Sino-American Joint Commission On Rural Reconstruction - The JCRR and The Economic Development of Taiwan

The JCRR and The Economic Development of Taiwan

With the impending defeat of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the JCRR moved to Taiwan, where under the leadership of Chiang Monlin it supervised major land reform, agricultural improvement, and education projects. Since the JCRR was funded from the United States and its salary scale was not governed by government pay schedules, the agency could offer higher pay than the government bureaucracy and attracted highly trained and capable staff. Commissioners included Shen Tsung-han, a graduate of Cornell College of Agriculture. Lee Teng-hui, the future President of the Republic of China and Nationalist Party Chairman, worked as an agricultural economist for the JCRR in the early 1950s.

From 1951 to 1965, around one third of US government aid to Taiwan was directed by the JCRR into agriculture, creating almost two thirds of net domestic capital formation. JCRR programs contributed directly to improving crop and animal stock, development of irrigation and flood control, soil improvement, rural credit programs and cooperatives, health programs, and birth control. The JCRR continued the strategy developed by the Rural Reconstruction Movement on the mainland of coordinating all these programs instead of running them independently one by one. Under the combined stimulus of the land reform and the agricultural development programs, production in agriculture increased at an average annual rate of 4 per cent from 1952 to 1959, greater than the growth in population, which was 3.6 percent. The JCRR is widely credited with creating the basis of agricultural prosperity which led to Taiwan's rapid economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s.

JCRR was combined with the Council of Agriculture when the United States ended the official foreign relation with the Republic of China in 1979.