Agricultural Collectivization —China

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Agricultural Collectivization —China

Private land ownership and the one-family farm were the basis of Chinese agriculture for more than two thousand years before the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Until the early 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claimed that it would first improve, rather than eliminate, the system of private family farms. The land reform of the CCP during the 1940s and early 1950s won great support of the majority of Chinese peasants because it actually allowed more peasants to own their own lands and thus to create their own family farms. However, CCP leaders, particularly Mao Zedong (1893–1976), shared Marxists' goal of eventually eliminating private ownership of land and achieving socialist collectivization. As early as 1943, Mao had proclaimed that agricultural collectivization would be the only way for Chinese peasants to escape poverty and would be the CCP's long-range goal. Before land reform was completely accomplished, the CCP was prepared to begin the gradual introduction of agricultural collectivization.

China's agricultural collectivization was carried out in three stages. The first stage was to promote mutual aid teams (MATs). MATs were small scale, usually with five or six households joining to work cooperatively during busy times (such as sowing and harvesting). Each family retained ownership of its own land, and the crops grown on that land basically belonged to that family. The move toward MATs was relatively successful. By 1952, 40 percent of China's rural households joined a mutual aid team.

During the same period, a small number of peasants were starting to move to the next stage of collectivization: the "lower" or "semisocialist" agricultural producers' cooperative (APC). An APC usually encompassed a small village or section of a village (twenty to forty households on average). Members of the APC pooled their lands and large agricultural tools and draft animals and worked the land together. A management committee kept records, usually measuring in daily "work points," of the amount of labor done by each family. At the end of a year, the crop and other income (after taxes had been paid and reserve funds had been subtracted) would be divided among the members of the APC according to the accumulated work points of each family and the land and tools they had contributed. Fifteen thousand APCs were established when the CCP began to encourage peasants to replace MATs with APCs at the end of 1953.

From Apcs to Full Collectivization

The third stage was the fully socialist collectives, or "higher" APCs. Most higher APCs contained 150 to 200 households. Unlike in the semisocialist APC, in which an individual family still retained nominal ownership of its lands and derived its income partially from these lands, the lands now were legally the property of the APC. The amounts of land and capital contributed by each family were no longer taken into account in determining how much each family would receive at the end of a year. The APC would distribute crops solely on the basis of each family's labor contributions: to each according to his deeds.

Originally, China's agricultural collectivization was planned quite cautiously. The CCP leaders who were in charge of this work knew that this transformation would have to be managed carefully to avoid the bloodshed and catastrophic results that had accompanied the rapid collectivization initiated by Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) in the Soviet Union. The CCP Central Committee predicted that the transition to socialist collectivization would be accomplished in fifteen years from 1953. The committee disbanded tens of thousands of APCs in 1953 and 1955 on the grounds that these APCs were premature and were organized against peasants' own will.

However, Mao was unsatisfied with the cautious approach to collectivization. According to Mao, China would suffer both economic and social problems unless the transition to collectivization speeded up. Mao believed that a socialist system of agriculture would bolster agricultural productivity, stimulate rural markets for industrial products, and divert sufficient workers and funds to accelerate China's industrialization. In the meantime, a fully socialist agriculture system would end the division between the haves and have-nots in China's countryside.

Despite the opposition of many key figures within the CCP and many peasants, Mao's view prevailed finally. The CCP launched a drive to organize more higher APCs in the autumn of 1955. After it started, the campaign moved much faster than even Mao had initially proposed. Provincial and lower-level cadres implemented the collectivization drive with such enthusiasm that China's agricultural socialization was completed in less than a year. In 1954, there were 114,000 APCs nationwide, 200 of them higher APCs. By 1956, 120 million agricultural households, or 96.3 percent of China's rural families, were organized in 750,000 collectives, of which 88 percent were the fully socialist higher APCs.

Endorsed by Mao, "people's communes" were organized in the countryside in 1958 on the basis of higher APCs. Each commune amalgamated dozens of higher APCs and had twenty-five thousand people on average. By the end of 1958, there were twenty-six thousand communes, in which 98 percent of China's rural population lived. The commune became a new organizational form for the countryside, combining political, administrative, and military functions in one organization. Economically, however, the principal internal unit in each commune was the production brigade, which often corresponded to a higher APC.

Results of Collectivization

Agricultural collectivization had profound influence in China. It gave the CCP greater power to exert its authority over Chinese peasants and to more effectively extract a large portion of agricultural income from the countryside to fund China's industrialization. In the meantime, collectivization was pushed too soon and too hard after 1955, resulting in inefficiencies in agricultural productivity, dissatisfaction among peasants, and mismanagement in China's rural areas. Peasants were deprived of their land and other private property and lost the incentive to work harder. China's agricultural productivity stagnated until 1979, when Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) launched economic reform. With the dismemberment of the people's communes in 1982, China's agricultural collectivization collapsed. Family farms again became the basis of Chinese agriculture; more than 97 percent of peasants ran their own farms under the household responsibility system (which turned responsibility for production back over to individual households) by 1983.