In a book assessing the development of China during the People's Republic era, it is of interest to know how well agriculture has performed and the role that it has played in the development process. Has China produced food and other commodities that have contributed to China's growth? Has it been successful supplying labor to the off farm sector? How has agriculture contributed to the rise in rural incomes and growth, in general? In short, one of the overall goals of this chapter is to document the performance of the agricultural sector and use the criteria of Johnston and Mellor to assess how well the agricultural sector has done.

This chapter, however, seeks to go further than describing the achievements and shortfalls of China's agricultural economy; we also aim to identify the factors, both domestic policies and economic events as well as foreign initiatives, that have induced the performance that we observe. To create an agricultural economy that can feed the population, supply industry with labor and raw materials, earn foreign exchange and produce income for those the live and work in the sector and allow them to be a part of the nation's structural transformation requires a combination of massive investments and well-managed policy effort. The process can only proceed smoothly if an environment is created within which producers can generate output efficiently and earn a profit that can contribute to household income. Policies are required to facilitate the development of markets or other effective institutions of exchange. Although the sector is expected to contribute to the nation's development and allow for substantial extractions of labor and other resources, large volumes of investment also are needed. Investment in education, training, health and social services are needed to increase the productivity of the labor force when they arrive in the factories. Investment is needed in agriculture to improve productivity to keep food prices low, allow farmers to adopt new technologies and farming practice as markets change, and to raise incomes of those that are still in farming. Investment is needed in technology, land, water and other key inputs that are in short supply. In this chapter we seek to point out both policies that have facilitated the performance of the agricultural sector and those that have constrained it.

China has been highly successful in electrifying rural areas in the past half century. Institutional structure and its reform are important for investment and, therefore, development of rural electrification. Over time, there have been three major institutional changes initiated by the central government; When the People's Republic was founded in 1949, it was short of capital, technology and management professionals to promote rural electrification, so rural electricity had a separate administrative system from the urban areas.

From 1949 to 1977, China established a comprehensive vertical system of rural electricity administration under strict central planning. At the end of the 1970s, with the adoption of economic reform policy, the central government handed over the management of the local electricity system to local government. County level has proved the most effective implementation unit for both planning and project implementation of the rural electricity system. From 1998 to 2002, the central government has been separating local electricity supply from local governments to facilitate the commercial operation of the utility market. After 2002, the rural electricity system was merged with the urban system, forming an integrated national electricity administrative system in China.

The Northeast Asian region has witnessed phenomenal economic growth and the spread of democratization in recent decades, yet wounds from past wrongs - committed in times of colonialism, war, and dictatorship - still remain. Of all the countries in the northeast region coping with historical injustice, the Republic of Korea has the rare distinction of confronting internal and external historical injustices simultaneously, both as a victim and as a perpetrator. Korea's experience highlights the major forces shaping the reckoning and reconciliation process, such as democratization, globalization, regional integration, and nationalism, in addition to providing valuable insight into the themes of historical injustice and reconciliation within the region.

Although there is no universal formula for reconciliation, the contributors examine the reaction of society from the perspective of citizens' groups, NGOs, and victim-activist groups toward such issues as enforced labor, ,comfort women, and internal injustices committed during the wars to foster a better understanding of the past and thus aid in future reconciliation between other Northeast Asian countries.

This paper was discussed at the Global Justice workshop on December 15, 2006.

Excerpt from page four of Sebastiano Maffettone's "Universal Duty and Global Justice":

We could uphold that, as a rule, cosmopolitans subscribe to the global distributive justice model, reducing the socio-economic rights to a corollary of their theorems on justice. Statists, instead, always as a rule, fully reject the idea of a global distributive justice and, sometimes, even the possibility that the socio-economic human rights might have considerable soundness and effectiveness. In short, this third option of mine recognizes that, in this historical time, a comprehensive ideal of global distributive justice - founded on the domestic distributive justice model - is not yet theoretically justifiable, although it entails a lower degree of skepticism that the statist thesis about its progressive establishment. However, my thesis dwells above all on the fact that a broad and convinced interpretation of socio-economic rights may do much to lessen social injustice in today's globalized world, being sufficientist in the way above defined, starting from a reduction of extreme poverty and, over time, enabling peoples to decide their fate. It may be affirmed that this thesis, moving our attention from relative inequality to radical deprivations, is based on a more modest ideal than global equality, an ideal inspired to 'weak global distributive justice.'

In my opinion, this intermediate option meets another requirement of some significance, at least for a political theorist with a liberal background. Cosmopolitans have a propensity for a radical moralization of international politics, whose institutions are considered at the service of their favorite moral ideals. Statists, on the contrary, tend to cut to a minimum the space of morals in international politics. I believe that, for a liberal, both positions should prove scarcely convincing. This is the reason why I have called this third position of mine - based on a weak ideal of global justice and being neither moralistic nor skeptical - 'liberal conception.'

About the Author

Sebastiano Maffettone is professor of political philosophy at Luiss University, Rome. He specializes in political philosophy, ethics, bioethics, business ethics, philosophy of international relations, environmental ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, history of philosophy, and analytic and continental philosophy.