A Virginia PhD student surmises that what foreign visitors construe as China's individualistic north and collectivist south may be the sociological results not of geography, but rather farming.

"It's easy to think of China as a single culture, but we found that China has very distinct northern and southern psychological cultures and that southern China's history of rice farming can explain why people in southern China are more interdependent than people in the wheat-growing north," said the study's lead author Thomas Talhelm, researching cultural psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.

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He calls it the "rice theory." 

While associated with all of Asia, rice production is restricted to areas where a continuous supply of water is readily available, such as China's river valleys and monsoonal south. In the drier northern regions of the country, farmers are more dependent on seasonal rain for crops.

Talhelm notes that rice farming is an extremely labor-intensive, requiring about twice the number of hours from planting to harvest as does wheat. More over, rice is grown on irrigated land, requiring the sharing of water, construction of dikes and management of canals that require constant maintenance. To big for any one farmer or even family, rice farmers quickly learned the necessity of working together to develop and maintain a viable infrastructure for food production. This, Talhelm argues, has led to the interdependent culture in China's south.

Conversely, wheat is grown on dry land, relying on rain for moisture. Farmers are able to depend more on themselves, leading to more of an independent mindset that permeates northern Chinese culture (and to a further degree, much of the West).

"The data suggests that legacies of farming are continuing to affect people in the modern world," Talhelm said, and identified the Yangtze River valley as the dividing line between the two psychological landscapes.

The Chinese have long noticed the difference between north and south. The two have different languages, different histories, and different climates — all of which were considered factors to how the regions developed. Narrowing the diving factor to agricultural practices is a novel idea. Talhelm noticed the difference having first lived in the southern city of Guangzhou before moving north to Beijing. He says Beijingers were more outgoing and individualistic than in the south. 

He went about investigating his theory with his Chinese colleagues by conducting psychological studies of the thought styles of 1,162 Han Chinese college students in the north and south and in counties at the borders of the rice-wheat divide: Beijing in the north, Fujian in the southeast, Guangdong in the south, Yunnan in the southwest; Sichuan in the west central, and Liaoning in the northeast.

"I think the rice theory provides some insight to why the rice-growing regions of East Asia are less individualistic than the Western world or northern China, even with their wealth and modernization," Talhelm said. 

Talhelm's findings were first reported in May 2014 issue of Science.