Developments in the delivery of agricultural credit during the collective era, 1950 to 1978 is poorly understudied and poorly understood. In this thesis, I examine and provide an economic assessment of the political movements and developments in rural finance in China from 1950 to 1978/1984 with the latter date capturing the interim period before modern reforms took place. To examine the influencing factors of provincial agricultural loans, this thesis models agricultural loans from 1950 to 1984 as a function of natural disasters, grain output and 5 historical policy dummies. Interestingly, establishments of the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) and Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCC), occurrence of the Great Leap Forward and two stages of the Cultural Revolution. My objective is to determine whether, and to what effect, these factors influenced agricultural credit. Using data collected from local gazetteers at the provincial and city levels, this preliminary assessments shows that these events and circumstances had significant impacts on rural credit. I find, for example, that the relationship between loan outstanding and interest rates is downward sloping which indicates what I refer to as a ‘demand dominant’ dynamic, that is shifts in supply along the credit demand curve has a much stronger impact on loan balances (a quasi-equilibrium) than shifts in demand along the supply/marginal cost curve. But I also show, for example that the change of steel output imposed a negative effect on RCC loans during the Great Leap Forward. Although RCC loans increased during this period this result suggests that the rate of growth in rural credit was dampened by the push for iron. In furtherance to this I show a significant increase in the deposit to loan ratio which suggests a form of red-lining in which rural deposits were not reinvested in rural loans but diverted towards non agricultural uses. Last not least, the documentation of contemporaneous living and economic conditions reported in the local financial gazetteers provide interesting and valuable stories and insights into agriculture credit in China.