BUCK, John Lossing.

£300 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Land Utilization in China. First edition, British issue. The author was professor of agricultural economics at the University of Nanking and conducted eight years of fieldwork in northern China in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1917, already in China, he married the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck."Many of Buck's recommendations - for improved extension, large conservancy works, and population control - were eventually implemented by the Chinese government, but only after the Communists, whom he detested, had taken power. Buck had placed his hopes on the Nationalist government, whose troubles in the Chinese countryside were of such a different and more serious nature than those of the federal government in rural America that Buck never saw them, despite his accumulation of 'data' from thousands of Chinese farms. A similar inability to see political reality, and how it limited technical agricultural improvements, afflicted the premier Chinese student of American agriculture" (Stross, p. 187).

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