  The growth dynamics of complex organizations have attracted much interest of
econophysicists and sociophysicists in recent years. However, most of the
studies are done for developed countries. We investigate the growth dynamics of
the primary industry and the population of 2079 counties in mainland China
using the data from the China County Statistical Yearbooks from 2000 to 2006.
We find that the annual growth rates are distributed according to Student's $t$
distribution with the tail exponent less than 2. We find power-law
relationships between the sample standard deviation of the growth rates and the
initial size. The scaling exponent is less than 0.5 for the primary industry
and close to 0.5 for the population.
