This book offers a startling new analysis of China’s most important local institution in Mao’s time, the people’s commune. In particular, it explores the least-well-reported years of recent Chinese history, the 1970s, when the country’s so-called economic rise began. Most officials, journalists, and scholars still treat that institution and decade as simply radical and backward looking. Most of the 1970s is described misleadingly in many books as part of a basically homogeneous Cultural Revolution, before China began to prosper. The commune as an institution was indeed a failure after 1958, bringing famine and poverty to millions; so most writers presume it remained an economic and political failure until it was abolished during the few years after Deng Xiaoping became China’s supremo in 1978.
To the contrary, Joshua Eisenman shows that after 1970 China’s communes, production brigades, and production teams became crucial generators of rural prosperity. He uses new sources, presenting statistics to prove that rural productivity grew quickly—nationwide—in the 1970s. This achievement occurred not just in a few selected and traditionally rich regions, such as Jiangnan and Guangdong, where a few previous writers had noticed. Instead, this productivity was widespread in many parts of the country. Eisenman presents data from eight major provinces, and from China as a whole, demonstrating that rural production from the early 1970s rose rapidly per commune member, per land unit, and in total. These findings refute the conventional, quasi-official story, which holds that before 1978 China’s rural (as distinct from urban) economy was in dire straits, requiring neoliberal efficiencies to fix it. Eisenman’s revisionist book offers hard data that disprove that conventional understanding. Communes, brigades, and teams bred more successful local leaders and entrepreneurs than practically anybody—including Deng Xiaoping, economists, or others—thought possible.
Maoist communes, with support from some central and local leaders, created China’s green revolution. This change was supported by material elements (high-yield seeds, multi-cropping, controlled irrigation, agricultural extension, and high rates of rural saving and investment). These factors were also supported by strong communalist values. Most sources have defined China’s reform as a post-1978 phenomenon—and have attributed it mainly to market efficiency. This usual periodization of the start of the economic surge begins nearly a decade too late. Change in the places where most Chinese lived—the countryside—have largely been ignored. Communalist–Maoist norms, as well as the improved agronomy that they sustained, brought more prosperity to the fields in which hundreds of millions of Chinese toiled during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
For the majority of Chinese, who tilled land, the 1970s was not a “lost decade.” Intellectuals, who write history, indeed had a grim time. But Eisenman chronicles in the early 1970s a quick increase of rural electric generators, walking tractors, fertilizers, trucks, pumps, and tool shops in which to repair them. He points out that the Northern Districts Agricultural Conference, held in 1970, spread the green revolution to new areas. Agricultural extension and mechanization changed China well before 1978. This book offers extensive statistics on these concrete, situational factors of change—but it equally treats the communalist ideals and management organizations that supported these material inputs to the new agronomy, and then to rural factories.
The commune was the “church of Mao.” Songs about Mao as savior of the East; dancers waving his Little Red Book; and posters of ardent workers, badges, and icons of the chairman demonstrated far more intense personal commitments than contemporary modern people generally muster for any cause. Such rituals are often derided in Western publications, yet a religion of this sort reduces moral hazard problems that are inherent in communitarian projects. Maoist norms shamed free-riding and flight from field labor.
Eisenman fully reports the coercive aspects of this form of organization; his treatment of commune militias is more complete than any other. Enforcement of the urban household registration system meant that Sent-Down youths or ambitious peasants could not move easily into big cities. Thus, brain drain from the countryside was discouraged. The commune was militarized at a time when China was trying to balance threats that national leaders perceived from both the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in Vietnam. Maoist enthusiasm and more responsive remuneration systems were essential to increased commune productivity.
Eisenman explores the comparative history of communes in diverse cultures, ranging far from China, to Pietists, Shakers, Owenists, kibbutzim, and other examples. Such organizations are not always successful in serving their members—but under some conditions, they are so. The book gives due attention also to the histories of high-modernist communes (e.g., in the Soviet Union) and to reasons for their various failures and successes. But in China during the 1970s at least, this book proves that communes, brigades, and teams brought more wealth to places that had been poor.
What made farmers work productively? Three main factors emerge from the data: Tillers need capital (including tools embodying technology). They need normative incentives to work hard rather than shirk work. They need to be organized in units that are small enough to achieve face-to-face trust but large enough to ensure that resources join their labor. These three themes unify the book and adapt its structure for comparative study of work contexts anywhere.
New insights emerge from findings about all three of these themes, notably the organizational one. Eisenman uses state-of-the-art statistical analyses to show that having many brigades per commune and many households per team usually meant higher productivity. Also, output rose when relative commune size was small. He offers explanations for these new discoveries, which all are available in this book for the first time.
His analysis is always political, even as he freely calls on theories of economics and sociology. Eisenman uses the standard economic development models of Arthur Lewis and Robert Solow to show how Chinese communes, production brigades, and teams fostered rural growth. But unlike many economists, he also shows that politics is an essential determinant of change. Available information about Chinese economic strategies comes mostly from leaders in the central government—but provinces, prefectures, counties, communes, brigades, teams, and families all have leaders and policies, too. Fairly autocratic patriarchy is a common pattern at each of these degrees of zoom.
In China, this is particularly well documented at the top of the party–state apparatus. Eisenman corroborates analyses by his former teacher Richard Baum, to whom his book is nicely dedicated, showing what happened in Chinese factional politics at “the center” in the 1970s. He is consistently clear that politics guides economic decisions.
Traditions of communal fairness exist at each size of collectivity. Unlike many social scientists, Eisenman is thoroughly sensitive to moral as well as concrete bases of change. Communes generally could make their own annual and multiyear plans, so long as they delivered taxes (usually in grain). Brigades and teams likewise had a good deal of autonomy, either because they could hide information or because Mao said their leaders should persuade ordinary members to coordinate—by forceful means, if necessary—votes for policies that they deemed appropriate to immediate local conditions. The result from communes, brigades, and teams, when they were supported by the national government and by local households, was a boost of productivity from fields, higher rural savings, more retention of profits in units that prospered, and faster mechanization leading to factories that used excess labor in agricultural slack seasons.
All of these institutions were—and in new and urbanized forms still are—the basic platforms of Chinese politics. The midsize institutions served most of the nation’s people well in the 1970s and were largely privatized or abolished in the 1980s. Prices of many industrial factors soared so high by 1985 that state planning of these commodities ended. Inflation contributed to political unrest by the late 1980s, and to more centralization in later decades. In Russia after the demise of the late great USSR, a similar process occurred. In China, the process was abetted by leaders (including Deng, heads of some rural families, and others) who gained power during privatizations. This book squarely addresses the main issues of China’s rise from the time it started. Those same concerns predominate in both official and academic thinking about the country in the twenty-first century, but this book revises the start of the usual story. Anyone who wants to know where China is going must read this book, if only to discover where the road began.
Lynn T. White III
Princeton and Berkeley