Considerable efforts have been made to assess the contribution of forest and grassland ecosystems to the global carbon budget, while less attention has been paid to agriculture. Net primary production (NPP) of Chinese croplands and driving factors are seldom taken into account in the regional carbon budget. We studied crop NPP by analyzing the documented crop yields from 1950 to 1999 on a provincial scale. Total NPP, including estimates of the aboveground and belowground components, was calculated from harvested yield data by (1) conversion from economic yield of the crop to aboveground mass using the ratio of aboveground residue production to the economic yield, (2) estimation of belowground mass as a function of aboveground mass, and (3) conversion from total dry mass to carbon mass. This approach was applied to 13 crops, representing 86.8% of the total harvested acreage of crops in China. Our results indicated that NPP in Chinese croplands increased markedly during this period. Averaging for each decade, the amount of NPP was 146 +/- 32, 159 +/- 34, 260 +/- 55, 394 +/- 85, and 513 +/- 111 Tg C/yr (mean +/- SD) in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively. This increase may be attributed to synthetic fertilizer application. A further investigation indicated that the climate parameters of temperature and precipitation determined the spatial variability in NPP. Spatiotemporal variability in NPP can be well described by the consumption of synthetic fertilizer and by climate parameters. In addition, the total amount of residue C and root C retained by the soils was estimated to be 618 Tg, with a range from 300 to 1040 Tg over the 50 years.