It is well known that when the Guomindang (KMT) lost the minds and spirits of peasants it paved the way for the Chinese Communist Party’s eventual victory in 1949 after the decades-long political rivalry. However, this is not to say that the Guomindang disregarded the agrarian question or only protected the landlords’ interests. Rather, the Guomindang Nationalists expended greater energy toward improving the rural problem than the communists could have done. The major distinction was that the Guomindang placed their emphasis less on the class relationships between the “haves” and the “have-nots” and more on the question of overall agricultural productivity.

The rice breeding programs led by the Central Agricultural Experimental Institute (CAEI), founded in the inaugural year of the Nationalist Government in Nanjing, represent the Guomindang regime’s unsparing efforts to resolve the agricultural problem and reduce rural poverty in China. The CAEI spearheaded rice-breeding experiments, with the full support of the regime, and produced great numbers of new high-yield rice varieties in the following decades. However, this scientific achievement could not assure the market success of new rice varieties, because the marketability of rice was determined not by the improvement in productivity but by the rice-consuming public and its discriminating dietary preferences. Thus, in evaluating the success of the programme local and practical contexts must be taken into consideration. How did the CAEI’s agricultural scientists, mostly trained in agricultural programs in the United States and Japan, understand the rice quality question? How did the rice-eating public respond to the rice improving program drafted and put into practice by the Republic’s “best and brightest” agricultural scientists? By focusing the issue of marketability of rice, this paper illuminates the incommensurability between agricultural science in the elite institution and the rice-eating public in the marketplace.