intensive use of cast iron tools and beasts of burden to pull ploughs.
Until the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), Chinese agricultural production centred on the Yellow River Basin. However, incessant warfare in the north and the spread of irrigation works down south shifted the agricultural centre of China southwards. By the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River became the new agricultural centre of China.
Rice and Wheat Farming
Although China is the largest agricultural producer in the world today, only 10% of its land area can be cultivated. Limited space for farming has always been a persistent problem in Chinese history. It is also the cause of chronic food shortages and famine. As agriculture becomes more constrained, society must optimise its grain planting structure by ensuring that the right regions produce the right crop for maximum output. Therefore, throughout Chinese history the two most produced crop in China are rice and wheat, grains that are both solid source of staple foods and grow from relatively high output crops.
Rice Farming
Rice is China's most important crop and raised on 25% of its cultivated land today. It is extremely labour intensive. Rice farming can be broken down into three stages: land preparation, planting, and harvesting. Firstly, the land must be prepared by flooding a field with water from pre-constructed irrigation channels. Next, farmers will plough the land to remove the previous harvest and weeds. Lastly, they will till the field to smooth it out. Next they will level it using a water buffalo to make sure the field is flat and water evenly distributed.
When the field is ready, the farmers either seed the field or transplant seedlings from a nursery. Before this process, the farmers would have grown rice seedlings in a nursery. These seedlings are grown to around three weeks old in 2-3cm of water and uprooted to be arranged in neat rows in rice fields. The growing process starts here and this is also the stage where rice fields resemble its picturesque quality. Lastly, farmers will spread fertiliser and regularly weed the fields. At the same time, some fields will be left to fallow for their nutrients to be restored.
Once rice crops have a golden yellow colour, farmers will drain the water and harvest the crop using sickles and stack them up in an open field. Then they will thresh the rice by knocking it against a slanted wooden board to separate the husk from the grain. These grains are then collected from the ground and are ready for cooking. It is important to note that water management is crucial at all stages of the rice farming process. These irrigation networks cover the entire network of rice fields. Its construction, management, and maintenance will take the effort of an entire village. Individual peasant efforts to plant rice for his family will be too inefficient and lead to starvation.
Wheat Farming
Wheat farming, while labour intensive, is still relatively easy and less intensive when compared to rice farming. It is the second most-prevalent grain crop in China and the process of wheat farming is slightly more straightforward than rice. Firstly, land preparation involves ploughing and tilling the soil and removing any weeds in the field. The land at this stage is dry compared to rice fields that are usually under centimetres of water. Then seeds are sown in the wheat field and the farmer must regularly weed and water the crop. In dry areas, an irrigation system is necessary to provide water to the crop. In monsoon areas, rain-fed wheat farming is possible. Despite requiring water like rice, it typically takes around 70% more water to produce 1 kilogram of rice compared to 1 kilogram of wheat, when all other factors are kept constant. Wheat is then harvest in late spring or summer and farmers will cut the wheat crop with a long scythe. Lastly, the crop is threshed and winnowed to separate the seed from straw. The seeds are then collected and ready to be made into flour and other products.
Agricultural Regions of China
The Agricultural Regions in China help us understand factors that encourage either rice or wheat farming. First split China into East and West to find out how water levels, geography, and temperature is much more suitable in the East for agriculture. West China is a dry mountainous zone unsuitable for farming but good for rearing animals like sheep and horses. East China has more areas in temperate, sub-tropical, and tropical zones with higher precipitation. It also has a higher prevalence of level terrain and fertile soil. Lastly, temperature in East China is more moderate and suitable for farming. In East China, agricultural areas can typically be split into three regions, the Northeast Plain, the North China Plain, and the Yangtze River region.
Next, we split East China into North and South to understand the split between rice and wheat. Scholars label this line the Qinling-Huaihe Line (秦岭淮河线). Rice is predominantly grown in the South of China because of two main reasons: abundant water and warmer temperatures. Growing rice requires a high amount of water and a hot climate. Southernmost provinces such as Guangxi, Guangdong, Hainan, and Fujian have ideal conditions where farmers can engage in double cropping of rice, where rice is harvested twice with the same piece of land in a calendar year. Southern Chinese eat a lot of rice as part of their diet, as well as other rice derived foods such as rice vinegar, rice flour, rice noodles, and rice wine.
Wheat is grown predominantly in the Northern areas. Wheat is prevalent as it is an environmentally resistant plant. Based on the planting season, wheat can be divided into two types: winter wheat and spring wheat. Winter wheat is wheat sown in the fall, that grows through winter, and harvested in the summer and accounts for 90% of all wheat grown. While spring wheat is being sown in the spring and harvested in the fall. Winter wheat is mainly distributed in the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain （黄淮海平原）in Henan, Anhui, Hubei, and Jiangsu provinces. Spring wheat is grown in areas that have cold winter temperatures such as Inner Mongolia, the Guanzhong Plain （关中平原） in Shanxi province, the Hexi Corridor（河西走廊）of Gansu province, and several oases in Xinjiang province.
The agricultural splits in China makes it a fitting test case for researching differences between rice and wheat. Furthermore, China is more ethnically, politically, and more culturally unified than Europe or Africa. The same regions have had the same agricultural crop and political institutions for thousands of years. Therefore, it is convenient for researchers to investigate whether agricultural crops have a significant impact on culture.
The Rice Theory
The Rice Theory is an extension of Subsistence Style Theory. The Subsistence Style Theory is that certain forms of subsistence such as farming require higher functional interdependence than other forms such as herding. For example, rice paddy fields require significant amount of water and societies must cooperate intensively to properly manage water resources. Over time, these societies become more interdependent. On the other hand, societies that do not have to cooperate as intensively become more individualistic.
The Rice Theory separates rice from other crops covered in the Subsistence Style Theory and argues that rice leads to a different cultural outcome. As mentioned before, rice farming requires high amounts of cooperation between families to manage water irrigation and the construction of these irrigation systems. Farming rice also requires at least twice the number of hours as wheat. A Chinese farming guide in the 1600s advised people that "If one is short of labour power, it is best to grow wheat" (Elvin, 1982) Individuals would be unlikely to be able to farm a large enough plot of rice to support a family by themselves, and self-reliance would mean starvation.
The massive labour requirements meant that farmers have to form cooperative labour exchanges. Farmers must also coordinate their planting dates so different families harvest at different times, allowing them to help in each other's fields. These labour exchanges occurred during transplanting and harvesting, which needed to be done in a short window of time. In economic terms, rice paddies make cooperation more valuable for farmers. This encourages rice farmers to form tight relationships based on reciprocity and avoid behaviours that create conflict.
The Rice Theory can explain East Asia's persistent culture of interdependence. China has a rice-wheat split, but Japan and South Korea are complete rice cultures. Japan and Korea's rice legacies could explain why they are still much less individualistic than China and other similarly wealthy countries.
Wheat in comparison, is much easier to grow. It does not always require irrigation as farmers can rely on rainfall for sufficient watering. Hence less coordination is required with their neighbours. Planting and harvesting wheat also takes only half as much time as rice. This results in farmers being able to look after their own plots without relying on their neighbours.
Rice vs Wheat Outcomes on Chinese Culture
Professor Thomas Talhelm and his associates propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world.
They tested 1,162 Han Chinese participants in six locations and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. China’s rice regions have several markers of East Asian culture: more holistic thought, more interdependent self-construal’s, and lower divorce rates. However, the wheat-growing north looked more culturally like the West, with more analytic thought, individualism, and higher divorce rates.
To Compare with Western Societies
There is research evidence that people in the West tend to be psychologically unusual when compared to the majority of other societies. These people are generally Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic, or WEIRD, in short. They are also highly individualistic, analytically minded, and generally see themselves as more independent from others and more self-sufficient. These traits encourage them to invest in new relationships outside their tribal or religious groups in contrast to most societies around the world. They also avoid embedding themselves in dense networks of kin and family which they depend for cooperation, security, and personal identity.
For those who come from a more collectivistic society, it is challenging to understand the worldview of a person from an individualistic society. When approaching problems, individualistic societies favour the use of analytical reasoning to break things into their constituent parts into rule-based categories. While collectivistic societies favour holistic approaches by focusing on relationships and interactions between objects and people. Evidence suggests that individualistic societies exercise higher rates of innovation, novelty, and creativity. A view that is pretty consistent with the state of the world today.
Talhelm also provided evidence that less dependence on rice is associated with more successful patents for new inventions. This is consistent with the idea that rice farming societies are less innovative then wheat farming societies.
Problems with The Rice Theory
However, why would a European society for example, have greater individualism and more analytical thinking when China also engages in Wheat farming? An explanation exists that Han Chinese were swarmed with northern invasions by nomadic people and were drove to southern rice paddy regions, where state-level political and legal institutions developed in accordance with the needs of governing a rice farming society.
There are also unresolved questions with the rice theory. For example, future rice studies can test whether water irrigation is central to the cultural effects of rice by comparing paddy rice with dryland rice, which grows rice without water irrigation.
Admittedly, agriculture is only part of the story of cultural evolution. Culture arises from a rich and complex interplay of ecology, institutions, and psychology. However, it could play an important role because long after ecological causes have become irrelevant, these cultural psychologies and institutions would continue to influence the formation of new institutions and rates of innovation. Wheat farming could explain the origins of a WEIRD society but perhaps only in combination of other factors.
The Rice Culture in the Future
The modernization hypothesis argues that, as societies become wealthier, more educated, and capitalistic, they become more individualistic and analytical. But this theory has difficulty explaining why Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong are persistently collectivistic despite per-capita GDPs higher than that of the European Union. There is also the question of how long rice culture will persist after the majority of people stop farming rice. There is evidence that US regions settled by Scottish and Irish herders have higher rates of violence, even though most locals stopped herding long ago. This is one example of how subsistence style can shape culture long after people have stopped relying on that subsistence style. In the case of China, only time will tell.
References
Tahelm Thomas, X. Zhang, S. Oishi, C. Shimin, D. Duan, X. Lan, and S. Kitayama. “Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture.” Science vol 344, no.6184:603-608.
Hartmann, Rudi and Wang, Jing Ai. 2014. A Comparative Geography of China and the U.S. Springer.
Elvin M. 1982. In "The Chinese Agricultural Economy" by Barker R., Sinha R., Rose B. Westview, Boulder, CO. 13–35.
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