1、中文 4060 字 本科毕业论文外文翻译 The Transformation of the Agricultural Population and the Urbanisation Process in China Zhang Wenxian Jiang Xiaorong China has a population of over one billion population, 800 million of whom are farmers. It is because of this that China needs to be built into a socialist countr
2、y with its own characteristics. There is an old Chinese saying: a festival will be better with fewer people, but farming better with more hands. Due to the present condition of more people but less farmland, however, more hands may not necessarily benefit farming. If five people farm land just enoug
3、h for three, naturally, productivity decreases. In the course of the modernisation of agriculture, more and more labour will be increasingly replaced by machines. Great changes have taken place in the Second Brigade of the Fifth Branch of the National Friendship Farm in Heilongjiang Province since n
4、ew agricultural machinery was adopted in 1978. Initially there were 236 farmers and 15,000 mu(one mu=0.067 hectare) of cultivated land. Since new machines were introduced, farmland has expanded to 19,400 mu, but only 20 farmers are needed. That is to say, the area of farmland per farmer has increase
5、d from 63 mu to 971 mu. As a result, nearly 300 labourers have been freed from farming, some of whom went to reclaim wasteland, and the others to work on water conservation projects. Faced with the need to modernise agriculture, we can neither use large numbers of machines to push aside labour, nor
6、slow down the pace of modernisation because of the large population. This is the population problem associated with agricultural modernisation. In China, 80 per cent of new labourers are annually provided with jobs in the countryside. However, only in combination with the means of production can lab
7、ourers realise their productive capacity. So the first contradiction we face is that of more people farming less land. Between 1952 and 1978, the agricultural labour force increased by 73 per cent, but the farmland in 1977 decreased by eight per cent. The average farmland per labourer is now only fi
8、ve mu. Therefore, it is difficult to increase productivity with more and more labourers working on less and less farmland. Another contradiction is that of the large population with the mechanisation of agriculture. Since liberation, China has introduced more farm machines, including more than 600,0
9、00 large and medium-sized tractors. The total power of agricultural machinery has increased from 1.65 million horsepower in 1957 to 180 million horsepower at present. Since agricultural machinery and the agricultural labour force increased simultaneously, the result has been that either the manpower
10、 or machines were then left unused； alternatively, neither machines nor manpower were efficiently used. The third contradiction is between population growth and the improvement of population quality. Since liberation, grain output has increased continuously as well as the income in the countryside.
11、However, as most of the increased wealth was consumed by the new increases in population, the development of the agricultural economy and other undertakings has been seriously retarded. The state and the collective then have had no means, financial or otherwise, to develop culture and education in t
12、he countryside. Thus, labourers could not get enough education, and further training for farmers also became impossible. Moreover, there were not enough trained people to spread new agricultural technology and scientific methods of farming. This problem will certainly become more serious in the cour
13、se of modernising Chinese agriculture. The essential way to develop Chinas agriculture is to carry out modernisation, which implies that the division of work be more specialised, the technology more advanced, and new branches of work more developed. All of these are prerequisites for increased emplo
14、yment and the transformation of agricultural labour. The aims of the modernisation are to equip agriculture with modern scientific technology and modern industry, to use modern economic management, and to raise the utilisation ratio and the productivity of land and labour. The modernisation of agric
15、ulture may basically be divided into two categories: one is the modernisation of the tools of production, i.e. mechanisation of agriculture； the other is advances in the field of biochemical technology, such as the improvement of conditions and techniques of production. Modernisation should be accom
16、plished step by step. First, we should substitute agricultural machinery for heavy manual labour to free farmers from traditional modes practised for hundreds of years. This would mean transplanting rice shoots without bending over, and carrying loads without using shoulders. Second, we should use m
17、achinery to increase efficiency, especially in the busy seasons. Third, we should rely on machinery to promote the specialisation and socialisation of agricultural production. Therefore, we should not set agricultural mechanisation against rural employment, thus slowing down the pace of agricultural
18、 mechanisation. Rather, if we can settle the problem properly, mechanisation should not make things worse for surplus rural labour. Instead, it can promote the transformation of the latter, by developing agricultural industry and trades related to machinery maintenance. What counts is that neither w
19、orkers nor machines lie idle. As regards agriculture, the progress of biochemical technology is of more importance than that of mechanisation. The process of the development of other countries falls roughly into three types: labour-intensive, capital-intensive and technology-intensive. Most of the d
20、eveloped countries are of the capital-intensive type. This is because the average area of farmland per farmer before agricultural mechanisation was larger than in China, and the development of large-scale industry in these countries demanded a large labour force. Consequently, these countries took t
21、he road of capital-intensive agriculture, which relied on mechanisation to save labour. It is evident that the aim of agricultural modernisation in China is not chiefly to save labour. At present, we should not invest in large quantities of machines to replace labour. We should adopt advanced techno
22、logy to replace land, and fully develop biochemical techniques. Thus we can make the most of technical advances, absorb appropriate amounts of labour, and try to increase significantly the yield per unit area. In fact, even countries short of manpower also paid great attention to the application of biochemical technology in the course of agricultural mechanisation. We can see, from the history of agricultural development around the world, that sharp increases in
