The overall goal of our paper is to create a framework for studying the impact of national investment into research and extension in China and to measure the impact that such investments have had on creating productivity-increasing technology. Our purpose is to provide more convincing measures of the impacts of crop-specific investment in national research programs and the import of materials from the CG system. Specifically, we use a new measure of seed technology to track the changes in the quantity and quality of genetic resources in China's major rice producing provinces from 1982 to 1995. We find that new technology has provided almost all of the growth of China's TFP of rice. The International Rice Research Institute has supplied an important part of China's rice germplasm and positively contributed to the health of China's rice sector.