20 years' development of super rice in China—The 20th anniversary of the super rice in China

20 years' development of super rice in China-The 20th anniversary of the super rice in China In 1996, the national key project on "China Super Rice Research" was launched by the Ministry of Agriculture, China to meet the rice demand of growing population (Chen et al. 2007).In 1998, the "Breeding for Super Hybrid Rice" Project proposed by Prof. Yuan Longping was approved by the Premier Fund Program, China (Yuan 1997).The "863" Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology, China also launched the "Super Hybrid Rice Research Project" in the same year, which symbolizes the beginning of China's super hybrid rice breeding (Chen et al. 2007).Since the project of "China Super Rice Research" was officially launched by the Ministry of Agriculture of China in 1996, China's super rice research has made great achievements in the past 20 years, although it was started later than other countries (Tang et al. 2017).China is in the leading position in basic research of rice yield potential, generation of elite germplasm with ideal plant type, and breeding approaches for both indica super hybrid rice cultivars in southern China and conventional japonica super rice cultivars in northern China (Huang et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2017).As of 2017, the Ministry of Agriculture of China has certified 166 super rice cultivars including 110 indica cultivars (66%) and 56 japonica cultivars (34%).Among the 110 indica cultivars, about 57 and 33% cultivars were developed by the three-line and two-line methods of hybrid breeding, respectively, and the rest 10% were conventional cultivars.Most of the 56 japonica super rice cultivars are conventional rice and account for about 84%, and the rest 16% were the three-line hybrid cultivars (Xu and Chen 2016).According to statistics, in 1996 when the Project of "China Super Rice Research" was officially launched, the national average rice yield was 6 211.5 kg ha -1 , which reached 6 892.5 kg ha -1 in 2015.The national average rice yield was increased by 681.0 kg ha -1 or 11% from 1996 to 2015.From 2006 to 2015, super rice cultivars were planted in total area of 70 million ha in China.In recent years, the annual planting area of super rice cultivars is maintained at about 9 million ha, which