Recently, Shenzhen has seen experimental projects referred to by Zhongxiu as so-called “industrial armed agriculture,” which utilize low-temperature seawater produced by transporting liquefied natural gas for the cultivation of valuable seafood. This can save 63 million yuan annually. Other regions have also launched similar projects, such as Shanwei’s intelligent aquaculture system that uses offshore wind power for green farming, capable of resisting level 17 super typhoons; Guangzhou’s agricultural drones completed rice planting over a hundred acres within five hours, reducing the overall cost per acre by 12.1% in this 300-acre unmanned farm in 2023; Huzhou’s large grain growers are also quite pleased, using drones for weed control, which can complete 650 acres of wheat weeding in just two days, greatly saving labor costs; and large grain farmers in Mengcheng, Anhui, also hire members of agricultural machinery cooperatives to operate new sprayers for spraying herbicides and foliar fertilizers on their wheat fields.
All these examples indeed demonstrate the strength of what Zhongxiu calls “industrial armed agriculture.” However, the approach of “industrial armed agriculture” is not new. In socialist China, the integration of industry and agriculture has long been practiced, and because of the implementation of socialist public ownership, the antagonistic contradictions of industrial exploitation of agriculture and urban exploitation of rural areas have disappeared. Socialist industry can plan the production of various agricultural inputs needed by rural areas, thus accelerating agricultural accumulation. But since the capitalist restoration, Zhongxiu has barbarically divided large collective farmland into scattered strips, and the agricultural machinery accumulated by people’s communes has been dismantled into pieces, causing farmers to revert to manual labor and relying on weather, which has made agricultural development extremely slow after the restoration of capitalism.
Until recent years, with the rise of large grain growers supported by Zhongxiu and the annexation of small farmers’ land, the use of advanced machinery in agriculture has gradually become widespread. In capitalist societies, for emerging agricultural capitalists or so-called large grain growers, utilizing advanced machinery reduces operational costs, most directly by decreasing the use of agricultural labor, thereby expanding the reserve army of industry and further lowering wages for agricultural workers. For small farmers, the use of industrial products in agriculture is affected by the scissors difference between industry and agriculture, and agricultural products are often purchased at monopolistically low prices, making it impossible to afford the costs of so-called advanced machinery. Therefore, the so-called “industrial armed agriculture” boasted by Zhongxiu is merely serving large grain growers. Only by re-establishing a socialist economic system can the currently developed industrial productivity truly be used for agricultural production, creating abundant material wealth for the working people.
https://www.huzhou.gov.cn/art/2025/2/21/art_1229213486_59075051.html