Marie Michael Library

Co-operative Organization in Rural Canada and the Agricultural Co-operative Movement in China: A Comparison

Shufang, Zhu; Apedaile, Leonard

This paper is about using co-operatives to continue China's rural economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s into the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. We argue that lessons drawn from the Chinese reforms and the Canadian co-operative experience can help to carry on the economic reform and modernization or rural China. The co-operative model is an obvious choice for addressing these issues, being a proven option as a cohesive organizational structure for agricultural development in many industrialized countries. This paper compares co-operatives in Canada and China by examining co-operative concepts, principles, and practices in both countries. It also briefly reviews the historical development of co-operatives in Canada and the socialist transformation of agriculture in China.