Since the foundation of People's Republic of China, China has made one after another outstanding achievements in agriculture technology, one of which is the successful development of inidca hybrid rice. With the application of this technology since 1976,China's total rice cultivation lands have grown such rice, which added rice output by some 240 billion kilograms up till 1994.

The research of indica hybrid began in 1964, when a teacher from Hunan Province, Yuan Longping first put forward the idea of utilizing the heterosis in rice and initiated the research on hybrid rice in China. In November 1970, a pollen abortive wild rice plant (shortly called wild abortive, i.e., WA, thereafter) was discovered among the plants of common wild rice at Nanhong Farm of Ya County of Hainan Island, the southernmost province in China.

The discovery resulted in the subsequent breakthrough in success of hybrid rice development. After the discovery of WA, a large amount of nationwide cooperative work was immediately conducted to testcross and screen for its maintainers and restorers. Soon in 1972, the first group of CMS lines such as Erjiunan 1A, Zhenshan 97A, and V20A were developed by using WA as the donor of male sterile genes by way of successive backcrossing method. In 1973, the first group of restorer lines such as Taiyin 1, IR24, IR661 were screened out through direct test crossing method and in 1974 the hybrids with strong heterosis such as Nanyou 2, Nanyou 3 were released. Such combinations showed very significant yield increasing ability in the experimental production.

Up to now, hybrid rice has covered indica and japonica types with different maturity, which made hybrid rice production throughout the whole China from Hainan in the south to Liaoning in the north and from Shanghai in the east to Yunnan in the west. Hybrid rice shows not only a high-yielding ability but also a wide adaptability.

Professor Yuan's remarkable achievement in hybrid rice research won him numerous awards and honors from the United Nations and worldwide. In 1981, the Chinese government granted first Special Invention Prize since the founding of the New China to Yuan Longping and Li Bihu, to honor their achievements in hybrid rice to China and world.

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