Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune

Implementing the household land contract scheme nationwide would not have been possible without Deng Xiaoping’s support. The fact that it did not meet much resistance from central leaders had a lot to do with Deng’s attitude. Though he did not comment much on the issue, he always showed support for views held by me, [Hu] Yaobang, and Wan Li.

The notion that people at the lowest levels of society can unite to effect nationwide economic and political change is intoxicating. Chinese and foreigners alike are captivated by the story of the poor farmers who cast off the yoke of commune oppression: “disorganized, atomized individuals [who] behaved as if acting in concert.”² People power, particularly for those raised in liberal democracies, just feels right. Unfortunately, however, especially in autocracies, the poor, weak, and vulnerable cannot effect peaceful, systematic change. The “truth,” especially as it is presented to foreigners in official Chinese publications and meetings, is manipulated from above, such that, as Frederick Teiwes has observed, Western studies that adopt “the logic of official (or quasi-official) Chinese viewpoints” have serious “shortcomings.”³ The conventional view of commune abandonment detailed in chapter 1—that “the household responsibility system, enthusiastically embraced by peasants, spread throughout rural China [and] the central government acknowledged reality and officially endorsed the new system”—is among the more striking instances of foreigners echoing official Chinese interpretations.⁴

Decollectivization, like collectivization itself, was initiated by China’s leaders and was cast as a popular movement to lend it legitimacy. Households and low-level cadres could complain or drag their feet while implementing distasteful policies, but they could not coordinate dissent beyond their team, let alone bring down the entire nationwide commune system. The Chinese proverb that “on the top there is policy and on the bottom there is pushback” was as well known to Chinese farmers then as it is today. Indeed, among the dozens of former commune members interviewed for this study, none foresaw the institution’s abandonment before it occurred in their locality, let alone believed that they or their local leaders had played any role in the decision to decollectivize. One former militia leader in Henan was unequivocal: “The order to decollectivize came from the provincial level.”5 In short, Chinese farmers chose neither to collectivize nor to decollectivize—just as they were forced into communes in 1958, they were forced out of them beginning in 1979.

An anti-commune faction led by veteran party leader Deng Xiaoping dismantled the commune for a distinctly political reason—that is, to gain control over China from a rival pro-commune faction led by Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. Among the three distinct political factions that existed on the eve of Mao’s death, the commune was the primary policy disagreement. Ultimately, its fate was not decided by its economic performance or by grassroots demands, but rather by the political preferences of the winner of the factional struggle: Deng. To lend legitimacy to decollectivization, Deng’s strategy to abandon the commune intentionally created, and then publicized, the perception that the farmers themselves initiated it. He encouraged allies at the provincial level to promote household farming, privatize commune enterprises, and expand rural markets and then broadcast farmers’ improved living standards—first via provincial-level official press outlets and later using the national media. Recalling his decollectivization strategy in 1992, Deng said that many people had opposed a return to household-based agriculture, but rather than attack them, he waited until households began enjoying higher levels of consumption before expanding the practice nationwide.⁶

Act I documents the struggle to control the commune that took place in the two years preceding Mao’s death. The big question throughout 1975 until Mao’s death in September 1976 was who would lead the Dazhai movement. In a speech to the 3,700 participants at the September 1975 Dazhai Conference—the largest such gathering since 1962—Jiang publically challenged her rivals to revise the Sixty Articles (see appendix C), which had been the working regulations for the commune since 1962. In late 1975 and early 1976, as Deng worked to rehabilitate leaders ousted during the Cultural Revolution, he again came under criticism, and in April 1976, Jiang and Hua teamed up to remove him from office. At the end of Act I, in the summer of 1976, it seemed the radicals and their vision of an institution committed to “class struggle” had prevailed.

Act II opens with the death of Mao and the purge of the radicals, also known as the “Gang of Four.” As Deng remained on the sidelines, Hua’s loyalists took charge. They advocated their commune-based investment strategy and lobbed a continuous barrage of public attacks at both the radicals and reformers. At this point, Hua was working to fill Mao’s big shoes, publicize his support from Mao, and identify the critical policy difference between him and Deng—that is, Hua’s support for the commune, and Deng’s longstanding opposition to it. Meanwhile, throughout 1977 and 1978, Deng’s reform faction built support for decollectivization at the provincial level and gradually increased pressure on Hua’s loyalists, who held sway in Beijing. The year 1978 was one of mixed messages, with loyalists calling for more agricultural investment under the commune, and Deng’s faction advocating for more household consumption and team autonomy.

Act III concludes the story of the commune. The struggles of 1978 culminated in Deng’s skillful manipulation of the Democracy Wall Movement to unseat his rivals at the Third Plenum of the National Party Congress’ Eleventh Central Committee that December. After the crackdown on Democracy Wall, and under the guise of calling for greater team autonomy, improving the people’s livelihoods, and ensuring continuity under the Sixty Articles, Deng’s reform faction promoted the reintroduction of household production contracts as a means to increase consumption. Once reintroduced, household-based remuneration (known as baochan daohu) destroyed the commune’s ability to extract resources for capital investment. These incremental steps toward decollectivization culminated at the Party Secretariat Work Conference in September 1980, with the release of Official Document No. 75, “Several Issues on Further Strengthening and Improving the Agricultural Production Responsibility System” (see appendix C). Promoted by Deng, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, and Wan Li, among others, and over the objections of pro-commune provincial leaders, this document, more than any other single official directive, crippled the commune and spread decollectivization nationwide.

Meanwhile, Deng’s reformers worked gradually and systematically to erode Maoism, the collectivist ideology that bound commune members to each other and the institution. At first, this was done by leveling indirect criticism at Maoist precepts (e.g., attacks on volunteerism and household austerity), then by placing Mao’s wife and close associates on trial, and ultimately by aiming direct criticism at Mao’s “erroneous left theses” in the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party” released on June 27, 1981. To replace Maoism, the reformers substituted improved household living standards as the determinant of political legitimacy under the slogans “practice is the sole criterion of truth” and “to get rich is glorious.”

Finally, with its remuneration system destroyed, its “god” humanized, and its collectivist ethos and economic theories publically discredited, the commune collapsed. Collectively owned land, capital, and enterprises were distributed (primarily to local cadres-cum-entrepreneurs), prices for agricultural products were increased, the commune and its subunits were eliminated, and workpoints were abolished. The result was an increase in household consumption, a fall in rural investment, and annual fiscal deficits each year from 1979 to 1985.⁷ Throughout decollectivization, this commune death dividend bought Deng and his political allies the time they needed to unseat their rivals and consolidate power. The last step was codified in October 1983, when the township was officially reestablished and the union of economic, political, and administrative authority that had existed for a quarter century under the commune was formally dissolved (see appendix C).

Factions (zongpai) in Chinese politics are informal networks of interdependent personal relationships that are neither fixed in membership nor immutable in ideology and policy preference.8 Over time, factions change. However, between 1975 and 1979, the period when the commune’s fate was decided, three principal political factions operated within the Communist Party of China (CPC) leadership: the “radicals,” led by Jiang, the “loyalists” led by Hua, and the “reformers” led by Deng. Before Mao’s death in September 1976, the radicals and the loyalists coexisted in an uneasy pro-commune coalition. After the radicals fell in October 1976, however, the struggle between the loyalists, who supported the commune, and the reformers, who did not, determined whether or not the institution survived.

Both the radicals and the loyalists supported the commune, but they had different visions for it. The radicals wanted to use the institution, first and foremost, to promote the idea of “class struggle” and to prevent a “capitalist resurrection” in the countryside. They believed that the 1970s commune was too capitalist, and they wanted to extinguish private plots, household cottage industries, and rural markets (i.e., the Three Small Freedoms), which, they argued, had produced dangerous “capitalist tendencies.” On the other end of the political spectrum were the reformers, who wanted to forsake the commune entirely and return to household-based agriculture. In the middle were the loyalists, who supported the existing commune and the policies adopted at the 1970 Northern Districts Agricultural Conference (NDAC), which suppressed household consumption in favor of investments in capital and technologies that increased agricultural productivity. They fought to preserve and expand the existing commune system—first against attacks from Jiang’s radicals on the political left, and then from Deng’s reformers on the right. Simply put, the loyalists won the first struggle against the radicals in 1976, but they lost the second one against the reformers in 1978–1979. Ezra Vogel summarizes the loyalist position:

Until he fell from power, Hua Guofeng continued to support the Dazhai model and to advocate improving agricultural production by introducing new seeds, more chemical fertilizers, as well as water pumps, tractors, and other machinery. His goal was within five years to have a large tractor in every brigade and a small tractor in every production team.⁹

Led by Vice-Premier Hua, the loyalist faction (dubbed the “whateverists” because they were loyal to whatever Chairman Mao advocated) sought to preserve Mao’s legacy and the commune system. This faction included a combination of senior party and military leaders who had either risen during or survived the Cultural Revolution. Among them were Beijing Mayor Wu De; Beijing Military Region Commander Chen Xilian; Mao’s long-time personal bodyguard and Politburo member Wang Dongxing; Vice-Premier and Politburo member Ji Dengkui; and, most important for rural policy; Vice-Premier and Politburo member Chen Yonggui. Chen, it is worth recalling from chapter 2, served as party secretary for the famous Dazhai Brigade in the early to mid-1960s and was the person most closely associated with the 1970s commune’s investment-driven growth strategy.¹⁰

First Vice-Premier Deng led a motley group of reformers—which Richard Baum has dubbed the “rehabilitated cadres faction” or the “practice faction”—whose “most vital common characteristic was their intense opposition to the Cultural Revolution, its leaders, and its legacy.”11 Prominent reformers included Guangdong Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang; Minister of Railways Wan Li; Vice-Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee Bo Yibo; Director of the State Council’s Political Research Office Deng Liqun; Vice-Premier Wang Zhen; and former Vice-Premier Chen Yun, who remained a Central Committee member. Hu Yaobang, the former head of the Young Communist League, remained on the political sidelines in 1975, but he became a leading reformer after his rehabilitation. The reform faction was bound together by its members’ shared experience of abuse during the Cultural Revolution and—after the fall of the radicals in late 1976—by their opposition to Hua’s “loyalists” and the commune.¹²

Although they held diverse political and economic views, members of Deng’s faction did agree on one overarching policy prescription: decollectivization. Achievement of this objective required the adoption of two subpolicies—one political and the other economic—each of which subverted the commune: an end to Maoist ideological indoctrination, and a return to the household as the basic accounting unit of rural China.

Between 1970 and 1975, the commune enjoyed broad political support and was not a major source of conflict in elite politics.¹³ In June 1970, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry was established, and from August to October, the NDAC was held to promote Mao’s commune-based development strategy. As the conference reconvened in Beijing, Mao’s instructions to the delegates appeared in the People’s Daily: “If Xiyang [county, the locale of Dazhai] can do it, why can’t you do it? If one year isn’t enough, isn’t three years enough? Four or five years should surely be long enough.”¹⁴ From August to September 1971, Hua convened a national conference on farm mechanization, and in early 1972, he directed the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to prepare another major Dazhai Conference. In July 1974, the ministry held a preparatory meeting, and a year later, in mid-August 1975, Hua and Chen Yonggui led the small group that developed the conference agenda. The conference objectives, which did not include revising the Sixty Articles, were as follows:

Between January and September 1975, in the run-up to the Dazhai Conference, the radicals and the loyalists struggled for control over the movement. That January, the Fourth NPC reaffirmed the protection of household sideline plots outlined in Sixty Articles as a necessary adjunct of the socialist economy. It also promulgated a new constitution, which at Mao’s request included the Four Big Freedoms: the right to speak out freely, to air views fully, to hold debates, and to write big-character posters.¹⁷ At this time, just as in the period from 1970 to 1971, “economic development superseded class struggle,” observes Zweig.¹⁸

The radicals responded in February 1975 with a series of editorials in the People’s Daily criticizing the Three Small Freedoms, which they claimed produced dangerous “capitalist tendencies,” and advocating the eradication of rural markets.¹⁹ In the spring of 1975, the loyalists responded with articles in Red Flag magazine and other outlets that supported rural markets, backed the team as the basic accounting unit, and opposed restrictions on private plots and household sidelines.²⁰ On July 2, 1975, Jiang sent a letter to the All-China Conference on Professional Work in Agriculture calling on delegates to promote class struggle and avoid revisionism. At the conference, these comments were trumpeted by Wang Hongwen, thus setting the stage for a confrontation between the radicals and the loyalists at the 1975 Dazhai Conference, which began on September 15.²¹

The 1975 Dazhai Conference, which included the party chief from every county in China, became the venue for a showdown over the commune. Like the NDAC five years earlier, it began with a visit and conference at Dazhai Brigade in Dazhai Commune, Xiyang County, Shaanxi, between September 15 and 22, and concluded with meetings among top central agricultural officials and provincial leaders in Beijing from September 23 to October 15. As the conference got under way, Mao told former British Prime Minister Edward Heath that he was anxious to increase economic development.22

Deng, Hua, and Jiang each sat at the dais and addressed the delegates. To avoid any surprises, all county-level leaders’ reports were scripted in advance by writing groups.²³ Senior PLA representatives also attended the conference, and in the summer of 1975, the navy’s political department established a Dazhai study group. “Whatever the precise mix of belief, calculation, or simply following orders, this reflected a broad elite predisposition to accept the legitimacy of the Dazhai model,” Teiwes and Warren Sun explain.²⁴ Figures 7.1 and 7.2 depict images from the 1975 Dazhai Conference.

According to Wu Jicheng, a senior member of the leaders’ guard under Wang Dongxing who was present at the conference, the radicals sought to co-opt “the red banner of Dazhai” to serve their own purposes. Rather than attack Dazhai, Jiang—recognizing Mao and Zhou’s strong support for the conference—instead sought to capture the movement by “attacking Hua and Dazhai for selling out to revisionism.”25 To serve her political ambitions, Jiang aimed to change the commune’s focus from economic development (i.e., capital construction and agricultural productivity) to revolutionary politics (i.e., class struggle and antirevisionism).²⁶ “I’ve come to fight the revisionist line,” she reportedly told participants, “Dazhai is lagging behind politically and following the revisionist line.”²⁷

Jiang’s attacks began on September 12, three days before the start of the conference, when she gave an unscheduled two-hour lecture to county leaders. In using the novel The Water Margin to launch a metaphorical attack on Deng, Jiang was suggesting that he was quietly working to make Mao a “figurehead.”²⁸ “He acted according to the principle of ‘concealment.’ That is, concealing his fierce appearance and waiting for the opportunity to come,” Jiang reportedly said, adding: “The enemy is buried deep within the Party in disguise. Therefore, don’t underestimate the discussion of this novel or take it as a matter belonging only to literary and art circles. The purpose of criticizing Water Margin is to warn the people about capitulators inside our Party.”²⁹

When the conference began, Jiang “severely disturbed” the proceedings with repeated calls to turn Dazhai into a revolutionary political struggle against the “capitalist class.” On the first day of the conference, she gave another speech that emphasized the threat of a “capitalist restoration” in the countryside and that warned delegates that “peasants still cherish the ideology of a petty agricultural economy.”³⁰ To “thoroughly get rid of the pernicious influence of Liu Shaoqi’s revisionism,” Jiang placed an emphasis on “class struggle” and advocated for a “mass rectification campaign among the people.” In Mao’s name, she called for revising the Sixty Articles to strip the commune of its capitalist vestiges: “The capitalist restoration in agriculture is dangerous. It is reported that in some production teams there still exists the revisionist policy of the Three Small Freedoms and One Guarantee (sanzi yibao). Isn’t it strange?”³¹

Jiang’s attack on the One Guarantee (i.e., yibao or household contract farming) was significant because it relinked that policy, which Deng had advocated in the early 1960s, but Mao had condemned, with the Three Small Freedoms (sanzi), which both Mao and Hua had supported and had remained national policy under the Sixty Articles since 1962. In this way, Jiang sought to tie the loyalists to the reformers and to cast both as “revisionists” and “capitalist-roaders.” When word of Jiang’s comments reached Mao, he prohibited them from being distributed: “Don’t publish the talk, don’t play the recording or print the text,” he reportedly instructed.³²

Although Mao had ordered Deng to represent the government at the conference, this directive was probably his way of coercing Deng’s compliance with the conference’s commune-led, investment-based development agenda.33 In his September 15 opening speech, Deng identified agriculture’s importance as one of the Four Modernizations, and called the Dazhai Conference the most important meeting of leading cadres from various levels since the 1962 conference of seven thousand cadres that ended the Great Leap Forward (GLF).³⁴ As Deng began his remarks, Jiang interrupted him, saying, “Vice-Premier Deng was sent by Chairman Mao, who asked him to deliver some remarks.”³⁵ Jiang’s comment implied that Deng did not attend the Dazhai Conference by choice. In a similar ploy, although she knew the provincial party secretaries were not invited to the first part of the conference, Jiang criticized them for failing to attend and for paying insufficient attention to agriculture.³⁶ Jiang interrupted Deng several more times during his speech, including once to dispute his claim that in some prefectures and counties grain production had not reached pre-1949 levels.³⁷ Deng maintained his composure and did not respond publicly to Jiang’s provocations.³⁸

Whether or not Deng had wanted to do so, he could not openly oppose Mao’s beloved Dazhai model in 1975. His desire to keep a low profile while he rehabilitated his allies required that he support the campaign as a “political fact of life, a requirement of political survival,” Teiwes and Sun explain.³⁹ Deng, who together with Liu Shaoqi, had tried and failed to undermine Dazhai in 1964–1965, attended at least four sessions of the 1975 Dazhai Conference. On September 15, Deng delivered his “important remarks,” on September 27 and again on October 4, he delivered his speech “Things Must Be Put in Order in All Fields,” and on October 15, he was present when Hua gave his full conference report.⁴⁰ In his September 27 and October 4 speeches, Deng advocated increasing household consumption: “Commune members’ income is very low, and some owe debts. Under these circumstances, can we be satisfied?”⁴¹ He also called for party consolidation, urged delegates to link Maoism to “practice,” and warned against an overemphasis on “class struggle” at the expense of “scientific development.” Deng’s speech cautioned:

Later, during the small high-level meetings in Beijing, several reformist provincial-level leaders (including Zhao Ziyang and Zhejiang’s Tan Qilong) disputed whether the Dazhai model should be expanded to the county level and whether brigade-level accounting should be introduced. Unable to stomach criticism of his cherished Dazhai model, Chen Yonggui lost his temper and a shouting match ensued. Under these circumstances, the issue of brigade accounting was shelved, but expansion of the Dazhai model to counties was not.⁴³

On October 15, Hua gave the final conference report titled “Mobilize the Whole Party, Make Greater Efforts to Develop Agriculture and Strive to Build Dazhai-Type Counties” (see appendix C). This report, which was published in the People’s Daily and circulated throughout the party as Document No. 21, stridently advocated the Dazhai model of investment-led growth and said that the existing three-level commune structure and the use of the team as the basic accounting unit were “in harmony with the growth of the productive forces in the countryside.”⁴⁴ Document No. 21 remained the loyalists’ foremost agricultural policy directive until February 1978, when Hua announced his ill-fated Ten-Year Plan.

Hua’s twin objectives were to build a winning political coalition and “trigger a ‘high tide’ in rural capital construction.”⁴⁵ He promoted “the superiority of the people’s commune as an institution large in size and with a high degree of public ownership,” which he compared favorably to “features of small production.” “The people’s communes have great vitality and are promoting the development of all kinds of undertakings in the countryside.”⁴⁶ Under them, Hua explained, “better conditions have been created for the development of mechanized farming. In the course of farmland capital construction, the collective concept and sense of organization and discipline of the peasants are greatly enhanced and they think more of the collective and show greater zeal in building socialism.”⁴⁷

Hua’s speech called for expanding the existing commune-led investment strategy to improve “grain, oil-bearing crops and pig production.”48 He praised the expansion of agricultural investment that had taken place under the Dazhai model “since 1970”; reiterated Mao’s call for the complete mechanization of agriculture by 1980; and advocated expanding “capital construction,” “animal husbandry,” “side-occupations,” and “training a mighty contingent of people for mechanized farming.”⁴⁹ To “raise labor productivity in agriculture,” Hua was unequivocal that the commune had been a great success and should remain China’s foremost rural institution: “The expansion of commune and brigade-run enterprises strengthens the economy at the commune and brigade levels; it has effectively helped the poorer brigades and teams, accelerated farm production, supported national construction and speeded up the pace of mechanization in agriculture.”⁵⁰

Echoing the 1970 NDAC report (see appendix C) and evoking notions of the worker-peasant alliance, Hua said more commune and brigade enterprises and agricultural mechanization would

bring into play the role of the people’s commune as an organization that combines industry, agriculture, commerce, education, and military affairs, in enabling the commune to display its superiority—big in size and with a high degree of public ownership—and in narrowing the difference between town and country, worker and peasant and between manual and mental labor.⁵¹

Politically, unlike Deng, Hua supported Mao’s collectivist ideology, self-reliance, and household austerity as components of a collectivist ethos that bound members to “the country and the collective,” noting that “Dazhai’s fundamental experience lies in its adherence to the principle of putting proletarian politics in command and placing Mao Zedong Thought in the lead, to the spirit of self-reliance and hard struggle and to the communist style of loving the country and the collective.”⁵²

Immediately after Hua’s speech, Jiang confronted him and Chen Yonggui and accused them of revisionism. “To put it mildly, that’s a revisionist report!” she reportedly said.⁵³ The radicals’ resistance to Hua’s vision of the commune intensified as they sought to wrest control of the Dazhai movement. They viewed Hua’s emphasis on production, capital construction, and mechanization as support for the repugnant “theory of the productive forces.”⁵⁴ Yao Wenyuan prevented Hua’s speech from being printed in the Red Flag and claimed that it “does not study how to attend to revolution in rural work.”⁵⁵ He instructed the People’s Daily not to “play up Dazhai in everything you print.”⁵⁶ In February 1976, Yao ordered the national media organs under his control to criticize Hua’s agricultural and rural industrial development program, and Zhang Tiesheng traveled to Dazhai to give a speech challenging Hua’s approach.⁵⁷

Meanwhile, in Shanghai, Zhang Chunqiao prevented party work teams from implementing Document No. 21, reportedly arguing, “who knows whether the education in the basic line is correct or not!”58 In April, Chen reiterated Hua’s position at a conference in Wuxi, Jiangsu, but at agricultural conferences in May in Suzhou and June in Shanghai, local cadres criticized him for abandoning class struggle.⁵⁹ Despite radical opposition, in the spring of 1976, under the old slogan “Grasp revolution by promoting production,” Hua and Chen worked to maintain control over the Dazhai Campaign and to implement its investment-based agenda nationwide.

In late 1975, Deng came under substantial political pressure from Mao’s fraying coalition of radicals and loyalists. In late November, Deng declined Mao’s request to draft a Politburo resolution supporting the Cultural Revolution, thus precipitating the beginning of the “Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend” Campaign and his removal from managing day-to-day government affairs.⁶⁰ On February 17, 1976, Deng was accused of rendering class struggle secondary instead of taking it as the “key link.”⁶¹ On March 2, he was attacked in the People’s Daily as “the unrepentant man on the capitalist road; who is the origin of the rightist wind of reversal of verdicts, the man who opposed collectivization and communization.”⁶² A week later, Deng was decried as “the person who blew the rightist wind to reverse verdicts, who before the great Cultural Revolution followed the revisionist line of Liu Shaoqi.”⁶³

On April 5, 1976, the traditional Chinese day of mourning known as Qingming, thousands of Beijing residents descended on Tiananmen Square to honor Premier Zhou, who had died with little fanfare in January. The mourners were brutally suppressed by security forces aligned with the leftists and loyalists, who then collaborated to frame Deng for the protests and, with Mao’s approval, had him removed from all official and party posts.⁶⁴

On April 7, based “on the proposal of Chairman Mao,” the Politburo announced two resolutions. The first promoted Hua from “temporary and acting” premier to permanent status, and appointed him to the Politburo Standing Committee as “first Vice-Chairman.” The second “dismissed Deng Xiaoping from all posts both inside and outside the Party, while allowing him to keep his Party membership so as to see how he will behave in the future.”65 Richard Thornton highlights the split between the radicals and loyalists that quickly emerged after Deng’s ouster:

Up to this point, Mao had managed to hold together his diverse leadership coalition, including its “radical” element. The Politburo decisions of April 7 in particular could not have been made had the so-called Gang of Four been in opposition to Mao. Yet even as Mao was elevating his chosen successor to a position of prominence, his coalition began to crumble.⁶⁶

As Deng waited on the sidelines, he penned a letter to Hua congratulating him on his ouster of the radicals and pledging his support for Hua as Mao’s successor.⁶⁹ Doubtful of Deng’s sincerity, Hua worked to distinguish himself from his rival by demonstrating Mao’s support for him, indicating his own support for the commune, and painting Deng as a revisionist. At Mao’s funeral on October 10, Hua, flanked by members of his loyalist faction, publicly attacked Deng and linked him to both Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao:

Chairman Mao himself initiated and led the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which smashed the schemes of Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and Deng Xiaoping for restoration, criticized their counterrevolutionary revisionist line, and enabled us to seize back that portion of leading power in the party and state they had usurped.⁷⁰

Hua’s funeral message warned that “anyone who tampers with Chairman Mao’s directives … and anyone who practices splittism or engages in conspiracies is bound to fail.”⁷¹ Then, during a massive anti-Gang rally on October 24, Wu De announced: “We shall continue to criticize Deng.”⁷² Two days later, on October 26, Hua ordered the party’s propaganda apparatus to criticize the Gang of Four and Deng simultaneously. Criticisms of Deng continued for more than a month, culminating with his condemnation by Wu De in a speech to the NPC Standing Committee on November 30, 1976.⁷³

Another way Hua sought to discredit Deng was by approving the publication of the fifth volume of Mao’s Selected Works, which contained a previously unpublished speech from 1956 entitled “On The Ten Major Relationships.” After its release in December 1976, which coincided with the Second Dazhai Conference, the official press extensively quoted the speech within which Mao laid out two alternative economic development strategies: “One is to develop agriculture and light industry less, and the other is to develop them more. The second approach will lead to a greater and faster development of heavy industry and, since it ensures the livelihood of the people, it will lay a more solid foundation.”74

Hua closely aligned himself with Mao’s development strategy and reminded everyone that Deng had supported the other position. He created this association by releasing an editorial note Mao penned in 1971 titled “The Fundamental Way Out for Agriculture Lies in Mechanization,” which illustrated the differences between Mao and Liu Shaoqi (and implicitly Deng). The article revealed that Mao had taken the position that collectivization should precede mechanization, whereas Liu had taken the opposite view. “Chinese leaders reading the article knew perfectly well that Liu and Deng were the two leaders who had opposed Mao’s strategy, even though Deng’s name was not mentioned,” Thornton explains.⁷⁵

With Jiang and Deng absent from the scene, the loyalists triumphantly convened the Second Dazhai Conference, which ran from December 12–27, 1976. In his conference report, Chen Yonggui, now in charge of agricultural policy, condemned the Gang as ultra-rightists, and sought to attract residual radical support to the loyalist camp. Although the politics of Chen’s message were tricky, his policies remained identical to those he and Hua had advocated the year before: “Further consolidate and expand the collective economy of the people’s communes, and make a leap from small-scale farming with animal-drawn farm implements to large-scale mechanized farming,” said Chen, continuing that “it is necessary to give full scope to the people’s communes’ advantages of being bigger in scale and having more developed socialist nature than the former agricultural co-ops and consolidate and develop the people’s commune system.”⁷⁶ Furthermore, Chen, citing Mao, called for expanding commune and brigade enterprises:

While he enjoyed the upper hand in late 1976 and 1977, Hua continued to advance his commune-based rural development agenda. In the summer of 1977, he chaired the Rural Capital Construction Conference in Xiyang, Shaanxi, where Chen gave another speech calling for field and water conservation projects to be built to increase collective productivity, not for “narrow personal gains and losses.” To create a “high tide” of capital construction, Chen argued for expanding competition among local units, with a cadre’s redness to be determined by his enthusiasm for collective production. By October 1977, more than 390,000 such projects were under way, and by mid-November more than 80 million laborers were involved.⁷⁸

On December 11, 1977, the People’s Daily heralded yet another major conference calling for the acceleration of agricultural investment to increase output, and announced that “our historical experience proves that each new leap forward in the national economy is invariably preceded by a new leap forward in agriculture.”⁷⁹ Following the conference, on December 19, 1977, the Central Committee published its “Outline Report for the Politburo on the Working Forum for Popularizing Dazhai Counties,” which called for a “high tide” in agricultural mechanization and rural capital construction, and a “mini-Great Leap” in agricultural output, particularly in grain production.⁸⁰ The report also “recognized that team accounting was appropriate for most of rural China,” but it offered an important olive branch to residual radicals by calling on party committees at all levels to “create the necessary conditions” for an eventual transition to brigade-level accounting.⁸¹

In January 1977, after an investigation led by Ye Jianying, Deng’s offense was downgraded from an “antagonistic contradiction” to a “contradiction among the people.” Deng could now be rehabilitated, although the Politburo was deadlocked on what posts he should be given. Hua then directed each of the two hundred–odd Central Committee members to provide a written opinion on Deng’s case. This directive not only delayed Deng’s reinstatement, but also gave Hua a list of Deng’s political supporters. By early March, the reports were in, and between March 7 and 21, 1977, the Politburo contentiously debated Deng’s case. Li Xiannian, Wang Zhen, Xu Shiyou, Wei Guoqing, and Chen Yun all supported Deng’s restoration, whereas Hua and his loyalists dissented. To resolve the deadlock, Ye Jianying brokered a compromise whereby Hua agreed to make two concessions: he would agree that Deng’s work in 1975 had included both “successes and shortcomings” and that the April 4 Qingming protests had started as a “reasonable” peaceful homage to Premier Zhou. For his part, Deng agreed to reiterate his support for Hua, acknowledge his own shortcomings in 1975, and not besmirch Mao’s legacy. Hua then agreed to reinstate Deng to the four posts he had held in 1976: first vice-chairman of the CPC, vice-chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, first vice-premier, and PLA chief of staff.⁸⁵

After his return, however, Deng began quietly pursuing a half-dozen strategies to promote the same “household responsibility system” he and Liu Shaoqi had advocated in the early 1960s. In the name of improving rural living conditions, he initiated incremental changes alongside restatements of the commune’s essential governing document, the Sixty Articles, which Deng himself had helped draft in 1961. Deng also mobilized provincial-level supporters to pressure the center, called on teams to resist extraction from the commune and brigade, used Hua’s attempts to gain residual radical support in late 1976 and early 1977 to paint the loyalists as radicals, used Hua’s unswerving adherence to Mao to call his judgment into question, questioned the value of Mao’s collectivist ideology, and humanized the once venerated Chairman by identifying his shortcomings.

The decision to reinstate Deng in spring 1977 triggered a struggle over the provincial party secretaryships. The leadership of at least fourteen provinces hung in the balance, and when the smoke cleared, Hua had inserted his supporters into only two positions, whereas Deng’s coalition had gained control of eleven provinces and kept Zhao Ziyang in Sichuan.86 Deng and his provincial-level allies then proceeded to “create a rightist wind that popularized the policy changes even before central leaders, still strongly influenced by proto-Maoists, formally accepted them,” Zweig explains.⁸⁷ Another result of the Dengist faction’s control over the provinces was the expanded criticism of Hua in some regional press outlets. In Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan, Deng’s political powerbase, provincial press outlets painted Hua as a radical leftist.⁸⁸ For his part, Hua controlled the central media organs, which continued to condemn the Gang of Four and implicitly criticize Deng.

To boost household consumption, the reformers advocated piece rates, the Sixty Articles, and team autonomy. In fact, these policies had continued unabated in nearly all communes throughout 1976 and 1977, but such proclamations suggested that they were under attack by Hua’s “ultra-leftist” Dazhai model. Wan Li, who became party secretary of Anhui in June 1977, was the most brazen critic of the commune. After touring Anhui’s poorest areas in the summer of 1977, Wan advanced the “Provincial Party Committee Six-Point Proposal,” which recommended that (1) production teams, depending on the circumstances and as long as production responsibilities were met, allow certain tasks in the field to be assigned to small workgroups or individuals; (2) the autonomy of production teams be respected by higher levels; (3) quotas assigned to the production teams and individual members be reduced; (4) produce be distributed to members according to their work, not their needs; (5) grain allocation reflect the interests of the nation, the collective, and the individual; and (6) households be permitted to work on their own private plots and sell the produce at local markets.89 Although points 4, 5, and 6 merely affirmed existing policy, points 1, 2, and 3 challenged the investment-driven growth strategy advocated by Hua and Chen Yonggui a year earlier at the Second Dazhai Conference.

In November 1977, Wan Li assembled Anhui’s county party secretaries and instructed them to implement his six-point proposal. Against pushback and “lingering concerns,” Vogel notes, Wan stood firm and declared that “any methods or policies that interfere with the advancement of production are wrong.”⁹⁰ He won the day, and in early 1978, under the guise of the Sixty Articles, Anhui implemented the proposal, which reduced the size of agricultural work units and permitted contracted production to households. According to Vogel, Deng approved Wan Li’s six-point proposal:

At the time of Wan Li’s six-point proposal, national policy explicitly prohibited contracting down to the household and Wan Li could not oppose national policy. But when Deng saw the Anhui Party Committee’s six-point proposal, produced under Wan Li’s leadership, he, like a number of other officials, immediately affirmed the value of the experiment.⁹¹

Meanwhile, in November 1977, Jilin fixed its commune extraction rates at a maximum of 10 percent, and in Sichuan, Zhao Ziyang promulgated a provincial document affirming the Sixty Articles. Gansu followed suit the following March.⁹² In December 1977, the People’s Daily praised Zhao for introducing a provincial initiative advocating the distribution of more collective income to the household.⁹³ The goal, as Zhao explained on Sichuan provincial radio, was to “press the center (the commune and brigade) and guarantee the two ends (the household and the state).”⁹⁴ On February 1, 1978, Deng met Zhao in Sichuan, told him about Anhui’s six-point proposal, and encouraged him to follow Wan’s lead. Zhao, who had already begun similar experiments, quickly developed his own twelve-point program.⁹⁵ By reaffirming the Sixty Articles, Deng’s provincial-level supporters appeared to be reinforcing existing policy. In hindsight, however, is it clear that these proclamations provided political cover for them to promote household-based farming.⁹⁶

Writings and speeches like Wan’s six points, which conveyed the team’s interests in ways that placed them at odds with the commune and brigade, tore the institution’s subunits apart. Teams were told that they would be better off without the commune and brigades extracting their income. The critique of Mao’s advocacy of selflessness (i.e., voluntarism) reasoned that farmers should support team rather than brigade ownership. “The reformers gave team leaders a stake in the reforms,” Zweig explains, thus intentionally creating the misperception that decollectivization was initiated at the local level.97

Collective remuneration was attacked under the ostensibly innocuous slogan “Carry out rural economic policy” (luoshi nongcun jingji zhenge). To increase household consumption at the collective’s expense, Deng’s provincial-level supporters encouraged households to emphasize their private plot and cottage enterprises. In early 1978, even as Hua remained supreme in Beijing, opposition to the loyalists and support for household contract farming was galvanized using official provincial press outlets, public speeches, and provincial party meetings. In January and February 1978, the People’s Daily reemphasized the role of the private sector in the rural economy under the Sixty Articles.⁹⁸ In April 1978, the People’s Daily commended the party committee in Qidong County, Jiangsu, for ordering its communes and brigades to return 19 million yuan they had extracted from their teams.⁹⁹

In March 1978, Deng told the Political Research Office at the State Council that he supported “payment according to labor” and opposed Dazhai workpoints.¹⁰⁰ In Red Flag, Wan Li advocated the “responsibility system” (zirenzhi). To improve worker oversight, Wan proposed that subteam workgroups, akin to the Mutual Aid Teams of the mid-1950s, be assigned specific tasks and rewarded a fixed number of workpoints.¹⁰¹ This policy turned compensation into a private, rather than a public, process—one that was a small step from direct cash payments to households for agricultural products. Household contract farming eliminated the need for team meetings to evaluate worker performance and disseminate Maoism. Without regular interaction with other team members and exposure to a common collectivist ideology, commune members’ sense of togetherness withered. Although many commune and brigade leaders were placated by the privatization of collective property, household contracting faced stiff resistance from committed local cadres whose power to extract and invest team resources was eroded. Peter Nolan and Gordon White observe that the “provisions for team autonomy, propaganda paeans to enterprising households and individuals, and a diminution of the power of higher levels to interfere” increased household income at the expense of local enforcement capacity.¹⁰²

At the national level, Chen Yonggui, still vice-premier in charge of agriculture, accused Wan Li of secretly promoting family farming, and in March 1979, the People’s Daily called for “maintaining the three-level ownership structure with the team as the basic accounting unit” (i.e., the commune) and criticized those who supported a return to household-based agriculture.103 Wan, emboldened by support from Deng, replied to Chen: “You say you are speaking from the Dazhai experience; I say Dazhai is an ultra-leftist model … You go your way and I’ll go mine … Don’t impose your views on me and I won’t impose mine on you. As for who is right and who is wrong, let’s see which way works best.”¹⁰⁴ At another meeting in Beijing, Wan responded bluntly to another critic by comparing his physical appearance to a fat pig and shot back: “You have plenty to eat. The peasants are thin because they do not have enough to eat. How can you tell the peasants they can’t find a way to have enough to eat?”¹⁰⁵ In June 1979, Deng advised Wan to be less confrontational: “You don’t need to engage in debates, just go ahead, that’s all. Seek truth from facts.”¹⁰⁶

The loyalists’ counteroffensive looked strong in February 1978 at the Second Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, when Hua announced the long-delayed Ten-Year Plan (1976–1985), which was issued at the Fifth National People’s Congress later that month. On the basis of a document drafted by the State Council in 1975, this ambitious investment plan marked the last time the commune and the Dazhai model were prominently featured in an official government directive. The plan included Hua’s familiar calls to expand agricultural investment to increase production and “consolidate and develop the people’s communes.”¹⁰⁷

We must mobilize all party members, greatly expand agriculture, deeply develop the movement to Learn from Dazhai in Agriculture and to universalize Dazhai Counties, consolidate and develop the people’s communes’ collective economy, administer state farms well, and build agriculture based on large-scale adoption of modern technology and mechanization, so that agricultural production has a big development.¹⁰⁸ (Italics added for emphasis)

The Ten-Year Plan and its investment-based growth strategy caused what Baum has called a “flying leap” in agricultural investment in 1978 (see figure 3.1). In response, Deng’s supporters, including Chen Yun, called for a sharp reduction in capital investment and an increase in household consumption. Economic theorist Wu Jiang argued that the most important goal of a socialist society was to “secure the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the people.”¹⁰⁹ Under pressure from reformers, Hua’s Ten-Year Plan was aborted, and the CPC Central Committee approved plans to increase household consumption on June 23, 1978. These plans were adopted as the “Movement to Lighten the Peasants Burden” and were promulgated as a directive and announced by the People’s Daily on July 5, 1978.¹¹⁰ The campaign was also known as the Movement to Study Xiangxiang Experience, a reference to a county 15 miles from Mao’s birthplace and under Xiangtan Prefecture, Hunan, where Hua had once been party secretary. Observers might have been forgiven for suspecting that Hua, not Deng, had promulgated the initiative.¹¹¹

In the run-up to the Third Plenum, Hua supported the proinvestment policies adopted at the 1970 NDAC and affirmed at the 1975 and 1976 Dazhai Conferences. Deng, by contrast, was quietly “initiating major agricultural reforms in the provinces” intended to increase household consumption and reduce capital investment.¹¹² These diametrically opposed lines made 1978 “a year of uncertainty,” Zweig explains.¹¹³ Contradictory and inconsistent instructions from the center and province encouraged communes in some areas (e.g., Jilin, Shaanxi, and Jiangsu) to experiment with brigade-level accounting, while others (e.g., Sichuan, Anhui, and Gansu) were encouraged to experiment with household contracting. The climax of incoherence came at the State Council’s July 1978 Rural Capital Construction Conference, which—under the banner of the Sixty Articles—advocated both increased investment and team independence. Stuck between pro-commune and anti-commune lines, delegates called for a high tide of capital construction, while also forbidding the expropriation of team labor, material, and capital. They emphasized the need to improve existing capital and condemned careless new projects. Under these circumstances, Zweig observes, risk-adverse local cadres generally concluded that “it was safest to avoid any changes.”¹¹⁴

Deng stoked the discontent of the Democracy Wall Movement, which was ostensibly protected under the Four Big Freedoms, and used it to undermine the loyalists and their Maoist ideology. The protest movement, which was in full swing during the December 12–22, 1978, Third Plenum, “was allowed to go on for so long because it was used in the leadership power struggle and it was helpful to Deng,” Merle Goldman explains. “Deng took advantage of this dissent from below—the demands of the Democracy Wall activists for political and economic reforms—to help oust the Maoists.”¹¹⁶ Goldman describes Deng’s tactics:

When wall posters appeared on Xidan Wall in the fall of 1978 denouncing Mao and other officials associated with the Gang of Four and demanding political and economic reforms, Deng, in interviews with foreign journalists in late November 1978, expressed approval of the posters. As these journalists then relayed Deng’s approval to the demonstrators at the wall, their numbers swelled into the thousands and wall posters spread to other walls in Beijing and to other cities.¹¹⁷

After Deng secured his political position at the Third Plenum, however, he “no longer needed the grassroots support of the Democracy Wall Movement.”¹¹⁸ On March 29, 1979, Deng had Wei Jingsheng, one of the movement’s leaders, arrested. Wei had published an article entitled “Do We Want Democracy or a New Dictatorship?” in which he warned that without political reform, Deng would become a new dictator. The day after Wei’s arrest, Deng publicly announced the Four Cardinal Principles and reminded all Chinese that “we practice democratic centralism not bourgeois individualist democracy.”¹¹⁹ Six months later, at a one-day show trial, Wei was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

In early 1979, Deng called for the abolition of the Four Big Freedoms, which had been reiterated in the State Constitution at the Fifth NPC the year before, so that, as Ye Jianying had argued, “China would in the future be able to avoid fascist rule.”120 On February 29, 1980, the Fifth Plenum proposed their elimination. This decision was approved at the Third Plenum of the Fifth NPC in September 1980, and the Four Big Freedoms were omitted from the 1982 constitution.¹²¹ In place of Maoist politics, Deng promised more consumption. As Maurice Meisner observes, “The Deng government set forth no new social and political ideals to strive for, but rather simply promised a better material life.”¹²² Deng’s reformers promoted household consumption as the new yardstick of success, thus subverting the austerity-driven agricultural development strategy of the loyalists.

The December 1978 Third Plenum began the loyalists’ fall from power and marked the beginning of the end for the commune.¹²³ Years before household quotas were formally accepted in Beijing, Deng’s provincial-level protégées (e.g., Wan Li and Zhao Ziyang) had encouraged this practice, and Deng used the pressure they created to push the center to accept household farming. For this reason, formal policy approval and guidelines for decollectivization lagged behind grassroots implementation, thus creating the erroneous impression that the center was responding to demands from below. As Zweig explains:

Informal policy mobilization kept the pace of decollectivization in parts of rural China well ahead of formal policy guidelines; while reformers in Beijing fought to authorize one form of the responsibility system, they concurrently experimented with more decentralized forms in localities under their control. As soon as the opposition acceded to one step on the path to decollectivization, new demands for another change arose from localities, keeping the pressure on the policy process in Beijing until collective agriculture was dismantled.¹²⁴

The February 1980 Fifth Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress officially changed the political leadership of China: loyalists Chen, Ji, Wu De, and Wang Dongxing, who had resisted decollectivization, were replaced with reformers.125 In a public ceremony, Deng posthumously readmitted Liu Shaoqi into the CPC and denounced his purge as “the biggest frame-up our Party has ever known.”¹²⁶ The Secretariat was reestablished and Hu Yaobang was placed in charge. Zhao Ziyang became premier, and Wan Li, who had initiated decollectivization, was named vice-premier, director of the State Agricultural Commission, and the member of the party Secretariat in charge of agriculture. To prevent Hua from influencing rural reforms, control over agricultural policy was removed from the Politburo (where Hua still retained some support) and placed under the authority of the reformist-controlled Secretariat.¹²⁷ “As head of the State Agricultural Commission, Wan Li, with Deng’s permission, could extend the model of household production nationwide,” Vogel explains.¹²⁸

According to Vogel, in early 1980, Wan sought Hu’s support for a central government resolution affirming the practice of household contracting: “[Wan] told Hu that it wouldn’t work to have people at lower levels surreptitiously practicing contracting down to the household. Instead, they needed the full support of the top party leaders. Wan Li thus suggested to Hu Yaobang that they convene a meeting of provincial party secretaries to give clear public support for the policy.”¹²⁹ On May 31, 1980, in a meeting before the conference of provincial secretaries, Deng for the first time publicly supported the household contract responsibility system. Yet, even in these baldly revisionist remarks, Deng insisted that the impetus for reform came from below and reassured readers that the collective would endure:

Now that more flexible policies have been introduced in the rural areas, the practice of fixing farm output quotas on a household basis has been adopted in some localities where it is suitable. It has proved quite effective and changed things for the better. Fixing output quotas on a household basis has been adopted in most of the production teams in Feixi County, Anhui Province, and there have been big increases in production … Some comrades are worried that this practice may have an adverse effect on the collective economy, I think their fears are unwarranted.¹³⁰

In the summer of 1980, more than one hundred staff of the Central Committee and the State Agricultural Commission traveled across China to promote household farming. Then, between September 14 and 22, the first party secretaries of all provinces, cities, and autonomous regions convened in Beijing for the Party Secretariat Work Conference. On September 27, 1980, the delegates approved Central Document No. 75, “Several Issues on Further Strengthening and Improving the Agricultural Production Responsibility System” (see appendix C). Document No. 75, which Wan had drafted based on Deng’s initiatives and statements between April 2 and May 31, approved household contracts and, according to Zweig, “signaled the demise of collective agriculture in China.”¹³¹ On Christmas Day 1980, Deng publicly endorsed the directive.¹³²

At the September 1980 conference, Deng and his allies downplayed the momentous changes they were advancing. Wan called on Du Runsheng, deputy director of the State Agricultural Commission, to proclaim the success of household contracting in Anhui and to champion its nationwide implementation. In his speech on September 14, Du used the phrase “contracting production down to the household” (baochan daohu) because, Vogel explains, “this term reassured conservatives that there was still a local unit that was assigning responsibility.” Although the objective was to quietly approve decollectivization, the adoption of Document No. 75 proved contentious.133

Some provincial secretaries—Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Anhui—supported household contracting, yet a majority of provincial leaders refused to embrace it as a national policy. After Du finished his September 14 remarks, leaders from Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jilin, Shanghai, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, and Heilongjiang remained silent.¹³⁴ But after Yunnan First Secretary An Pingsheng and Guizhou First Secretary Chi Biqing both declared they would implement household farming, an argument erupted among the delegates. During Chi’s speech, Yang Yichen of Heilongjiang interrupted to protest that he would not permit household farming. During a break in the proceedings, however, Chi and Yang agreed that although Heilongjiang could take the “broad road” of collectivization, Guizhou would take the “single-plank bridge” of baochan daohu. The next day, Yang recognized “the need to start from realities and not prescribe a single way [or] one model.”¹³⁵ Teiwes and Sun explain the profound consequences of this seemingly mundane acknowledgment: “In this, Yang accepted the reform principle of different measures for different conditions, the argument that underpinned the development of baochan daohu.”¹³⁶

Still, many provincial leaders remained unconvinced that household farming would facilitate agricultural modernization. These divisions are reflected in Document No. 75, which reaffirmed that “the collective economy is the unshakable foundation of our country’s advance to agricultural modernization” and called for preserving the production team and strengthening its “core functions” in areas where household farming was adopted.137 Under the principle of considering local conditions and in the interest of “the needs of the peasants,” Document No. 75 approved household farming as a temporary measure in poor, backward, and mountainous areas.¹³⁸ Yet, as Teiwes and Sun explain, the document did not give households a choice:

Nowhere did Central Document No. 75 state that baochan daohu could simply be initiated where the masses wanted it, but it was replete with references to the desires of the peasants. The argument was that this new policy directive was not introducing a top-down process, but rather it was a process in which peasants’ choice was to be respected. “Floodgates” notwithstanding, Central Document No. 75 provided considerable scope for officials seeking to extend household farming.¹³⁹

Document No. 75’s essential role was that it gave reform-minded provincial leaders license to decollectivize: “All in all, Central Document No. 75 was a skilled policy document that gave provincial leaders the flexibility they wanted, and created a new significantly enlarged opening for household farming when anything more direct would not have been approved by the conference.”¹⁴⁰

Although Wan Li had drafted Document No. 75, he had remained on the sidelines during the conference. Wan was initially dissatisfied with the final version, but Hu Yaobang reassured him that significant progress had been made. On the sidelines of the conference, Hu had held heart-to-heart talks with the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee in which he condemned the leftist mistakes of the Dazhai movement. Two months after the conference, the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee submitted a self-examination that was circulated as Central Document No. 83, along with instructions to eliminate all remaining Maoist ideological barriers to reform.¹⁴¹

After the conference, Hu Yaobang asked Du Runsheng to develop a plan to persuade residual loyalists to accept decollectivization. Support from provincial-level leaders was essential. In Guangdong, for instance, household contract farming was introduced within three months after Ren Zhongyi replaced Loyalist Party Secretary Xi Zhongxun in November 1980.¹⁴² Throughout 1981, Hu traveled to the Northwest, Wan went to the Northeast, and Du visited several provinces to remove remaining opposition to decollectivization.¹⁴³ “Some provinces still sent people out to prevent the implementation of household land contracts, and at that point we issued administrative orders to stop them,” Zhao Ziyang explains in his memoir.¹⁴⁴

More than any particular policy directive, Deng’s efforts to rehabilitate older cadres and cultivate reform-minded younger provincial and national leaders, led by the “reform trinity” of Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, and Wan Li, were essential to accomplish decollectivization. As Zhao later recalled: “Implementing the household land contract scheme nationwide would not have been possible without Deng Xiaoping’s support. The fact that it did not meet much resistance from central leaders had a lot to do with Deng’s attitude. Although he did not comment much on the issue, he always showed support for views held by me, [Hu] Yaobang, and Wan Li.”145 In his autobiography, former Vice Premier Li Lanqing, also underscored Deng’s leadership over the reform process: “Deng was the irreplaceable nucleus of the nation’s central leadership. To put it another way, the reform and opening would have been out of the question without Deng’s third and final comeback to power.”¹⁴⁶

During the Deng era, “ultra-leftism” became a political heresy. In late 1976 and early 1977, Hua and other loyalists had paid lip service to radical policies (e.g., brigade-level accounting) to bolster their coalition in the wake of the Gang of Four’s fall. Hua had hastened to distinguish himself from Deng by vowing “to support whatever policy decisions were made by Chairman Mao” and “unswervingly follow whatever instructions were given by Chairman Mao.”¹⁴⁷ He commissioned a new official hagiography to advance his claim as the guardian of Mao’s collectivist ideology. Posters hailing Mao’s selection of Hua as his legitimate successor appeared around the country, including the statement, which Mao had written on a note to Hua in April 1976, “With you in charge, I am at ease.”¹⁴⁸ Songs and dances were commissioned to glorify Hua’s past exploits and to act as paeans to his popularity and compassion for the people. Slogans glorifying the “Wise Leader Chairman Hua” were painted on buildings across the countryside (see figure 7.4).¹⁴⁹

These decisions proved rash, however, as they associated the loyalists with radical policies and blind leader worship. They also locked Hua into a Maoist defense for all future policy decisions and precipitated the pejorative moniker “whateverists,” which Deng skillfully juxtaposed with the reformers’ slogan “Practice is the sole criterion of truth.”¹⁵⁰ Deng used Hua’s unconditional adherence to Maoism to paint him as a radical, question his judgment, and call Mao’s collectivist ideology into question.

In his memoir, Li Lanqing (a reformer) recalled that, in 1977, Deng “on more than one occasion, spoke openly in opposition to the ‘two whatevers.’” Hua, by contrast, “believed that the Gang’s downfall was ‘yet another great victory of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ and that China ‘should carry through to the end the continued revolution under the proletarian dictatorship.’”¹⁵¹

In July 1977, just after his third revival, Deng addressed the Third Plenary Session of the Tenth Central Committee. During this speech, Deng proposed an alternative yardstick to Maoism that could be used to gauge the correctness of policies: “seek truth from facts” (shishi qiushi). Although unobjectionable in itself, the phrase, which Mao had coined in his Yan’an writings, became the essential rhetorical weapon used to attack the loyalists and undermine Mao’s legacy.¹⁵²

In August 1977, at the Eleventh Party Congress, Deng again identified the need to “restore and carry forward the practice of seeking truth from facts.”153 The slogan’s formal acceptance by the party at the Third Plenum meant that no truths were unassailable and that Maoist ideology and the leader’s decisions, including his selection of Hua, could be questioned. Zweig explains the significance: “Reforms could not be judged on their political orientation; if they improved the peasants’ situation they should be followed. Economic outcomes replaced political slogans as the criteria of policy evaluation.”¹⁵⁴

In this way, the reformers’ coalition first declared that improved household consumption was the goal, then met that goal through the commune death dividend—that is, the distribution of collective property and reduced extraction rates, which were made possible by commune abandonment. Increased procurement prices, approved at the Third Plenum, also helped increase household consumption. The price of grain sold to the state was increased by 20 percent, whereas surplus crop prices increased by 50 percent.¹⁵⁵ Using an index of state procurement prices for grain taking 1950 as the base year, grain prices grew from 222 to 222.8 between 1971 and 1977, and then jumped from 224.4 to 271.8 between 1978 and 1979 and to 283.5 in 1981.¹⁵⁶

Improved living standards validated the effectiveness of the reformers’ polices, provided the window of prosperity they needed to unseat their rivals, and solidified their hold on political power. An unwelcome consequence of increased procurement prices and lower taxes on rural households, however, was a large national budget deficit. After a surplus of 10.1 million RMB in 1978, China’s budget deficit was 170.6 million RMB in 1979, and fiscal deficits persisted until 1985.¹⁵⁷

The Third Plenum jettisoned many of Mao’s ideas and polices and called for a “reversal of verdicts” against those who had been persecuted under his rule. It did so, however, without any formal judgment on the leader himself. Rather, a torrent of implicit criticism of the chairman appeared in official publications and was reinforced by the explicit accusations of democracy activists, returned Sent-Down youth, and others that had suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout 1979–1981, in the lead-up to Mao’s formal assessment, his reputation and collectivist ideology were under continuous attack. In a speech on October 1, 1979, Ye Jianying commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China by condemning the Cultural Revolution as a decade-long calamity (1966–1976) perpetrated by “ultra-leftists.” Mao was not mentioned by name, but instead “the personality cult” (sometimes called “modern superstition”) was denounced and Mao Zedong Thought, rather than the chairman alone, was redefined as the creation of the entire party.158

The Third Plenum also established the Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) chaired by Chen Yun, with Hu Yaobang as vice-chairman. “The hundred-member CDIC was tasked with exposing and rectifying remnant ultra-Leftists, ‘factionalists,’ ‘anarchists,’ and ‘smash-and-grabbers’ within party organizations,” Baum explains. Much credit for Deng’s triumph belonged to Chen Yun’s efforts to mobilize veteran party cadres and to Hu’s network of supporters inside the Communist Youth League and the Central Party School. Baum explains the essential role cadres in these party organs played in vanquishing pro-commune loyalists:

It was they who had spearheaded Deng’s “criterion of truth” campaign; they who led the drive to desanctify Mao and demystify “whateverism”; they who drafted the Third Plenum pathbreaking communiqué; and they who, along with such veteran party theorists as Liao Gailong, most ardently championed systemic structural reform.¹⁵⁹

By 1980, the entire commune era was open to public scrutiny. Document No. 75 called for eliminating the “ultra-leftist line,” and beginning on November 20, 1980, the radicals—including Jiang and Mao’s onetime secretary, Chen Boda—were subjected to a show trial orchestrated by the Politburo. The trial in Beijing became the model for a series of less-publicized provincial trials against “followers of the Gang of Four.” In Henan Province alone, after the loyalists fell, more than 1 million Maoists were detained and some four thousand were given prison sentences following closed-door trials.¹⁶⁰ For Deng and his allies, the trials were revenge for decades of mistreatment. But, as Meisner explains, “the most important political purpose of the highly ritualized spectacle was to raise the question of the role of Mao Zedong in the events for which his widow and onetime comrades stood condemned as criminals.”¹⁶¹ Jiang affirmed Mao’s complicity by continually evoking him in her defense, and the chief prosecutor drove home the point in his closing statement, arguing that the Chinese people “are very clear that Chairman Mao was responsible … for their plight during the Cultural Revolution.”¹⁶²

On June 27, 1981, a day after accepting Hua’s resignation as party chairman, the Sixth Plenum of the CPC Eleventh Central Committee issued its assessment of Mao, formally known as the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC.” The document, which was drafted in accordance with Deng’s suggestions, sought to preserve Mao as a symbol of revolutionary and nationalist legitimacy while also condemning his “personality cult” and “erroneous left theses.” It decried the Cultural Revolution as a decade-long debacle “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” Most important for the hundreds of millions of Chinese still living in communes, the document denounced Maoist collectivism as “utopian,” “unscientific,” and “divorced from reality,” resulting in economic theories that “overestimated the role of man’s subjective will.” In a final blow to the commune’s collectivist ideology, Deng humanized the infallible chairman by estimating that his Cultural Revolution had been 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong.163

After the 1981 Resolution, the once sacred artifacts of Maoism (e.g., posters, statues, busts, paintings, and writings) became trinkets of a bygone faith. According to Meisner, the de-deification of Mao “provided a necessary ideological sanction for the abandonment of Maoist socioeconomic policies in favor of market-oriented economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping and others were preparing.”¹⁶⁴ In rural areas, discrediting Mao and his ideology destroyed the collectivist ethos that bound commune members to the leader, to each other, and to the institution. With Mao and his collectivist ideology and development strategy discredited, unity of purpose among commune members was destroyed and the rural social structure that had existed for more than two decades collapsed.

By October 1981, more than half of all production teams were contracting work to households. Central Document No. 1, issued in January 1982, declared household contracting as “socialist,” and by year’s end, 98 percent of rural households worked on contracts.¹⁶⁵ The final blow came in the October 1983 “Circular on Separating Government Administration and Commune Management and Setting Up Township Government” (see appendix C), which once and for all ended the unity of political, economic, and administrative affairs that had existed under the commune and reestablished the township government. It declared:

The battle was over, and the commune had lost. Between 1980 and 1983, depending on the province, the Chinese commune—under which a fifth of the world’s population had lived for a quarter century—was silently abolished. Newly established township governments took over administrative responsibilities, and the communes, brigades, and teams were dissolved. Rural households no longer had a venue for political participation or collective coordination for agricultural investment. They could keep what they earned, and consume as they liked, but they were also atomized and subject to the vicissitudes of the weather, illness, and the market.

Individual enrichment became the primary measure of success. In the summer of 1984, a leading Shanghai newspaper published an article “Prosperous Girls Attract Husbands,” which praised a group of women from a poor farming village who became the object of intense matrimonial desire when they became prosperous after shifting from collective to private household farming. “The moral was clear,” Baum explains, “to snag a mate, one must be commercially successful.”¹⁶⁷

At the elite level, with the commune gone, the bonds among members of Deng’s reformist faction began to erode. Conservative patriarch Chen Yun and Deng’s liberal protégée Zhao Ziyang, who had worked together to “maintain central administrative control over the reform process, began to diverge appreciably by 1983–84.”¹⁶⁸ Soon Deng’s anti-commune coalition would rupture, and by decade’s end, the hardliners had triumphed. Thousands of party liberals who had collaborated with them to eliminate the commune just a few years earlier (including top party leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang) were purged from their posts, or worse.

Unified by their disdain for the Cultural Revolution and a desire to solidify their grip on power, Deng’s reform faction set out to bury Mao’s collectivist ideology, his economic theories, and his commune. To achieve decollectivization, Deng nurtured a new generation of provincial leaders and encouraged them to introduce household contracts and to criticize commune- and brigade-level extraction. After decollectivization was under way in some provinces, Deng brought his allies to Beijing to pressure the center to approve decollectivization under the pretext of acquiescing to grassroots demands. This effort was aided by a temporary alliance with Democracy Wall Movement activists, who Deng crushed after they had outlived their political usefulness. In 1980, the acceptance of household contracts in Document No. 75 gave Deng’s supporters the go-ahead they needed to promulgate the practice nationwide.

An increase in state procurement prices for agricultural products and the “decollectivization dividend” (i.e., the disbursement of commune capital and the withering of commune extractive powers) increased the living standards of long-deprived rural households. Meanwhile, privatizing collective capital helped secure the support of local cadres who benefited most. Households’ desire to consume more and local leaders’ willingness to privatize commune and brigade property were essential to the commune’s demise. Yet, the desire to consume more—perhaps the most fundamental human desire—is ever-present. The difference is that this desire was suppressed and punished under the commune, but then called forth and validated during decollectivization.