About Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences

Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences

Overview and Mandate

The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, known in Chinese as Zhongguo Nongye Kexueyuan, is China's national comprehensive agricultural research organisation. Established on 1 March 1957 and headquartered at 12 Zhongguancun South Street in Beijing's Haidian District, it works under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. The academy's mandate covers basic research, applied research and new-technology development for agriculture, and its work is organised around China's food security and the official framing of the 'Three Rural Issues': agriculture, rural communities and farmers. It is routinely described as the national team for agricultural science and technology innovation in China.

CAAS is also one of the country's principal agricultural information institutions. Through caas.cn it disseminates agricultural science news, research results and technology information, and its institutes publish journals, data and extension material used by provincial academies, universities, agribusinesses and farmers' organisations. The academy combines this publishing role with the largest concentration of agricultural research talent in China: official descriptions record more than 5,000 professional staff, a graduate school, a publishing house and a network of institutes across the country, making it the central node of China's agricultural knowledge system.

Founding and Development

The Central Committee formally approved the establishment of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1957, a milestone in the history of Chinese agricultural science that unified the national agricultural research effort under one academy. The founding responded to a practical national need: raising farm output and improving food supply for a large population. From Beijing, the academy coordinated crop, livestock and resource research that had previously been dispersed, and it built the institute network that still defines its structure today.

Among the episodes most often cited in accounts of the academy's history is its role in hybrid rice. In 1972, CAAS and the Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences took the lead in organising more than 150 units across the country in large-scale research on indica-type hybrid rice, breaking through the three-line hybrid rice system and enabling hybrid rice to spread rapidly into production. The academy later led super rice research, with promotion areas reported at over 100 million mu annually, about a quarter of the national rice area. Wheat improvement has a similar lineage in academy accounts, from the foundational breeders of the 1950s to the dwarf wheat breeding technology system of the 1980s, which produced more than 60 new wheat varieties planted on some 230 million mu in total.

Organisational Structure and Institutes

Descriptions of the academy's size vary slightly by date and by how co-hosted institutes are counted, but the structure is consistent. Reference sources describe CAAS as overseeing more than 40 institutes — 42 to 45 in recent listings — of which 32 are direct affiliates in Beijing and the regions, with the remainder co-hosted with local governments or universities. The academy also incorporates a graduate school and the China Agricultural Science and Technology Press, its publishing house. Its headquarters compound in Beijing also hosts offices of related policy bodies, including the China Association for the Promotion of International Agricultural Cooperation, established in 1998.

The Beijing institutes cover the core disciplines: crop sciences, vegetables and flowers, animal husbandry and veterinary medicine, agricultural products processing, agricultural information, plant protection, biotechnology and agricultural resources and regional planning, among others. Institutes outside Beijing are placed where their subjects are grown or studied, including farmland irrigation research, the Rice Research Institute, the Shenzhen Agricultural Genome Research Institute and an Urban Agriculture Research Institute. Co-hosted institutes include the Citrus Research Institute. This geography makes CAAS a genuinely national research system rather than a single campus, and its regional institutes anchor agricultural information services in the provinces where production actually happens.

Research Fields and Programmes

CAAS organises its research into eight disciplinary clusters: crop science, horticulture science, animal science, veterinary medicine, agricultural resources and environment, agricultural mechanisation and engineering, agro-product quality, safety and processing, and agricultural information and economics. Beneath those clusters, official descriptions count 134 focused fields and 309 research focuses, giving the academy coverage of nearly every question that Chinese farming presents, from seed genetics and soil health to food-safety testing and farm economics.

A flagship mechanism is the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program, launched in 2013, which funds institute teams to work on long-term strategic problems rather than short projects alone. The academy's infrastructure supports this programme at national scale: accounts of its first sixty years list national and ministerial key laboratories, national crop improvement centres and sub-centres, quality supervision and testing centres, and major collections including a crop germplasm resources bank described as the second largest in the world and a major animal cell bank. These collections and laboratories are information assets as much as research assets, holding the reference material against which new varieties and technologies are measured.

Research Achievements and Technology Transfer

Over six decades, the academy reports thousands of scientific and technological advances, with almost 3,000 winning national or provincial awards in recent official summaries, and more than 1,000 new varieties of crops, livestock and poultry developed. Its breeders' work on hybrid and super rice and on wheat underpins a significant share of Chinese grain production, and its veterinary, plant-protection and processing institutes supply technologies used across the food chain. Twenty-seven members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering are recorded as past employees of CAAS, with 11 still actively involved in research in recent descriptions, underlining the academy's place in the national talent system.

Transfer of results is a formal part of the mandate. CAAS cooperates closely with local governments to promote local economic development through technology transfer and has been instrumental in establishing over 100 companies, particularly in crop seed and seedlings, agricultural chemistry, veterinary products and drugs, animal feed and special agricultural products. Institutes run demonstration bases and training with provincial academies and extension services, so that published research becomes field practice. For an information directory, this pipeline — laboratory result, published variety or standard, demonstration, then commercial and extension channels — is the mechanism by which CAAS functions as an agricultural knowledge agency and not only as a research performer.

Publications and Information Services

The academy's publishing is anchored by its own press and journals. CAAS publishes the Journal of Integrative Agriculture, an English-language journal that carries Chinese agricultural research to an international readership, alongside Chinese-language journals issued by its institutes across the disciplinary clusters. The China Agricultural Science and Technology Press publishes books, standards-related material and technical works arising from academy research, while the Agricultural Information Research Institute in Beijing specialises in agricultural information science itself — library, database and information services for the national agricultural research system.

Digital dissemination runs through caas.cn, which carries academy news, research highlights, variety and technology releases and institute information in Chinese, with English material for international partners. The academy's library resources are described in its institutional histories as among the largest agricultural collections in Asia. Because provincial academies, universities and companies treat CAAS releases as authoritative, its publications serve as the reference layer of Chinese agricultural information: variety registrations, technical standards work and research evaluations across the sector routinely cite academy sources.

Graduate Education and Talent

The Graduate School of CAAS trains the research workforce of the agricultural system. Recent descriptions record enrolment of more than 4,300 students across 65 master's programmes, 53 doctoral programmes and nine postdoctoral research programmes. Students are based largely within the academy's institutes, working on live breeding, veterinary, environmental and information projects, so graduate education and the research programme are a single system. The academy describes itself as the largest employer of scientific talent in agricultural science and technology in China, with over 5,000 professional employees within a total staff that other accounts put considerably higher when all institutes are counted.

Talent development extends beyond degrees. CAAS institutes host visiting scholars, run training for provincial researchers and technicians, and supply experts to national committees on varieties, standards and food safety. Its alumni lead provincial academies, agricultural universities and seed and veterinary companies across China, which spreads the academy's methods and information standards through the whole sector. In assessing CAAS as an information institution, this human network matters: the academy's publications are authoritative partly because the people who write the sector's other publications were so often trained within its institutes.

International Cooperation

CAAS maintains an extensive international programme. Recent institutional descriptions record 27 joint laboratories and research centres established with partners in various countries and international organisations, and liaison offices of 13 international organisations and foreign agricultural institutions hosted within the academy. It cooperates with global agricultural research bodies and universities on breeding, genomics, animal health and sustainable production; a recent example in academy news is the joint laboratory on potato breeding innovation agreed in March 2026 between the International Potato Center and the academy's Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen.

The academy presents its mission internationally as promoting sustainable agriculture within and outside China, through technology exchange and cooperative research agreements with agricultural institutions and universities domestically and internationally and with global non-governmental organisations. Its English-language journal, conference activity and institute websites give foreign researchers structured access to Chinese agricultural science, while its own scientists draw on international germplasm, data and methods. For Belt and Road agricultural cooperation in particular, CAAS institutes act as technical partners and information sources for partner countries adapting Chinese varieties and techniques.

Leadership and Institutional Role

CAAS is a national institution directly affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and its presidents are senior agricultural scientists; Tang Huajun is quoted as academy president in accounts of its sixtieth anniversary period. Senior ministry leaders have publicly defined its role: at the sixtieth anniversary, the agriculture minister urged the academy to serve the main line of supply-side structural reform in agriculture, and academy leaders describe its three identities as the national team for agricultural science and technology innovation, a leader of reform and a decision-making think tank for the sector.

That think-tank identity completes the profile. Beyond performing research, CAAS advises the ministry and the state on food security, seed industry development, animal-disease control and rural revitalisation, and its evaluations inform national agricultural planning. Its information output — journals, news releases, variety and technology catalogues, data collections and policy studies — is therefore read on two levels: as science, by researchers, and as official signal, by everyone planning within Chinese agriculture. The academy is profiled in this directory as China's national agricultural knowledge agency, headquartered in Beijing with institutes in the country's main farming regions.