Abstract:
This paper investigated the summer and autumn crops grown in Henan Province in the Qing Dynasty respectively. According to the results, it was thought that Henan Province maintained an advantageous place in provisionsbased grain production in China’s traditional agricultural areas and that each farmer’s family properly arranged its structure of plantation depending on the reasoning of survival. This situation remained till the late Qing Dynasty when such commercial crops as oil plants, tobacco, cotton started to diverse the plantation of provisions crops under the stimulation of multiple elements, such as the rise of market price, improvement of communications and transportation and innovations of agricultural technology. Thus occurred the real situation of “vying provisions crops for land”. However, this just expressed the Chinese farmer’s reasoning in his choice of economic behaviour, which happened to be one of leading phenimena in the course of China’s industrialization.
