Abstract: Over the past century, there have always been a lot of controversies over the development of family farms in Chinese agriculture. Among them, some defined the family farm as“Imported Goods”, while others held the “Transitional Theory”. This article argues that, the so called“Country Estate”“Manor”“Farmstead”“Manor Land”and“Large Household” in Chinese history from the Qin and Han dynasties to the nineteenth century are actually different appellations of Chinese family farms in different historical periods. After entering the twentieth century, as a kind of management mode of traditional Chinese agriculture, it is combined with the family farm due to the same type and same nature as the western family farms in the tide of learning from the Western economy. In the practice of exploring large-scale corporate farming, it has become the preferred management mode of the return of agricultural economic development. When entering the Republic Era, although it had been forced into “extinction” at one point under the transformation of “large in size and collective in nature”, it regained a new life in the reform of the household contract responsibility system and became one of the four major management entities in China’s modern agriculture. In the history of more than 2,000 years of agricultural development in China, the family farm has been the preferred management mode through repeated sufferings in China’s traditional agricultural economy, though it is regarded a “borrowed word” in modern China.

Key words: family farm; agricultural management; preferred mode