Recently, Shaanxi, Shandong and some other provinces, as well as Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, have started large-scale "seawater rice" transplanting. The strain is grown in salty soil near the sea, and was created by over-expressing a gene from selected wild rice that's more resistant to saline and alkali. China has been studying salt-tolerant rice since at least the 1950s.

However, the term "seawater rice" only started to gain mainstream attention in recent years after the late Yuan Longping, once the nation's top agricultural scientist, began researching the idea in 2012.