Chinese horticulture: From basic research to industrial applications

China and New Zealand have a long history of close ties and cooperation in the horticultural industry. The growth of China’s economy has seen it become New Zealand’s largest trading partner, with the exchange of an increasing variety of horticultural products, such as kiwifruit, pears and apples (Sense Partners 2020).

These two countries work closely in developing and commercialising horticultural products. China, as one of the major agricultural producing countries, is less similar to New Zealand's trade in horticultural products. China and New Zealand are located in the northern and southern hemispheres, and the weather periods and product types can be complementary. In the future, the two countries can further leverage their respective resource advantages to enhance agricultural trade and improve the efficiency of global resource utilisation. A case in point is the interesting scientific tale behind the golden kiwifruit we find on our supermarket shelves today. The kiwifruit was originally called ‘Chinese gooseberry’, because people thought the fruit had a gooseberry flavour. The name was then briefly changed to ‘melonette’ before ‘kiwifruit’ was proposed by the Auckland fruit-packing company Turner & Growers in 1959. The breeding of high-quality modern kiwifruit varieties would not have been possible without the efforts of scientists from both China and New Zealand and the contribution of wild kiwifruit germplasm resources from China, with Yichang City in Hubei Province being recognised as the original centre of kiwifruit in the world at the 2008 Kiwifruit International Conference (Ferguson 2004; Wishart 2011). Kiwifruit seed was first brought to New Zealand from Yichang by Mary Isabel Fraser in 1904 and was subsequently used by Hayward Wright to breed the first commercial kiwifruit cultivar ‘Hayward’. In the mid-1970s, an opportunity arose for a new link to be forged between the fruit’s major exporter and its native country, leading to collaboration between plant physiologist Ted Bollard and a group of scientists from China that included Professor Li Lairong (Morton 2017). This resulted in New Zealand researchers obtaining access to the raw germplasm that would, after many years of breeding, become the yellow-fleshed kiwifruit Hort16A, which was marketed as Zespri® Gold. However, starting in November 2010, this variety was ravaged by the kiwifruit-killing disease Psa-V, which is caused by the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae (Greer and Saunders 2012), leading to it being replaced by the new cultivar Zespri SunGold™.

China and New Zealand also work closely in undertaking scientific research on horticultural products. For the past decade, China has been the largest producer of horticultural products in the world. However, there is still a need for increased effort in fruit quality improvement and commercialisation, which has driven the cooperation between China and New Zealand. In recent years, the New Zealand Crown Research Institute Plant & Food Research (PFR) has signed cooperation agreements with several Chinese research institutions, such as Sichuan Provincial Academy of Natural Resource Sciences, Huazhong Agricultural University, Zhejiang University, Shandong Agricultural University, Northwest A&F University, Nanjing Agricultural University, Zhengzhou Fruit Research Institute and Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (https://www.plantandfood.co.nz/page/about-us/our-global-network/). With the support of both the Chinese and New Zealand governments, the intensive exchange of scholars and cooperation between the two countries has greatly assisted the upgrading of the horticultural industry through research on variety selection, efficient cultivation, sensory evaluation and maintenance of post-harvest quality for a range of fruits (https://www.plantandfood.co.nz/page/about-us/publications/).

Over the past decade, China has been the largest source of initial submissions to the New Zealand Journal of Crop and Horticultural Science (NZJCHS), with 550 manuscripts written by China-based authors being submitted between 2011 and 2020, approximately 50 of which were accepted for publication. This makes China the second largest source of published papers in the journal after New Zealand. Furthermore, papers originating from China-based authors receive an average of 4.5 citations, which is identical to the citation performance of papers published by New Zealand-based authors. This indicates that Chinese manuscripts have made an important scientific contribution to NZJCHS and global research in terms of both quantity and quality, which is one of the main reasons why NZJCHS has prepared this special issue on Chinese horticultural research.

We have served as Guest Editors of this special issue, spearheading the project from the call for papers all the way through to the final editing. This special issue received a positive response from the Chinese horticultural research community, with 12 high-quality papers being submitted from a wide range of institutions and universities in China. The content of these papers ranges from basic research (e.g. genome-wide analysis, transcriptional regulation and genetic diversity) through to industrial applications along the entire chain (e.g. fertiliser, black film, gibberellic acid, 1-methylcyclopropene, coating mixture and packaging). The release of this special issue was originally planned to coincide with the IX International Postharvest Symposium (https://www.scienceevents.co.nz/postharvest2024), which was scheduled to be held in Rotorua, New Zealand, in February 2021. However, this special issue is now being formally published ahead of the Symposium, which has been postponed until 2024 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

We would like to thank all of the scholars and staff who have been involved in producing this special issue for their kind help and exceptional support. We believe that this special issue will allow more global scholars to improve their understanding of the China–New Zealand horticultural industry, promote further cooperation and academic exchanges, facilitate the training of horticultural talent, and eventually promote the development of a high-quality global horticultural industry.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by Shennongjia Golden Monkey Conservation Biology Hubei Key Laboratory Open Subjects (SNJGKL202102) [grant number 1]; Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Project of Specialty Fruits [grant number 3] and Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2019CFB541) [grant number 2].