China's persistent smallholder farming structure has emerged as a critical constraint on agricultural modernization. This study adopts a farm management perspective, using farmers as the main micro-level analytical unit, to explore viable paths for small farmers in China to overcome their structural difficulties. The core contradiction that exists in the Ministry of Agriculture of the People‘s Republic of China—the “small farmer’s dilemma”—has the property of four interrelated structural dimensions: insufficient cropland by household units, fragmentation of land holdings leading to a significant increase in production costs, acceleration of land de-agriculture, and systematic failure of land mobility policies. International comparative analyses show that substantial breakthroughs in agricultural modernization, whether state-led structural reforms (Japan), normative land market integration (France), or market-based agricultural integration mechanisms (USA), have always been accompanied by a continuous decline in the number of farmers. Based on these findings, this paper proposes a three-stage institutional framework that our country will jointly advance, including short-term revitalization of the land transfer market; medium-term deepening of land property rights and household registration reforms to establish a "push-pull" exit mechanism; and long-term restructuring of agricultural production entities to achieve sustainable operator renewal.
Yujia Huo (2026) studied this question.