Rice-based production system with the mixture of cropping and aquaculture is a traditional agriculture system in China.With the development of modern agriculture,it is becoming a popular food production pattern around China.Because rice-based production system could maintain the riceland biodiversity and reduce the production cost,Chinese government encourages the development of these coculture systems.Based on the local tradition and habit of cropping and aquaculture,there are two dominant coculture types:Rice-crab and rice-fish systems.However,to date,the cost,benifit and productivity per unit of these coculture patterns varied from farmer to farmer as well as from area to area,which indicated the rice-based production system is still immature and unstable.Therefore,based on the survey of rice-based production system from four typical provinces in 2013,we investigated the current status of two major rice-based production systems in China.In this study,the production inputs,economic benefits,fertilizer and pesticide utilization were analyzed and compared to provide the useful information for the future development of rice-based production system.The results are as follows:Compared to the rice monoculture,these two rice-based production systems have higher average profits(2.43-3.92 times),lower fertilizer and pesticide cost(reduced by 2.8%-49.2% and 3.2%-83.6% respectively).These results indicated that both rice-crab and rice-fish coculture systems had better economic and ecological benefits than rice monoculture system.But due to the technical immaturity and degree of industrialization,huge differences were observed on the final economic and ecological benefits among the farmers.This investigation revealed that the small scale,the high cost of inputs,limited ecological and social benefits are the main problems we are currently facing in the rice-based production systems.In conclusion,our results suggested further development of key technology,increasing the governmental support,and improvement of production scale are very important to slove these problems.