The contradiction between the working class and the peasant class in socialist society is resolved by the method of collectivization and the mechanization in agriculture.
INTRODUCTION
This chapter examines the historic arc of rural collectivism in contemporary China before 1970. It explains the economic and political forces that created and gradually shaped the commune, and it traces changes that took place in the institution’s priorities, structure, and mandate throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In so doing, it reveals how debates about agricultural modernization helped ignite the Cultural Revolution and explains how a rival institution supported by some of China’s top leaders—the trust—nearly usurped the commune’s control over agricultural capital and technology. These topics are examined in the context of pervasive economic challenges—rising population, falling arable land, and fast depreciating capital—that are discussed in chapter 3. This chapter recounts the first part of the commune’s institutional history: Where did it come from? Why and how was it changed over time? What role did it play in Chinese politics? Which elements of the institution continued into the 1970s, which were reformed, and which were discarded?
From 1958, when communes were established, until decollectivization began in 1979, evolutionary changes in organizational structure, remuneration systems, and the dissemination of agricultural capital and technology reflected political changes in the top leadership that influenced every rural locality. Over time, the commune’s mandate was substantially altered. Yet decisions regarding size, structure, priorities, and remuneration made throughout the first part of the institution’s life span, 1958–1969, proved sticky throughout the second, 1970–1979. During the 1960s, political battles between leftists and rightists resulted in a compromise: the 1970s Green Revolution Commune. This hybrid institution combined elements of both collective and household production, economic planning and free markets, and collective and private remuneration.
Over the life of the commune, agricultural investment strategies and remuneration systems changed considerably to reflect political struggles among elite factions. In 1958 and 1959, the large Great Leap Forward (GLF) Commune instituted free-supply remuneration, ended material incentives, closed free markets, and prioritized red politics over technical know-how when making investments. To stem the GLF famine, these polices were reversed and two administrative subunits—the brigade and its subordinate, the team—were created. Private household plots, free markets, and cottage enterprises, collectively known as the Three Small Freedoms, were adopted and also remained in place until decollectivization. These and other institutional changes were made in the November 1960 “Urgent Directive on Rural Work” (i.e., the Twelve Articles), drafted by Zhou Enlai, and were expanded on in the “Regulations on the Rural People’s Communes” (i.e., the Sixty Articles on Agriculture), which were drafted by Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen in March 1961. The Sixty Articles subsequently were adopted in September 1962 at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee in 1962 (see appendix C).
During the early 1960s, right-leaning leaders—led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng—favored a central bureaucracy that determined agricultural investments based on profitability. Their strategy called for large centralized trusts to facilitate the sale of agricultural equipment, seeds, and chemicals by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to those communes that could afford them. Under Liu’s direction, a dozen or more trusts were established to implement this strategy, including one trust established in 1963 to coordinate the production and sales of agricultural machines. Advocates of this centralized approach also supported shrinking the commune’s size, removing agricultural modernization from its mandate, and introducing household contract farming (baochandaohu).
Mao and his supporters, by contrast, championed the commune as the rural institution that could introduce socialist values and boost agricultural productivity. They opposed the centralized trusts and instead supported the establishment of large semiautonomous communes, with a broad political and economic mandate. Communes, the Maoists argued, should not rely on profit-seeking state-run trusts and SOEs, but rather should own and maintain their own farm equipment, fertilizer production facilities, and crop test fields. Likewise, they believed communes should be encouraged to reinvest their profits locally with an eye toward increasing agricultural output, specifically in grain and pork production. Intracommune industry and infrastructure construction were intended to expand local production of agricultural capital and technology and to disseminate them widely. This commune-led approach to rural development, known as the Dazhai model, was an ambitious nationwide (as opposed to targeted) strategy that required high rates of household income extraction to underwrite local capital investment.
The trust, in short, challenged the commune’s position as the primary institution of rural China and its ownership over the means of agricultural production. The commune stressed local autonomy, whereas the trust stressed central control; the commune prioritized nationwide agricultural modernization, whereas trusts prioritized development in select regions; the commune depended on small-scale local production to reduce transportation costs, whereas the trust prioritized economies of scale in production to generate savings.
Between 1965 and 1969, the commune experienced substantial institutional reforms. Changes were made to the workpoint remuneration system, its collectivist ideology, the agricultural research and extension system, and the ownership and control of farm machines. These reforms were completed by 1970 and were promulgated at the Northern Districts Agricultural Conference, which began in August of that year in Xiyang, Shanxi, the home of the model Dazhai brigade. What emerged was the Green Revolution Commune, which included elements of collective and private production, ample local control over workpoint remuneration methods, and an integrated three-in-one organizational structure designed to channel local resources into productive capital investments to increase grain and pig output (see chapters 3 and 4) and mitigate collective action problems (see chapter 5). After 1970, the institution not only retained the private plots, cottage industries, and rural markets that had begun in the early 1960s but also featured the collective ownership of capital and Mao’s pervasive collectivist ideology.
This chapter has two sections. The first section introduces the institutional antecedents of the commune, which served as the origins of collective agriculture in contemporary China: Mutual Aid Teams (MATs; 1954–1955) and Agricultural Producer Cooperatives (APC; 1956–1957). These organizations had an economic but not a political mandate. The second section examines the commune’s first dozen years and is subdivided by its first three phases: the GLF Commune (1958–1961), the Rightist Commune (1962–1964), and the Leftist Commune (1965–1969). The subsections examine China’s agricultural modernization strategy during each one of these three phases, which are distinguished in chapter 4 using economic growth models. The average annual agricultural production growth rates during these phases are available in appendix A. It is important to note that growth rates under the Rightist Commune are amplified because that period followed directly on the heels of the GLF Commune’s economic failure.
ANTECEDENT INSTITUTIONS
Mutual Aid Teams
Before 1949, the independent family farm was the dominant social and economic structure of rural China. These farms were small, averaging about 2 hectares (ha) in the north, and just over 1 ha in the south. Landlords owned nearly half of the land, which they leased to households, but they contributed little else to production. In the south, land leases were generally long, sometimes for life, whereas in the north, one-year contracts were common. As in most premodern rural societies, rents were high, generally about half of the main crop, as were interest rates, which averaged more than 30 percent a year in the 1930s. Underemployment was a serious problem, with labor in surplus most of the year but scarce during the planting and harvesting seasons. Northern peasants worked an average of 100–120 days per year, while the average southerner worked only 80–100 days per year. The local market town was the economic hub, which was connected to higher-level domestic markets.2
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, a land-to-the-tiller reform program was implemented in areas as they came under communist control. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1950 revoked all land ownership, redistributed land to farmers, and branded landlords and rich peasants as class enemies before displacing, brutalizing, and sometimes killing them. Like similar programs in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, the purpose of China’s land reform was to simultaneously consolidate the party’s political support among poor rural farmers, wrest economic control from traditional rural elites, and initiate the destruction of “old” society and its institutions. In China, as in most agrarian societies, land ownership was closely associated with economic and political power; hence, seizing land was synonymous with seizing power. The destruction of preexisting rural institutions during land reform cleared the way for the CPC to create its own institution: the commune.3
In the early 1950s, land was generally distributed on a per capita basis, resulting in economic inefficiencies. Families with small children, for instance, received more land than they could manage, whereas families with older children had surplus labor. Furthermore, labor, which was abundant most of the year, continued to be scarce during planting and harvesting seasons. To alleviate these impediments, MATs consisting of about ten families each were created to facilitate labor sharing during peak demand. By 1954, 68 million families had joined MATs, which built on preexisting labor-sharing arrangements among friends, relatives, and neighbors.4
Land reform and MATs redistributed land and power, but they did not change ownership structures or resolve the collective action problems that continued to disincentivize households from pooling their resources to make large-scale capital and infrastructure investment. Because MATs were small, it was difficult to organize labor for infrastructure projects (e.g., irrigation works, land leveling, and terracing) or combine funds to purchase equipment (e.g., plows and waterwheels). Households continued to buy, own, and sell land and to borrow money from richer farmers. Families that lacked labor or inputs were beginning to sell their land, borrow money at high interest rates, and contract themselves out as laborers. Strong traditionalist tendencies and commercial patterns also remained—trends that, if left unredressed, threatened to gradually undo land reform.5
Agricultural Producer Cooperatives
The APC was an economic institution at the village or subvillage level under which households collectively managed land and productive inputs and shared costs. The premise was that larger cooperatives would reduce waste and harness surplus labor during the down season for work on capital infrastructure projects. Income was distributed based on the proportion of land and other resources each household contributed to the collective and on the labor performed that season.6 By the end of 1955, 17 million peasant households had joined 630,000 APCs.7 On the heels of their establishment, Mao seized the momentum and quickly expanded the size of APCs. On July 31, 1955, he proclaimed: “Throughout the Chinese countryside a new upsurge in socialist mass movement is in sight. But some of our comrades are tottering alone like a woman with bound feet. The tide of social reform in the countryside—in the shape of cooperation—has already been reached in some places. Soon it will sweep the whole country.”8
A larger institution, Mao argued, would improve labor mobilization for local infrastructure projects and harness greater resources to purchase modern capital and inputs. It could consolidate CPC control over the countryside and prevent the rise of an independent class of rich and middle peasants. These “political considerations,” explain Dwight Perkins and Shahid Yusuf, “virtually dictated eventual collectivization, although the decision was made much easier by the justification that collectivizing agriculture would yield economic benefits as well. Political objectives enjoyed primacy over economic ones.”9 Politically, the objective was to end the landlord-gentry class’ domination of the rural power structure. Economically, the goal was “to stimulate the rapid recovery of agricultural production, which had been stagnant since the mid-1930s,” explains Richard Baum.10
To achieve these goals, larger Higher-Level Producer Cooperatives (HAPC) were established in 1956. Some areas transformed directly from MATs to HAPCs. By February 1956, more than half of China’s villages had opened HAPCs, and by the end of that year, 107 million farm families—more than 90 percent of China’s 500 million farmers—had joined 746,000 HAPCs. The average HAPC was much larger than the APC that preceded it, with each new cooperative including one hundred to two hundred families and five hundred to one thousand people.11
The HAPC was usually the same size as the village, so although political leadership and economic management remained separate, for the first time, they covered the same geographic area. The cooperative administered nearly all productive inputs (e.g., land, tools, and farm animals), with the only remaining vestiges of private ownership being a few chickens or pigs and a small plot usually adjacent to the family home.12
HAPCs ended remuneration based on resource contribution and began to award workpoints based solely on labor contribution.13 The number of workpoints its members earned determined each household’s income, and the workpoint’s value was determined after the harvest was sold and all member workpoints were added together and divided by total collective income. Each member’s share (normally paid in grain or cash) was what remained after all taxes, administrative costs, input costs, advances, and welfare funds were deducted. Only production on the family’s small private plot was exempt from this calculation.14 Although the way that workpoints were awarded varied by time and place, the aforementioned method for calculating their value remained constant from 1956 until the commune’s dissolution more than two decades later. The brief exception was the GLF’s disastrous experiment with free-supply remuneration, which is discussed in the next section.
The HAPCs sold their output to the state and at rural markets, which remained open in 1957. Originally, the free markets established in the summer of 1956 were intended for native and subsidiary products that were not subject to state planning or purchase. After their establishment, however, these markets quickly grew to include grain and other agricultural products earmarked for government procurement. This market expansion undermined the state’s power to use price controls to extract agricultural surpluses. To remedy the problem, new regulations were issued in August 1957 restricting the sale of grain, oil-bearing crops, and cotton to state purchase agencies or state-controlled grain markets.15
During the off-season, HAPCs supplied labor to build local infrastructure projects. Like fieldwork, workers received workpoints based on the time they spent on construction. Any increase in agricultural productivity from a project went into the institution’s general fund, to be reinvested or apportioned along with all other household income based on workpoints. The HAPC successfully mobilized resources for small-scale capital investments, but it did not eliminate the difficulties associated with projects that traversed two or more cooperatives. An irrigation or road project might require labor from several HAPCs, but when only a few benefited from the project, those who gained little or nothing lacked the incentive to supply labor and materials. Leaders and members were understandably reluctant to dilute the value of their workpoints by awarding them for labor on projects that did not increase their HAPC’s income.16
Other problems cast doubt on the sustainability of the HAPCs. Concerns were voiced on the left about the system’s hierarchical organization, the clear division between manual and mental work, the aloofness and unresponsiveness of cadres, and the bureaucratization and centralization of production planning and decision-making. Leftists also criticized policies that squeezed agriculture to fund urban industrialization. Because more than 80 percent of Chinese were commune members, such a policy benefited only the minority of urbanites, and if the communes were unable to produce a surplus, it benefited no one.17
The economic mandate of the HAPCs soon overwhelmed its sister political institution, the township (xiang). The cooperative organized production, collected taxes, and distributed food and income, while the township enforced party policies, maintained the police, investigated political crimes, and handled army recruitment. But as HAPCs grew, sometimes into multivillage organizations, it became increasingly difficult for townships to provide political leadership. In 1955–1956, townships were consolidated into Big Townships (da xiang), which were larger than the HAPCs and intended to enhance political leadership over them. In 1957, there were about 750,000 HAPCs and about 100,000 Big Townships.18
THE COMMUNE’S FIRST THREE PHASES
Phase 1: The Great Leap Forward Commune (1958–1961)
Communist ideology stresses two interrelated goals, one economic and the other political: encouraging inclusive economic growth, and changing the character of social relations to promote a collectivist—as opposed to an individualist—community ethos. In a vast agricultural country like China, it is unclear which institutions can best accomplish these objectives. To design a self-sufficient, self-administered collective rural institution that could achieve these two goals, China created communes and reformed them continuously throughout the 1960s. This evolutionary process began in 1958 with the establishment of the GLF Commune.
In 1958, the HAPCs were consolidated into about 26,000 massive communes, each containing an average of about 4,500 ha of land, 24,000 people, and 5,200 households, although commune size varied substantially among provinces (see chapter 3, figures 3.3 and 3.4). William Skinner has hypothesized that because townships were the lowest level of the traditional marketing area, GLF communes generally included the cooperatives in two or three marketing areas, perhaps an intermediate market and its subordinate markets.19 GLF communes averaged about thirty HAPCs, although some included as many as a hundred.20
The GLF Commune was intended to produce a revolution in agricultural capital and technology to increase food output and raise living standards. Agricultural modernization and the surpluses it was intended to generate would expand opportunities in rural industry, which, over time, would eliminate the rural–urban divide, hence solidifying the worker-peasant alliance as the CPC’s political base. Mao argued that greater labor mobilization alone would be insufficient to generate these sustained increases in agricultural output. Meeting the fast-growing rural population’s expanding demands without more arable land required modern agricultural capital and technology, such as fertilizers, water pumps, improved seed varieties, and farm machinery.
Mao billed the GLF Commune as the institution that could implement a nationwide rural development program. In 1956, he envisaged that mechanization would expand and diversify rural employment opportunities:
After the mechanization of agriculture there will emerge in the future various kinds of undertakings never before imagined by people, and the yields of agricultural crops will be raised several times and even scores of times the present level. The development of industrial, communications, and exchange enterprises will even be beyond the imagination of the people of the past. Likewise, there will be such developments in the fields of science, culture, education, and public health.21
But not everyone supported investments in agricultural capital. Opponents raised five main arguments: (1) because China’s population was large and land was scarce, modernization would increase unemployment without raising yields; (2) China’s massive size, mountain ranges, and east-flowing rivers would inhibit capital distribution and maintenance; (3) in many areas, topography was not conducive to tractorization; (4) mechanization required scarce resources like iron, steel, and petroleum; and (5) agricultural modernization was too expensive. In 1956, a high-level critic, Bo Yibo, warned that “with such a large reservoir of manpower in the Chinese countryside and such complicated farming systems, it is impossible to introduce mechanization. If mechanization is introduced, the problem of surplus labor power in the countryside is so acute as to defy solution.”22 Minister of Agriculture Liao Luyen similarly warned that “with the exception of those areas where land is plentiful and labor power is inadequate and also with the exception of a number of economic crop growing areas any hasty steps to achieve mechanization are unacceptable to the masses, nor will they be conducive to raising agricultural output.”23
Despite these concerns, in October 1957, the State Technical Commission published a report that found that to cope with rapid population growth, China should prioritize agricultural modernization to increase yields. The report observed that during the harvest and planting seasons, even densely populated areas suffered labor shortages, which were exacerbated by multiple cropping systems that simultaneously harvested one crop while preparing to plant another. Improved yields thus required expanding irrigation networks and access to fertilizer, farm tools, agricultural machines, and vehicles. The successful commune, the commission argued, would use capital to free field labor to work on diverse tasks, including animal husbandry, oil processing, sugar refining, flour processing, brickmaking, pipe making, tractor repair, carpentry, iron work, and tailoring.24
Mao supported the GLF Commune, claiming it could quickly improve the countryside’s capital-to-labor ratio. The 1958 Chengdu Conference advocated the initial deployment of agricultural capital and technology in suburban and commercial crop areas, followed by their adoption nationwide. The conference emphasized small farm machines and semimechanized farm implements, supplied by small local manufacturers.25 In April 1959, Mao promulgated a ten-year plan to modernize China’s agriculture:
The fundamental way out for agriculture lies in mechanization. Ten years will be needed to achieve this. There will be minor solutions in four years, intermediate ones in seven, and major solutions in ten. This year, next year, the year after and the year after, we will be relying mainly on improved farm tools and semi-mechanized farming implements. Every province, every district, and every county must establish farm tools research stations and concentrate a group of scientific-technological personnel and experienced carpenters and blacksmiths of the rural areas to gather together all kinds of more advanced farm tools from every province, district, and county. They should compare them, experiment with them, and improve them. New types of farm implements must be trial-produced. When they are successfully trial-produced, test them out in the fields. If they are found to be truly effective, then they can be mass-produced and widely used. When we speak of mechanization, we must also include mechanized manufacture of chemical fertilizers. It is a matter of great importance to increase chemical fertilizer production year-by-year.26
Three months later, at the 1959 Lushan Conference, Mao supported the creation of the Ministry of Agricultural Machinery, which opened on August 26, 1959—two days before the People’s Daily announced the Ten-Year Plan for Agricultural Mechanization.27 In 1960, policy statements and People’s Daily editorials on January 13 and February 25 stressed mechanization and farm tool innovations.28 That April, Tan Chenlin, then-deputy director of the CPC’s rural work department, endorsed a three-stage agricultural mechanization plan:
1. Small-scale solution in four years (1959–63). Agriculture, livestock breeding, irrigation, and drainage. During this time, mechanization should be achieved in a preliminary way in the outskirts of big cities, market grain growing centers, the major industrial crop growing centers and the major non-staple food growing centers, while the major part of the rural area should concentrate mainly on popularizing semi-mechanization and improved implements.
2. Medium-scale solution in seven years (1964–66). By the end of seven years, mechanization should have materialized over more than half of the rural areas as a result of the gradual development of the agricultural industry and increased supply of agricultural machines.
3. Large-scale solution in ten years (1966–69). By the end of the ten years, virtually all the countryside should have mechanization and a considerable degree of rural electrification.29
Large-scale labor mobilization for infrastructure construction dates back to ancient times: water management projects improve crop yields, which, in turn, support more people and increase tax revenues. If village-size cooperatives could mobilize labor for small projects, the reasoning went, then pooling twenty to thirty cooperatives into a commune could build larger projects that would improve commune productivity, thus increasing the value of their workpoints and incentivizing members’ participation.
The first major attempts at mass labor mobilization came in late 1957. Instead of sitting through the winter, tens of millions of farmers were organized to build dams, reservoirs, dikes, and irrigation canals. At this time, “redness”—including political zeal, enthusiasm for the collective, and class background—was prized over technical knowledge and experience, and Mao coined the phrase “take grain as the key link,” which remained a cornerstone of agricultural policy until decollectivization. When Shandong Provincial Secretary Tan Qilong reported that Beiyuan Township, Lichen County was preparing to establish HAPCs, Mao said, “It is better to set up people’s communes. Their advantage lies in the fact that they combine industry, agriculture, commerce, education and military affairs. This is convenient for leadership.”30 By fall 1958, communes were being established, free markets for agricultural commodities were closed, and private household plots were eliminated.31
The first assessments of the GLF Commune were promising. In 1958, China’s reported grain harvest surpassed the United States, and party leaders were told that the country could produce as much rice as it wanted. The movement accelerated, and Mao announced that rural residents should eat five meals a day. Believing that food was abundant, party leaders raised grain procurement quotas, which commune cadres, who had inflated their grain production reports, were obligated to fulfill. Rather than upset their superiors, they lied and squeezed every grain from the hapless households under their jurisdiction. The result was an orgy of official exaggeration, while at the bottom, hundreds of millions suffered.32
Meanwhile, problems with the large and hastily assembled GLF communes thwarted plans to standardize and expand the application of modern inputs. GLF communes suffered from insufficient engineering know-how, scarce skilled labor, flawed techniques, poor-quality capital and inputs, a paucity of careful planning, and an emphasis on political correctness over technical expertise. The result was a large stock of useless, fast-depreciating capital, often made from poor-quality iron smelted in backyard furnaces. When the first heavy rains fell in summer 1958, many dams, canals, dikes, and reservoirs that had been quickly built the previous winter failed, inundating hundreds of thousands of acres. Within two years, more than two hundred of the five hundred largest reservoirs built in 1957–1958 were abandoned.33 In 1962, Zhou Enlai voiced his concern about the poor condition of China’s reservoirs and their associated water delivery systems: “I’ve been told by doctors that if a person goes without eating for a few days, no major harm will result. But if one goes without urinating for even one day, they will be poisoned. It’s the same with land. How can we accumulate water and not discharge it?”34
During the GLF, the rapid expansion of entitlements—coupled with insufficient planning, technical skills, and oversight—created a disincentive to hard work. Between 1958 and 1960 (before the team level was created), the massive GLF communes or brigades were the basic accounting units. Because workpoints entitled members to a percentage of the entire commune’s total output, if a worker was completely unproductive the value of that worker’s workpoints declined by only a fraction of a percent. Too little connection existed between an individual’s labor and workpoint value. Without subunits, the large commune was unable to supervise and evaluate the contribution of each of its roughly 8,500 workers.35
The free-supply remuneration system adopted by commune cafeterias also failed. With 50–80 percent of income distributed as “subsistence supplies” and only 20–50 percent distributed based on labor, a serious free-rider problem emerged.36 The false sense of abundance generated by free-supply remuneration contributed to careless field management, which compounded the aforementioned problems, producing a cataclysm: between 15 million and 30 million people starved to death during the GLF famine.37
Despite the GLF’s catastrophic failure, one of its lasting legacies was the mobilization of women in the rural workforce.38 Carl Riskin identifies two additional contributions that outlived the movement: the nationwide system of rural communes to facilitate large-scale rural capital accumulation and technological innovation, and the proliferation of small and midsize enterprises in rural China.39
Phase 2: The Rightist Commune (1962–1964)
The GLF disaster prompted the Chinese government to review its agricultural policy.40 In 1958, Mao had championed the commune as the institution that would allow China to reach communism quickly and overtake capitalist countries in terms of productivity. Before 1961, China’s rural policy had prioritized transforming grassroots social relations (politics) over increasing productivity (economics). This policy altered the architecture of local power relations, but not the quantity or quality of available agricultural capital and technology. After 1961, the commune was changed to facilitate China’s gradual transition from socialism (to each according to his work) to communism (to each according to his need). Economic performance was unquestionably placed at the fore, and ideology was employed to encourage productivity. A worker’s industriousness and expertise became prime determinants of his or her redness.
In the early 1960s, Mao and Liu prioritized competing rural development goals. Liu, supported by Deng, Peng Zhen, and others, believed that profitability was essential. He argued that success in agriculture required an efficient, centralized administration; specialization and economies of scale in input (e.g., fertilizer) and machine (e.g., tractor) production; and material incentive structures for workers. Mao, by contrast, prioritized agricultural development and reaffirmed that the commune was the institution that could modernize rural China and spread an ethos of collectivism. Over time, Mao argued, rural industrialization under the commune would reduce the differences in capital-to-labor ratios between the agricultural and industrial sectors, urban and rural areas, and mental and manual workers, thus further solidifying the “worker-peasant alliance” as the party’s political base.
The GLF famine halted Mao’s Ten-Year Plan for Agricultural Mechanization and caused the commune’s size and institutional mandate to be scaled back considerably. Vast quantities of poor-quality capital had been built, yet China still had little advanced agricultural technology; few world-class scientists and engineers; falling amounts of arable land; and a massive, growing pool of unskilled rural labor that still used ancient farming tools and techniques. To address these problems, new rules were promulgated between 1960 and 1962 in the Twelve Articles and in the Sixty Articles on Agriculture (see appendix C), respectively. When Deng and Peng drafted the latter document, which remained the operational guide to commune administration until decollectivization, they neglected to consult Mao. Consequently, when the draft was discussed at the March 1961 Central Committee work conference, the resentful chairman pointedly inquired: “Which emperor decided this?”41
These directives created and empowered the production brigade and the production team as property-owning subunits under the commune. In 1959, at the height of the crisis, the brigade level, which was about the same size as the 1957 HAPC, was created and took over accounting and remuneration from the commune level.42 Then, in 1961, the production team, which was roughly the size of the 1955 APC, became the institution’s primary accounting unit, under which the value of the workpoint was determined and income was distributed. Shrinking the size of the basic accounting unit—from the commune to the brigade and, ultimately, to the team—increased members’ ability to monitor each other’s performance, thereby lessening the free-rider problem.43 Jonathan Unger describes how team-based remuneration was introduced in Chen Village in Guangdong:
Each of Chen Village’s five neighborhoods was organized into a production team, and each was granted ownership and control over a fifth of the village land. This relatively small number of fifty households would be remunerated through the harvest yield from its own fields. To assure that the peasants would see a vested interest in working hard to improve their own livelihood, each of the five neighborhoods was further divided half a year later to form even smaller teams, each containing some twenty to twenty-five families.44
THREE FREEDOMS AND ONE GUARANTEE (SANZI YIBAO)
The primary objective of the Rightest Commune was to rapidly increase household consumption to end the GLF famine. There was substantial intraparty consensus that this required incentive-based remuneration schemes that closely linked income to work.45 The GLF free-supply system was ended, and remuneration was again based entirely on labor contribution. Communes were permitted to experiment with ability-based work grades and various performance-based workpoint rate systems, including time, task, and piece rates.46
The new rules were summarized as the Three Freedoms and One Guarantee (sanzi yibao): private household sideline plots, family-run cottage industries, free markets, and household production quotas.47 Of these measures, the latter was the most controversial and the only one that did not last beyond the early 1960s. To restore agricultural productivity in the aftermath of the GLF famine, Anhui Party Chief Zeng Xisheng applied a “designated land responsibility system,” and in 1961, Beijing officially blessed household contracting.48 Under the scheme, household income was closely tied to productivity. Each family was allotted fertilizer, seed, and a piece of land at the start of the growing season. Every plot was assigned a production quota, and after the harvest, the household would supply its crop to the team in return for a set number of workpoints. The team then would sell its crop to the state at a discount and could peddle any remainder at the local market. After covering its costs, the team distributed the remaining cash to its households based on their accumulated workpoints. Sometimes, the household could keep what it produced beyond its quota; other times, the team purchased the surplus and paid farmers a progressive workpoint bonus. Unger notes that in Chen Village, for instance, “an extra 150 pounds (of rice) over the quota would earn a family 200 extra workpoints.”49
Private household plots were allocated on a per capita basis and were generally adjacent to the family home. According to the Sixty Articles, these plots were supposed to make up 5–7 percent of each commune’s cultivated land. Households could plant whatever they wanted on their sideline plots, but vegetables, fruit trees, and tobacco were common. A family could also raise a limited number of pigs, chickens, ducks, and geese. The commune, brigade, or team would sell a piglet to a family on credit, provide low-cost veterinary or stud services, and be repaid when the pig was brought to market. This arrangement, which continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s, was a hybrid collective–private approach that placed both household production and rural markets under commune auspices, thus enhancing their legibility to the state.
Handicrafts, including basket weaving, embroidering, shoemaking, and tailoring, were common household sideline enterprises, as were fishing, hunting animals or snakes for food or medicine, silk production, beekeeping, and collecting firewood.50 If an enterprise grew to include multiple households, the team could establish a cooperative. The increased output that came from sideline production and rural household enterprises was sold for cash at local free markets. As early as September 1959, at the height of the famine, Beijing reopened these markets; by 1961, China had forty thousand rural markets, and in 1962, market sales accounted for one-quarter of all rural commodity transactions.51 Household farming expanded rapidly in 1961 and 1962, and in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, its value exceeded collective farming.52
As household enterprises and rural markets expanded, tensions emerged between the private and collective sectors. In the slack season, workers’ focus on private sideline plots increased output. During planting and harvest seasons, however, sideline production and cottage industries competed with the collective for scarce labor. Because the profits of the sideline enterprises went directly to the household, members began devoting more and more energy to these enterprises at the expense of collective production. To ensure that farmers prioritized the collective, cadres pressured them not to overemphasize the private sector.53 The following account, published in 1972, reveals how local cadres pressured households and how the latter resisted:
In 1960 … the pernicious doctrine of the free market and material incentives were being propagated by the capitalist roaders in the Party leadership. There was a free market about 20 lis (10 km) away from the commune. I came to learn that some of our members were going to the free market and selling the produce of their private plots at exorbitant prices. They also used to take their hens and eggs for sale. The gravest situation, in this regard, arose in one of our difficult and poor brigades, namely, Yang Fang. Members would take the tobacco grown on their private plots to the free market. The normal price of such tobacco was 1.5 yuan per catty, but they would sell it at 6 yuan per catty. The same was true of chickens. If the normal price was 1 yuan, they would get on the free market about 5 yuan. Now these were dangerous tendencies. Work for the collective was ignored in favor of work on private plots. Profit was put in command. One day I went to the free market to make an investigation. My comrades, who had gone there, disappeared when they saw me. I recognized one person and I asked him: “Why are you here?” He said: “I have come to buy some things.” This was not true. Then why did he lie? Because he felt that what he was doing was not right. That evening I went to this comrade’s house and I asked him: “What did you buy?” He answered: “Tobacco.” I asked: “Can’t you grow enough on your own plot?” He did not answer. Then we organized mass meetings in the brigade. We asked, should we rely on private plots or on the collective, should we depend on 5 percent or on 95 percent? All of us cadres went to the various teams and launched a mass education campaign. Gradually, fewer and fewer people went to the free market. We mobilized the masses and started a campaign for production. People’s enthusiasm was roused, and we reached a high tide in production.54
Under contracting, farming families with more workers or better land earned more, which allowed them to contract more land or raise more livestock, which, in turn, further increased their income. By contrast, households with young children or a weak, an old, or a sickly adult fared less well. But labor-rich households not only wanted to maximize their income but also to minimize risks, because at any time they too could face illness or lose a crop as a result of drought or pestilence.55 On the basis of interviews with Guangdong residents, Unger concludes that most farmers supported “a system of collective agriculture [that] provided a peasant with a cushion of sharing in broader economic resources than his or her family could manage on its own.”56 By 1963 and 1964, with the GLF famine a bitter memory, household contracts were designated a temporary measure and communes were instructed to return to predominantly collective systems of agricultural production and remuneration. The Three Small Freedoms, however, would remain an officially sanctioned part of the commune system until decollectivization.
THE RISE OF THE TRUST
After the GLF crisis abated, in late 1962–1963, agricultural modernization reemerged as a priority. In September 1962, the communiqué of the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth CPC Central Committee announced the following:
It is necessary to mobilize and concentrate the strength of the whole Party and the whole nation in an active way to give agriculture and the collective economy of the people’s communes every possible material, technical and financial aid as well as aid in in the field of leadership and personnel, and to bring about the technical transformation of agriculture, stage-by-stage in a manner suited to local conditions.57
In October, top political leaders and agricultural experts met to discuss implementation of this directive. Participants included Zhou Enlai, Minister of Agriculture Liao, Tan Chenlin (politburo agricultural specialist), and Chairman Nie Rongzhen and Vice-Chairman Han Guang of the State Science and Technological Commission. Among them were twenty-six agricultural specialists, thirteen of whom held doctorates from American or European universities. After the meeting, 1,200 agricultural scientists and technicians gathered for a six-week conference that set priorities and outlined a national agricultural modernization agenda.58
In June 1963, a People’s Daily article entitled “Exploration of a Few Problems Concerning Mechanization in Our Agriculture” identified three goals in agriculture: improving yields, guaranteeing grain production, and introducing modern agricultural equipment. To achieve these ends, the article advocated a targeted approach focused on select regions rather than one “carried out it in such an excessively scattered manner as to seem blooming everywhere. There should be concentration of forces to fight battles of annihilation, basically winning one battle before waging another.”59 At a conference of agricultural science and technology held in spring 1963, ten regions—among them Beijing, the Northeast, the Sichuan Basin, Lake Taihu near Shanghai, the Pearl River Delta in Guangzhou, and Hainan—were selected as demonstration sites.60
The Ministry of Agriculture was charged with building an agrotechnical extension station system from the ashes of the GLF. At least one professionally staffed extension station was created for every three or four communes to introduce new production techniques created at research institutions and agricultural universities. In fall 1961, the commune’s control over the acquisition and distribution of agricultural capital was transferred to newly created and functionally independent Agricultural Machinery Stations (AMS).61 Profit-minded SOEs administered by large monopolistic trusts supplied these AMSs, which managed machinery operation, leasing, and repair. By 1963, however, the AMS had begun to accumulate excess staff and losses, and they were told to become profitable within two years or risk facing closure. Cash rewards were given for reducing expenditures by lowering gasoline use, reducing staff, and cutting maintenance costs—a strategy that enhanced profits but not agricultural production.62
This agricultural strategy, which Liu and Deng supported, was predicated on centralization, gradualism, and profits. Despite Mao’s opposition at the Tenth Plenum, he was unable to block the adoption of this approach, and large, centrally controlled trusts were created to disburse capital and technological inputs. The trusts centralized administration and planning in the agricultural sector and targeted investments into regions that could afford them.63 Peng Zhen, then secretary general of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), explained the logic: “Use of machinery must be centralized. If ten or eight tractors are allocated to one county they cannot be well maintained. Tractors must be used in a centralized manner in counties one by one.”64 In October and December 1963, Liu promoted trusts to enhance central control over agriculture:
It is necessary to consider the trust method. Control must be exercised over manufacture as well as business management. Rather than set up truck and tractor departments, it is better to organize truck and tractor companies. The operating expenses for agricultural machines should also buy those companies…. In short, things must be organized and planned. Don’t promote things on your own with no regard for the Center. All local undertakings must be organized, and this is what is called socialism.65
A dozen or more trusts were established between 1963 and 1965, each with its own monopoly. During a meeting in December 1963, Liu instructed the agricultural machinery trust to maintain tight control over agricultural modernization:
It is good to have agricultural machinery supply centers. A big trust should be formed and supply substations should be set up along railroads and highways. Don’t set up stations according to administrative districts and don’t put them under the direct jurisdiction of counties. Local authorities must not lay their hands on such stations. They can make suggestions, but cannot allocate money for making such stations. All agricultural machines should be under the unified management of the supply company and factories should also be under its control. Tractors, irrigation supply companies, and factories should also be under its control. Tractors, irrigation and drainage machines, and oil supply should be under the unified management of the company.66
Between 1963 and 1965, trusts controlled agricultural modernization. In March 1964, the China Tractor and Internal Combustion Engine Spare Parts Company was created to manage thirteen factories producing more than five thousand types of spare parts. The next month, another trust, the China Tractor and Internal Combustion Engine Industrial Company, was similarly established. It absorbed more than one hundred local enterprises and operated eight regional branches in the Northeast, Shanghai, Tianjin, and other regions. By the end of 1965, a trust in Shaanxi controlled 120 local factories and AMSs, 6 major factories, 4 schools, 10 agrotechnical research and extension stations, and about 100 stores. The trust was, in fact, a rival institution to the commune, one that—rather than operating as an autonomous, self-reliant unit—answered directly to the central bureaucracy. As Peng, who gave the report at the National Conference on Agricultural Machine Work in July 1965, explained: “When we operate a trust and have the trust take over the work of the Party, we are in fact running an industrial party.”67
THE COMMUNE OR THE TRUST?
From 1964 to 1966, in the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution, a struggle was under way at the highest levels of the Chinese leadership between advocates of two alternative visions of socialism. Agricultural capital and technology—its manufacture, distribution, ownership, and management—played a central role in this struggle. Conflicts had emerged over which institution, the commune or the trust, would manage the production and distribution of agricultural capital and technology. These competing development strategies had been debated for years, but during the Cultural Revolution, these disagreements—previously contained within the party—exploded into every aspect of life. Although differences about which agricultural modernization strategy could best feed and employ China’s growing population were not the only cause of the Cultural Revolution, they were among the most important.
Liu’s strategy, which was based on the Soviet experience, was predominant before communes were established in 1958 and reemerged in the early 1960s after the GLF’s failure. It stressed using agricultural surpluses to support investments in urban heavy industry.68 As described previously, proponents favored the creation of SOEs under the auspices of centrally controlled trusts. Urban, suburban, and selected rural areas received the lion’s share of investment, whereas most rural localities were excluded. This process would, Liu argued, target inputs into areas where they would have the most benefit. The central bureaucracy set production targets and decided where and how to allocate agricultural capital and technology. Success depended on a cohort of educated and honest technocrats who could identify appropriate capital and technologies and then produce and allocate them efficiently on a massive scale.
The competing strategy, advocated by the Maoists, supported the commune as rural China’s primary economic and political institution. Under the slogan “self-reliance,” Mao argued that communes should retain their agricultural surpluses and invest them in physical and human capital. This concept was threatened by Liu’s support for a centralized and technocratic elite, which Mao feared would capture the surpluses created by agricultural modernization.69
The dispute between commune supporters and trust supporters was also tied to fears that agricultural modernization might exacerbate unemployment. In March 1965, Xiang Nan reiterated Bo Yibo’s concerns from a decade earlier that “in areas with little land and a large population” fears that machines would displace increasingly abundant rural labor produced a “controversy over the introduction of mechanization.”70
By the mid-1960s, some communes had the capital and technology necessary to free up enough rural labor to support rural industrialization. To study the implications of agricultural modernization on productivity and employment, two test sites were selected: Xinzhou, Hebei, and Nanhai, Guangdong. In 1965, both received electric irrigation and drainage equipment, threshers, cotton gins, diesel engines, grain-processing machines, oil presses, and tractors, and both test sites substantially increased output. Xinzhou reported a 56 percent increase in cotton output; self-sufficiency in grain production; and bumper crops in oil-bearing crops, tobacco, lotus seeds, hogs, and fish. Nanhai, despite a drought, increased rice production by 48 percent. Equally important, however, were the consequences for surplus workers, who, according to Xiang’s report, were reassigned to various productivity-increasing tasks:
After mechanization was introduced, how did Xinzhou and Nanhai handle their labor power thus saved? They promptly organized their labor power for more activities of intensive farming such as plowing, hoeing, tilling, accumulating manure, selecting seeds, and preventing insect pests. Laborers were organized to go up to the mountains or down to the river—for purposes of undertaking afforestation, animal husbandry, fishing, and developing a diversified economy. They were also organized for activities of capital construction on farms such as cutting canals, building roads, building reservoirs and dams, and leveling land.71
Most relevant to the commune–trust dispute, Xiang reported that by themselves, capital and technology bestowed from above were insufficient for agricultural modernization to be successful. Enthusiastic and capable local leadership and planning was required at each administrative level to ensure that the units that received investments would reallocate displaced field labor into productive tasks, rather than create more idle hands.72 In spring 1965, an inspection report on Zhouxin Commune in Guangdong agreed with the finding that insufficient planning had stoked unemployment fears among the risk-adverse farmers and prompted team leaders to resist adopting modern farming techniques:
When the production activities of basic-level production teams were unplanned there was the problem of superfluous labor power. To employ their surplus labor manpower, some production teams were willing to restore the use of the old-type water wheels for drainage and irrigation. They were not willing to use the newly built electric-operated drainage and irrigation equipment. This was a new problem, and a big problem that Zhouxin Commune had to solve urgently.73
Commune control over agricultural modernization was intended to facilitate increased agricultural productivity and help diversify the rural economy. Allowing local cadres to assign freed-up labor to sow new crops, including peanuts, onions, garlic, sugarcane, and bamboo, and to expand animal husbandry enhanced agricultural productivity. Commune and brigade enterprises were also encouraged to employ excess labor to manufacture farm implements, produce fertilizer, weave baskets, and make bricks (a policy response that is explained in chapter 3).
Trusts faced rising opposition in the summer of 1965. In August 1965, the National Agricultural Machinery Management Conference, although sharply divided, reinstituted commune control over agricultural modernization. It identified “collective operation” as a critical component, called for “integrating stations with communes and state-operated stations with collective-operated stations,” and ordered that agricultural capital investment be financed by collective accumulation, that is, workpoints. The conference did not seem to dampen Liu’s support for the trust, however, and in fall 1965, he christened another trust—the China Agricultural Machine Company.74
THE STRUGGLE OVER DAZHAI
In the early 1960s, Liu’s vision of large, centrally controlled trusts and small, dependent rural communes gained traction among high-ranking party members including Deng. To force continued debate on this and other topics beyond Beijing and into low-level venues nationwide, Mao first sought to gain control of the Socialist Education Movement (SEM, also known as the Four Cleanups) and later launched the Cultural Revolution. The commune, Mao argued, should introduce agricultural modernization funded by high savings rates and a remuneration scheme that rewarded workers for prioritizing collective over individual interests. After 1970, this remuneration methodology, known as Dazhai workpoints, became optional, although high savings rates and agricultural modernization would remain top priorities until decollectivization.
In 1965, Mao wrestled control over the SEM away from Liu and changed it from an anticorruption campaign into a broader strategy to fund agricultural modernization via the workpoint system. The center no longer would target investment into select areas based on estimated profitability. Under the Dazhai model, the process was locally funded, decentralized to commune control, and expanded nationwide. Although data from 1966 to 1969 are unavailable, the trajectory suggests that levels of income extraction began to increase gradually at this time and continued throughout the 1970s (see chapter 4, figure 4.8).
Between 1964 and 1975, the Dazhai Brigade and its party branch secretary-cum-vice-premier, Chen Yonggui, received more official media attention than any other commune subunit or cadre. The Dazhai Brigade was located in the eponymous Dazhai Commune in Xiyang County, Shanxi Province. Before 1949, it had been a “poor and backward” mountain village, composed of about 380 peasants living in handmade caves. Its hillside lands were infertile and vulnerable to poor weather and soil erosion. After years of toil and cooperation among farmers and cadres, the brigade reported that grain output had increased from 1,125 kilograms per hectare (kg/ha) of cultivated land before 1949, to more than 6,000 kg/ha in 1964. This upsurge in grain productivity gained Dazhai the “model production unit” label, and that year, Chen served as Shanxi representative to the Third NPC.75
In October 1964, as Dazhai began its rise to national prominence, a central government Four Cleanups work team was dispatched to verify its production reports. The work team took control of the brigade and questioned the “unnatural phenomenon” of unity between the cadre and poor and lower-middle peasants. For two months, the team met with peasants urging them to “expose the inside story,” and they subsequently accused brigade cadre of falsifying grain reports. To investigate these claims, the team spent two months interviewing households, checking the grain stores, and conducting land surveys. Following their investigation, in early December 1964, the work team reclassified Dazhai from an “advanced” unit to a “brigade with serious problems.” They concluded that “there are grubs in the staff of the red banner of Dazhai. If they are not eliminated, the banner cannot be raised high.”76 But, as Baum observes, the struggle over Dazhai’s reputation went far beyond the brigade itself:
Whether or not [Dazhai’s] production claims in the early 1960s were fraudulent, the fact remains that in late 1964 there existed a group of higher-level Party officials who suspected them to be fraudulent, and who acted upon that suspicion by having a work team thoroughly investigate the question of agricultural acreage and output.77
Liu and Deng were among the “higher-level party officials” who sought to use Four Cleanups work teams to impugn Dazhai and thus prevent the spread of Mao’s Dazhai model. Mao and his supporters, by contrast, maneuvered to gain control over the SEM and use it to promote their Dazhai-based conception of commune-led agricultural modernization. In this context, Mao backed Chen in his dispute with the Four Cleanups work team. After meeting with Chen on the sidelines of the NPC in mid-December 1964, Mao elevated him to the NPC Presidium and allowed him to address the delegates. According to Chen,
Chairman Mao was best able to understand us [the cadre of Dazhai], and he showed the greatest concern for us. At the crucial moment of the struggle, he received me in audience and gave me important instructions concerning work in Dazhai. To us this was the greatest encouragement, the most intimate concern, and the most powerful support.78
Under Liu, Mao believed that the SEM had been too centrally controlled, too detail oriented, and too focused on corruption. At the December 1964 NPC, Mao criticized its orientation and reordered its priorities at the subsequent CPC Central Committee Work Conference. Mao’s instructions were clear: “We must announce what we wish to do: production, distribution, and workpoints—these are matters to which we must devote ourselves.”79 After being infused with “Dazhai Spirit,” the Mao-led SEM began to promulgate a more extractive remuneration system to fund local investments in agricultural capital and technology.
Given his experience with the Dazhai Brigade, and because the Dazhai model’s successful implementation would require capable, untarnished commune and brigade-level cadres, it is not surprising that Mao warned the Four Cleanups work teams against hastily accusing local leaders of corruption and ordered them to focus on only those anticorruption efforts that increased agricultural productivity: “Four Cleanups means cleaning up a few people. Where there is something unclean, clean it up; where it is clean, no cleaning up will be necessary. There must be some clean people! Where there are no lice on a person, how can you find lice?”80
Mao turned the SEM from an anticorruption campaign into one that promulgated the Dazhai model nationwide. On December 22, 1964, Premier Zhou praised Dazhai in his report to the NPC, called for its emulation, and summarized its successful model: placing politics in command and ideology in the lead, love for the country and the collective, and self-reliance and hard struggle.81 The ultimate gesture of public support for Dazhai came on December 30, when Chen’s picture appeared alongside Mao’s on the front of the People’s Daily. The article quoted the chairman’s instruction that agriculture communes should “Learn from Dazhai,” and the slogan soon swept the countryside.82
Phase 3: The Leftist Commune (1965–1969)
HUBEI’S MODEST PROPOSAL
The political powder keg between supporters of Mao’s commune-based approach and Liu’s alternative vision of a centrally administered agricultural sector controlled by trusts was ignited in January 1966 by a seemingly mundane proposal from the Hubei CPC Provincial Committee. To precipitate agricultural mechanization, the province requested permission to establish two factories to manufacture ten thousand 7-horsepower (hp) walking tractors and 20-hp riding tractors per year. Assuming that twenty-two thousand of its thirty-eight thousand production brigades could each use two tractors, Hubei leaders reasoned that widespread agricultural mechanization could be achieved in only five years.83
Mao approved the Hubei plan on February 19; then Liu rejected it on February 23. On March 11, Liu wrote to Mao that “the transmission of the Hubei Provincial Committee’s documents should be postponed.”84 The next day, Mao sent a letter to delegates at the National Industrial and Communication Work Conference proposing (as he had in April 1959) a three-step, ten-year plan for agricultural modernization via the commune.85 The letter criticized efforts to centralize control over agricultural modernization and instead advocated decentralization to local control:
[Agricultural modernization] must be carried out in the main by various provinces, municipalities, and regions on the basis of self-reliance, and the Center can only give assistance in the form of raw and semi-processed materials to places short of such materials. Local authorities must be given the right to manufacture some machines. It is not a good way to exercise too rigid control by placing everything under the unified control of the Center.86
The conference was the last time party leaders openly debated trusts. Soon afterward, against Liu’s wishes, the Hubei proposals were published, first on April 4 in the Canton Evening News, and then again in the People’s Daily on April 9, 1966.87 On May 7, 1966, Mao issued a vague directive permitting communes to open small factories.88 Then in July, on the brink of the Cultural Revolution, the CPC Central Committee convened the On-Site Conference on Agricultural Mechanization in Hubei (also known as the First National Conference on Agricultural Mechanization), which reached three conclusions affirming the Maoist line: (1) that agricultural mechanization must rely on the collective economy, (2) that it must rely on the local manufacture of machines and farm tools, and (3) that it must rely on small-size machinery. In October, these three points were published in the People’s Daily.89
In retrospect, the commune’s triumph over the trust seems to have been an inevitable result of Mao’s political victory over Liu during the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, by late 1966, with Liu and his supporters under criticism, the trust was roundly rejected and the commune was reaffirmed. Because trusts were inspired by Soviet institutions and promulgated by “China’s Khrushchev,” their Maoist opponents labeled them “revisionist”—an argument made by The People’s Daily on April 3, 1966:
In regard to production and technique, management, regulations and systems in our enterprises, shall we go our own way or copy from capitalism and revisionism? Shall we foster a collective spirit and a communist style, or cultivate bourgeois ideas? Shall we gradually narrow down the differences between town and country, workers and peasants, and mental and physical labor or preserve and widen them?90
But the debate went beyond ideology. Maoists opposed trusts because they would have exacerbated the “three differences”—differences between urban and rural life, between industrial and agricultural work, and between intellectual and manual work. The commune, by contrast, promised to manufacture, distribute, and utilize agricultural capital and technology in ways that would resolve these longstanding social cleavages.
Logistical considerations also contributed to the trust’s rejection. The objective of a large trust (not unlike a modern corporation) was to operate factories and warehouses at capacity while minimizing excess inventory and waste. To benefit from economies of scale in production, however, trusts required close coordination and timing to reduce transportation and storage costs. Ideally, large quantities of machines and inputs would be produced in coastal factories and transported via road or rail into the countryside. But efficient distribution would require an extensive infrastructure and logistics system, which China lacked. The inadequate transportation system would have predetermined which localities could, and which could not, receive agricultural capital and inputs. Using this approach, nationwide agricultural modernization would have first required a massive and cost-prohibitive expansion of transportation infrastructure.
Furthermore, militarily, any system that required integration and coordination over long distances was vulnerable in the event of war with the United States or the Soviet Union. The centrally controlled trusts, unlike communes, ran contrary to Mao’s People’s War strategy, which required a nationwide network of self-sustaining rural bases that could resist the enemy if they were cut off from the center during a conflict.
Provincial, prefectural, and county-level cadres, whose influence over agricultural development and budgetary allocations was threatened by trusts, also pushed back. Centralized production and administration, they believed, would deny most localities the positive externalities associated with modernization—that is, investments in local physical and human capital necessary for operation and repairs. They also opposed the targeted approach taken by trusts, which—even if successful—would have taken much longer to make modern agricultural inputs and technology available nationwide.
THE COMMUNE AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
After the Cultural Revolution began in August 1966, China promoted commune-led agricultural modernization continuously for more than a decade. Between 1966 and 1968, the commune gradually assumed ownership and management of agricultural capital. The transfer of farm machines from the state-run AMS to the commune occurred slowly. Lacking a Central Committee directive, as late as 1968, many AMS personnel remained reluctant to transfer machines. Beginning in mid-1968, however, articles appeared in at least ten provinces praising efforts to decentralize the administration of agricultural capital, and Mao’s 1958–1959 instructions on agricultural modernization were reissued. Such publications, some of which provided instructions on how to handle challenges that might arise during the transition, were unambiguous signals that the center wanted communes to take over agricultural modernization. In most cases, the transfer of agricultural capital was completed before the establishment of a provincial revolutionary committee, which generally occurred in 1969.91
The gradual transfer of agricultural capital from the AMS to the commune sharply contrasted with the hasty implementation of GLF communes a decade earlier. During the GLF, preliminary experiments had taken place in only four cooperatives outside Beijing and in Heilongjiang before they were rapidly expanded nationwide. By comparison, the 1966–1968 transfer process stressed intracommune planning and leadership rather than central directives. To ensure that agricultural capital was transferred to collective control in good condition, an evaluation team including experienced workers, cadres, and technical personnel was created to appraise each machine and farm tool one by one and to determine its appropriate price in light of its condition and current prices.92 One official publication described the considerations during handover of agricultural equipment to commune cadres in Lankao County, Henan as follows: “Aid was given to mountain areas with consideration given to poverty-stricken communes and teams. Rational distribution of agricultural machines and implements was made with consideration given to the terrains of the communes and teams, repair force and the technical state of machines and implements.”93
Between 1966 and 1968, the AMS were converted into three-in-one farm machinery management committees or stations. On the basis of its size and complexity, each machine or technology was matched with the appropriate subunit to achieve optimum economies of scale. Commune leaders controlled larger equipment and delegated smaller, more specialized items to their subunits. A commune, for instance, might operate a large tractor station, a multibrigade irrigation system, and a hydropower dam and its electric substations. A brigade might administer handheld tractors, smaller waterworks, and combined thresher-reaper machines to process grain or other farm products. The team could control semimechanized farm tools, a gas-powered wheelbarrow, and smaller, less complicated threshers and reapers.94
Three-level farm machinery management committees, which included cadre and technical personnel at the county, commune, and brigade levels, managed “scientific research” and repaired and allocated all agricultural capital within a given rural locality. Frequent team meetings, a hallmark of the commune, were used to ensure that households understood and consented to their leaders’ production plans and investments, which were underwritten using collective funds procured via the workpoint system. To oversee agricultural modernization, AMS personnel, who were originally state employees, were placed under commune leadership. In one commune, former AMS personnel continued to receive their state salaries and food rations for two years. In another, they received half their compensation according to the average workpoint value of all teams, and the other half from their production team.95 In the late 1960s, agricultural capital had been transferred to communes, yet it remained scarce relative to the large and rapidly expanding labor force.
In 1966, China had abundant rural labor and a scarcity of land and capital. To counter these trends, a nationwide plan to shift investment from heavy industry toward agricultural capital and infrastructure was announced as the Cultural Revolution began at the Eleventh Plenum of the CPC in August 1966.96 The basic points stipulated that agricultural modernization would receive “special priority,” semimechanization would be introduced as a stopgap measure, farm tools would be locally manufactured, and communes and their brigades (rather than a state bureaucracy, companies, or trusts) would own and manage all agricultural machinery. Although in 1967 and 1968 the Cultural Revolution disorder delayed the implementation of these policies in some regions, once farm machines had been transferred and the new local leadership in the form of the Revolutionary Committees was created in 1969, investment began to flow into agricultural modernization at an unprecedented rate.97
In 1969, with Mao’s support, Premier Zhou took charge of agriculture and recommitted China to a nationwide, commune-led agricultural modernization program. The Ministry of Agriculture and its provincial and county organs were instructed to develop an ambitious nationwide scheme to maximize land productivity using agricultural capital and technology. In September and October 1969, conferences on agricultural modernization were held in a number of provinces, including Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Anhui, Shandong, Hunan, and Guangdong.98 At these gatherings, agricultural experts and local cadre shared their experiences and were informed about the nationwide agricultural modernization program. The production team would remain the basic accounting unit (i.e., the level at which collective income was distributed), and the workpoint remuneration system could again include various task, time, and piece rates as well as other ad hoc remuneration methods. The October 1969 issue of Red Flag printed an article emphasizing agricultural capital investment and technical improvement: “Every county must positively set up a farm machine repairing station and manufacturing plants, establish an industrial network for serving agriculture, and contribute greater strength to speeding up the technical reform of agriculture.”99
Radio Shanghai’s November 10, 1969, broadcast proclaimed the beginning of a “new stage of realizing agricultural mechanization” and emphasized the importance of making investments in agricultural capital and technology to increase rural productivity and strengthen the worker-peasant alliance:
Today, our worker-peasant alliance has entered the new stage of realizing agricultural mechanization. Agricultural collectivization without agricultural mechanization cannot consolidate the worker-peasant alliance because it is impossible for such an alliance to rest forever on two diametrically opposed material and technical foundations. The development of agricultural production lies in mechanization. The realization of agricultural mechanization in turn will consolidate agricultural collectivization and eliminate differences between workers and peasants, towns and countryside, mental and manual labor.100
Each of the Green Revolution Commune’s antecedent institutions—the MAT, the APC, the GLF Commune, the Rightist Commune, and the Leftist Commune—was distinguished by its size, mandate, remuneration system, and approach to agricultural modernization. Yet, from the introduction of the Sixty Articles in 1962 until decollectivization began in 1979, the commune retained four structural consistencies: a three-tier administrative structure, control over all local political, economic, and administrative affairs, distribution of household income (except for private household plots) as a portion of collective income, and the prioritization of grain and pork production.
The GLF Commune was an ambitious but deeply flawed and short-lived institution. After the devastating famine, the commune was redesigned to address China’s most pressing concern: rising demand for food and employment caused by increasing population growth rates. Between 1962 and 1964, Liu, Deng, and other right-leaning leaders expanded remuneration to include material incentives, rural markets, household sideline plots, cottage industries, and contract farming, known as Three Freedoms and One Guarantee. Although contract farming (i.e., the one guarantee) would later be disavowed, the political inertia created by the tolerance of household sideline plots, cottage enterprises, and rural markets (i.e., the three freedoms) predisposed the institution to tolerate them until its abandonment.101 Together, they provided an intracommune market-clearing mechanism that ensured that excess resources would not be wasted—a cardinal sin in Maoist China.102 Furthermore, they also helped commune leaders to identify the most profitable areas for investment based on local market prices.
The Leftist Commune phase (1965–1969) introduced the Dazhai model, which extracted an increasing percentage of household savings to fund local investments in agricultural capital. Although Dazhai workpoints, which rewarded workers for placing collective above individual interests, were deemed optional after 1970, the model’s commitment to investment-led growth remained. At this time, hundreds of millions of commune members were indoctrinated with Maoism, which for reasons explained in chapter 5, increased their tolerance for resource extraction. By 1969, China had transferred agricultural machines back to commune control, reformed the agricultural research and extension system, and institutionalized a remuneration system that could fund Mao’s nationwide, ten-year agricultural modernization scheme.
The next chapter examines the Green Revolution Commune (1970–1979), the institution’s final phase and the culmination of a decade-and-a-half of nationwide experimentation and elite political struggles. Changes made during each of the commune’s three preceding phases were integrated into the 1970s commune, and many remained in effect until its dissolution. The Three Small Freedoms, for instance, remained under the Leftist Commune and coexisted, albeit sometimes uneasily, alongside Mao’s virulent collectivist ideology.
