Brian Palmer是美国知名网络杂志Slate的首席讲解员，也是《华盛顿邮报》的专栏作家。4月2日，他在Slate发表文章《中国为何不再有饥荒？——摆脱两千年饥荒的两种对立解释》，肯定基础设施建设等成就对中国农业奇迹的巨大贡献，而将传统解释，称为“像自由市场哲学家米塞斯写的一个童话”。

1958年10月，北京新桥宾馆。员工们在宾馆大院内建起一个简陋的炼钢炉。

观察者网翻译全文如下：

散文家杰拉德早就说过，美国的历史总有一天会沦为宪法、爵士乐和棒球。如果有人在30年前提出中国历史的同样总结，这三样很可能是长城、毛泽东思想和饥荒。在过去的2000年里，中国几乎每年都遭受饥荒。在始于1876年的两年饥荒中，严重干旱杀死了多达1300万中国人。1927年的饥荒夺走了600万人的生命。在1929年，1939年和1942年也有显著饥荒……中国饥荒的原因各不相同，从旱情下囤积到在食品采购政策上的可怕错误，这项错误从种植者嘴边取走食物，导致死亡集中在传统农业区。

在中国历史上的多数时候，饥荒也只是比正常状况更严重些。近至上世纪70年代末，中国人口的30%为营养不良。谷物提供了中国人绝大多数的热量。5岁以下的孩子每3个人中就有1个生长发育迟缓。

简直难以置信，今天的中国已经变得多么不同。到2005年，只有不到十分之一的中国人营养不良。在过去的三十年，肉类消费量几乎增加了一倍，水果消费量增加了两倍多。出生体重上升，今天和20世纪70年代相比，6岁儿童的身高平均增长2英寸（观察者网注：约5厘米）。先放下一会儿这些难以置信的事实，中国用不足世界10%的耕地喂养了占世界20%的人口，还有充足的剩余食物出口。食物为中国奇迹推波助澜。

中国是如何从艰难生存发展到当今的年年有余粮？个中存在两个长短不一的故事版本，其差别具有重要意义——尤其是对美国人。

简短的版本读起来就像自由市场哲学家路德维希·冯·米塞斯写的一个童话。中国农民在毛泽东领导下进行了组织，土地集体所有。不顾市场信号或个人的特殊技能，集体的管理者做出种植决定和指派工作。在收获时，集体以固定价格出售其作物的一部分给国家，然后基于工作时数将剩余的分给农民。努力工作改变个体命运的农民非常少，无人勤劳耕种，农场效率不高。

在1978年一切都变了。小岗村集体暗自同意去走资本主义道路。他们的产量飙升得厉害，抓住了保守的中共当局的注意。小岗村这些异见者担心他们会被处决。然而，北京非但没有惩罚小岗村这一英雄集体，反而认识到了他们的天才，并采取改革。中国各地的农户取得了小块土地的准所有权，并获得了更多的自由在公开市场上出售他们的收成。包产到户的变化创造了对积极工作的激励，和对未来生产力的投资。从此，每个人都过上了红红火火的生活。

你经常可以在媒体上听到这个版本的故事。美国国家公共广播电台把小岗村的秘密协议描绘成解放5亿中国人摆脱贫困的催化剂。中国科学院的黄季焜和斯坦福大学经济学家斯科特·罗泽尔在给世界粮食计划署的报告中写道，改革的影响“已经不能更戏剧性”，“崛起于农村经济的活力是中国经济改革其余部分的触发器之一。”

中国奇迹的资本主义童话版本对世界其他地区有一个相当简单的教训：创建正确的激励，以勤奋和人类的聪明才智便可以解决所有其他问题。“我们都暗暗竞争，”一个小岗村农民告诉美国国家公共广播电台。“每个人都想生产上超过别人。”当人们谈论这个版本的中国奇迹，其含义是，资本主义本身就是奇迹。

这个故事有很多真相。1970至1978年，农业生产力上升为每年微薄的2.7%。在接下来五年的改革中，增速攀升至7.1%，国民生产总值也飙升。改革鼓励农民家庭的个别成员采取了非农就业，农村地区呈现了多元化，家庭收入得到了提升。

然而，故事的全貌远比资本主义童话更复杂。这包括深谋远虑的规划、巨额基础设施投资和国家补贴等。它不会给你西方哲学胜利了的温情脉脉和沾沾自喜。但你也该不妨一听。

事实上，1978年之前，中国政府就意识到集体农业生产效率低，并实施一系列将在数年后奏效的变革。50年代开始，中央政府就致力于将中国的耕作方式带入20世纪。在彻底改造农业科技前，中国仅有18%的农田得到灌溉。农业“去集体化”的十多年前，中国就开始大力投资水利基础设施，如今，中国超过一半的农民都在水田内耕作，使中国成为世界上灌溉最集中的农业经济体之一。与此同时，中国加快对高产粮食、水果和蔬菜新品种的研究。许多新品种直到上世纪70年代后期即将实施资本主义式改革时才研发成功。

另外，中国政府增加用于收购农民粮食的资金，增幅为25%。仅此一项政策就使中国农民大幅增收。许多农民将增收资金用于购买当时大规模进入市场的化肥，这就进一步提高了农业生产率。

幸运也是中国农业激增的一个重要原因。从1982年起，中国碰到了一些史上最好的耕种气候。忽略这点就人为高估了80年代初的生产力，也夸大了基础设施投资和资本主义改革的积极效果，除非你认为是上帝保佑了资本主义改革。当气候转而恶化，之后几年生产率减速了。

学者们继续争论中国农业的转变多大程度上是由于资本主义的激励结构，有多少是早期投资的结果，又有多少是气候造成。有人说结束集体耕作占了生产力提高近四分之三的功劳，也有人说不超过三分之一。

将中国的粮食革命视为童话未尝不可，但我们必须正确理解这个故事的寓意。改变激励机制并非把任何落后经济体转变为全球巨人的魔法。基础设施投资、研发和将资金放入劳动者的口袋也能创造奇迹。

（英文原载Slate网站，原标题：Why Does China Not Have Famines Anymore？；观察者网孙珷/译。翻页请看英文原文）

Why Does China Not Have Famines Anymore？

By Brian Palmer

Essayist Gerald Early said that the history of the United States will one day be reduced to the Constitution, jazz, and baseball. If someone had made the same summary of Chinese history 30 years ago, the trio would likely have been the Great Wall, Maoism, and famine. Over the past 2,000 years, China has suffered almost one famine per year. Severe drought killed as many as 13 million Chinese in the two-year famine beginning in 1876. The 1927 famine killed as many as 6 million. There were significant famines in 1929, 1939, and 1942. The Great Famine, which began in 1958 and lasted three years, was probably the deadliest famine in human history, killing between 30 and 45 million people. The causes of Chinese famines have varied, ranging from drought to hoarding to Mao Zedong’s horrifically misguided food procurement policy, which took food from the mouths of the people who grew it, concentrating deaths in traditional farming areas.

For most of China’s history, famine was just an extreme version of the normal state of affairs. As recently as the late 1970s, 30 percent of China’s population was undernourished. Grains supplied the overwhelming majority of their calories. One in 3 children under the age of 5 had stunted growth.

It’s almost hard to believe how different today’s China has become. By 2005, fewer than 1 in 10 Chinese people were undernourished. Consumption of meat nearly doubled and fruit consumption more than tripled in the past three decades. Birth weights have risen, and the average 6-year-old child is two inches taller today than in the 1970s. (Pause on that incredible fact for a moment.) China feeds 20 percent of the world’s people using less than 10 percent of arable land, with plenty of food left over to export. Food has fueled the Chinese miracle.

How did China go from barely surviving to a nation with a food surplus? There’s a short version and a long version, and the difference really matters—even for Americans.

The short version reads something like a fairy tale written by free-market philosopher Ludwig von Mises. Chinese farmers under Mao were organized into collectives that worked common land. The manager of the collective made planting decisions and assigned duties, paying no heed to market signals or the particular skills of individuals. At harvest time, the collective sold a portion of its crop to the state at fixed prices, then divided up the remainder among the farmers based on the number of hours worked. Hard work changed an individual farmer’s fortunes very little, so no one worked very hard and the farms weren’t very productive.

Everything changed in 1978. A collective in the village of Xiaogang secretly agreed to go capitalist. The group’s output surged so dramatically that it caught the attention of the evil communist authorities. The Xiaogang dissidents feared they would be executed. Rather than punish the heroic Xiaogang collective, however, Beijing recognized their genius and adopted reforms. Farming families across China took quasi-ownership of plots of land and were granted more freedom to sell their yields on the open market. That single change created incentives to work hard and make investments for future productivity. And everyone lived prosperously ever after.

You hear this version of the story quite often in the media. NPR portrayed this secret agreement in Xiaogang as the catalyst that lifted 500 million Chinese out of poverty. Jikun Huang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Stanford economist Scott Rozelle wrote in a report for the World Food Programme that the impact of the reforms “could not have been more dramatic” and the “rise in the vibrancy of the rural economy was one of the triggers of the rest of the economic reforms in China.”

The capitalist fairy tale version of the Chinese miracle has a rather simple lesson for the rest of the world: Create the right incentives, and hard work and human ingenuity will solve all the other problems. “We all secretly competed,” a Xiaogang farmer told NPR. “Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person.” When people talk about this version of the Chinese miracle, the implication is that capitalism itself is miraculous.

There’s a lot of truth to this tale. Agricultural productivity rose at a meager 2.7 percent per year from 1970 to 1978. In the five years following the reforms, the growth rate surged to 7.1 percent. Overall GDP also spiked. The reforms encouraged individual members of farm families to take up non-agricultural employment, diversifying and lifting household incomes in rural areas.

The full story is far more complicated than a simple capitalist fairy tale, though. It involves prudent planning, heavy investment in infrastructure, and state subsidies. It doesn’t give you that warm, self-satisfied feeling of Western philosophical triumph. But you ought to hear it anyway.

In fact, Chinese authorities recognized the poor productivity of their farming collectives long before 1978 and set in motion a series of changes that would take years to pay off. Beginning in the 1950s, the central government worked to bring Chinese farming practices into the 20th century. Just 18 percent of Chinese farmland was under irrigation at the beginning of the technological overhaul. Heavy investment in water infrastructure began more than a decade before de-collectivization. Today, more than one-half of Chinese farmers work irrigated fields, making the country one of the most intensively watered farming economies on the planet. At the same time as the investments in irrigation began, China accelerated research on new varieties of grains, fruits, and vegetables that could, when paired with improved irrigation, produce more food on less land. Many of these varieties didn’t become available until just before the capitalist reforms of the late 1970s.

Chinese central planners can also take credit for some of the investments made by Chinese farmers themselves. Around the time of the reform, the Chinese government increased the amount it paid farmers for their crops by around 25 percent. In a single year, Chinese farm income surged massively due almost exclusively to government policy. Many of the farmers put some of their capital windfall toward the purchase of chemical fertilizers, which flooded the Chinese market around the same time, further enhancing productivity.

Sheer luck played a major part in the incredible Chinese agricultural surge as well. Beginning in 1982, China saw some of the best years of farming weather in recorded history. Unless you think that was God’s way of endorsing the capitalist reforms, that change artificially inflated early 1980s productivity and magnified the positive effects of both the infrastructure investments and the capitalist reforms. Productivity decelerated a few years later, when the weather took a turn for the worse.

Scholars continue to argue over how much of China’s agricultural turnaround was due to the capitalist incentive structure, how much resulted from earlier investments, and how much was a trick of the weather. Some say the end of collective farming accounted for nearly three-quarters of the improvements in productivity, while others say it was responsible for no more than one-third.

It’s fine to treat China’s food revolution as a fairy tale. The changes were so dramatic that it’s hard not to. But let’s make sure we get the moral of this story correct. Changing the incentives isn’t a magic trick that can turn any lagging economy into a global juggernaut. Investment in infrastructure, research and development, and putting money into the pockets of workers work wonders as well. And a little sunshine doesn’t hurt, either.