With the help of professionally-trained agricultural scientists, the Guomindang's Nationalist Government, drafted a grandiose program for agricultural reconstruction in the late 1920s and early1930s. At the heart of the program was scientific rice-breeding experiments, which produced great numbers of new high-yield rice varieties. However, this scientific achievement could not assure the market success of new rice varieties, because the marketability of rice was determined not by the scientific productivity improvement, but by rice-consuming public and their discriminating dietary preferences. For this, local and practical contexts had to be taken into consideration. By focusing the issue of marketability of rice, this paper illuminates that incommensurability underlay between the state's productivist understanding of the grain market and rice-eating public in the marketplace.