China

Rural collectivization

This transition was most obvious in the countryside. After land reform had been carried out, mutual aid teams allowed the communists to experiment with voluntary forms of agricultural collectivization. A campaign was launched in late 1953 to organize into small collectives, called lower-level agricultural producers’ cooperatives, averaging 20 to 30 households.

Vehement debate soon broke out within the CCP concerning how quickly to move to higher stages of cooperative production in the countryside. The debate was symptomatic of the larger tensions within the party regarding urban and rural development, Soviet influence, and the development of huge government ministries in Beijing. The strengths of Mao Zedong lay in agricultural policy, social change, and foreign relations, and in the mid-1950s he began to shift the national agenda more in the direction of his own expertise.

In July 1955 Mao, against the wishes of most of his colleagues in the CCP leadership, called for an acceleration of the transition to lower-level, and then to higher-level, agricultural producers’ cooperatives in the countryside. The key difference between these two forms concerned the middle class of peasants, farmers able to live off their own land. The advanced cooperative was particularly disadvantageous to the wealthier peasants because it invested the cooperative itself with title to the land, granting no right of withdrawal, and because wages were based on labour performed, not land contributed. Middle-level peasants came to resent landless peasants, whom the party was recruiting into the new cooperatives. Also, the advanced form, modeled on the Soviet kolkhoz, brought with it the outside political controls that were necessary to extract the agricultural surpluses required to pay for China’s capital equipment in its industrialization and to feed those moving into the cities to work in the growing industries. Many middle-level peasants actively resisted these changes and the measures for enforcing them, particularly grain rationing, compulsory purchase quotas, and stricter regulations on savings and wage rates. Nevertheless, Chinese agricultural organization in 1956 reached the approximate level of collectivization achieved in the Soviet Union: a peasant owned his house, some domestic animals, a garden plot, and his personal savings; by the end of 1956, some seven-eighths of China’s peasant households were organized into advanced cooperatives.