PROLOGUE
2. Images from within the Xiaogang Museum, including the contract on display can be viewed at http://bbs1.people.com.cn/post/2/1/2/141694563.html. The heading reads: “We agreed to divide up the land among the households. The head of each household will sign and seal this contract with his fingerprint or family chop. If it works, every household will promise to give its production quota of grain to the collective and will no longer ask the state for money or food. If it doesn’t work, we cadres are willing to be put into prison or executed, and the remaining commune members would raise our children until age 18.”
3. “The Xiaogang Village Story,” People’s Daily, November 11, 2008, http://en.people.cn/90002/95607/6531490.html. At least two additional versions of the “secret contract” can be found online; however, only the two presented here have been identified as “authentic” by the Chinese authorities.
4. Office of National People’s Congress Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, Department of Development Planning, National Development and Reform Commission, ed., “1976–1985 nian fazhan guomin jingji shinian guihua gangyao (caoan)” [Ten-Year Plan for the Development of National Economy as of 1976–1985], in Jianguo yilai guomin jingji he shehui fazhan wunian jihua zhongyao wenjian huibian [Selected Important Documents of the Five-Year Plans for National Economy and Societal Development since the Founding of PRC] (Beijing: China Democracy and Legal Press, 2008); Hua Guofeng, “1978 State Council’s Governmental Report,” presented at the First Plenary Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress, February 26, 1978), February 16, 2006, http://www.gov.cn/test/2006-02/16/content_200704.htm.
5. Justin Lin Yifu, “The Household Responsibility Reform and the option of Hybrid Rice in China,” Journal of Developmental Economics 36, no. 2 (1991): 359.
6. Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 59.
1. INTRODUCTION
1. John McMillan, John Whalley, and Zhu Li Jing attribute about 78 percent of productivity gains between 1978 and 1984 to economic reforms associated with decollectivization. See McMillan, Whalley, and Zhu, “The Impact of China’s Economic Reforms on Agricultural Productivity Growth,” Journal of Political Economy 97, no. 4 (1989): 781–807. For additional works that argue the commune was not productive, see Justin Yifu Lin, “Rural Reforms and Agricultural Growth in China,” American Economic Review 82, no. 1 (1992): 34–51; Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Fei Hsiao-tung, Rural Development in China: Prospect and Retrospect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Tony Saich, Governance and Politics of China (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Anne Thurston, Muddling Toward Democracy: Political Change in Grassroots China (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1998); He Hongguang, Governance, Social Organisation and Reform in Rural China: Case Studies from Anhui Province (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004); Zhang Yulin, “Readjustment and Reform in Agriculture,” in China Economic Reforms, eds. Lin Wei and Arnold Chao (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); Erza Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
2. Numerous scholarly works that argue the commune increased agricultural productivity. Publications that support this contention in one way or another include Fan Shenggen and Philip Pardey, “Research, Productivity, and Output Growth in Chinese Agriculture,” Journal of Development Economics 53, no. 1 (1997): 115–37; Arthur Galston, Daily Life in People’s China (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973); Li Huaiyin, Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948–2008 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Mobo C. F. Gao, Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Leslie T. C. Kuo, Agriculture in the People’s Republic of China: Structural Changes and Technical Transformation (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976); Han Dongping, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008); John Wong, “Some Aspects of China’s Agricultural Development Experience: Implications for Developing Countries in Asia,” World Development 4, no. 6 (June 1976): 488. Wong’s additional contributions to the literature include “Agriculture in the People’s Republic of China,” in China: Cultural and Political Perspective, ed. D. Bing (London: Longman Paul, 1975); “Communication of Peasant Agriculture: China’s Organizational Strategy for Agricultural Development,” in Cooperative and Commune: Group Farming in the Economic Development of Agriculture, ed. Peter Dorner (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); An Economic Overview of Agriculture in the People’s Republic of China (New York: Agricultural Development Council, 1973); “Grain Output in China: Some Statistical Implications,” Current Scene 9, no. 2 (1973); Marc Blecher, China Against the Tides: Restructuring through Revolution, Radicalism and Reform (New York: Continuum, 2010); Steven Butler, Agricultural Mechanization in China: The Administrative Impact (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Gordon Bennett, Huadong: The Story of a People’s Commune (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978); Nicholas Lardy, Agriculture in China’s Modern Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Dwight Perkins and Shahid Yusuf, Rural Development in China (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); On Kit Tam, China’s Agricultural Modernization: The Socialist Mechanization Scheme (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Peggy Printz and Paul Steinle, Commune (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977); Dwight Perkins, Rural Small-Scale Industry in the people’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Chris Bramall, The Industrialization of Rural China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Chris Bramall, Chinese Economic Development (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2008); Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
3. Decollectivization, which took place between 1977 and 1983, was a gradual and uneven process that began in different time in different provinces.
4. “Luoshi jingji zhengce, shougou gengduo de tufu chanpin” [Implement Economic Policy, Purchase More Agricultural Products], People’s Daily, December 12, 1971; “Jianchi shehui zhuyi daolu, xianzhi jichan jieji faquan” [Maintain the Socialist Road, Restrict Bourgeois Rights], Red Flag [Hongqi] 20, no. 8 (August 1975): 26.
5. Yang Kuisong and Stephen A. Smith, “Communism in China, 1900–2010,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Communism, ed. S.A. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 227.
6. Lin Chen, “The Agricultural Plight of the Chinese Communists,” Issues and Studies 5, no. 5 (1970): 41–42.
7. David Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968–1981 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 61, 226.
8. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 61, 227.
9. Fairbank and Goldman, China, 405.
10. Lieberthal, Governing China, 124.
11. Luo Hanxian, Economic Changes in Rural China (Beijing: New World Press, 1985), 89. Also see Zhang, “Readjustment and Reform,” 128. As deputy chief of Hunan Nongmin Bao (Hunan Peasants’ Daily) Zhang’s arguments closely reflect the official line at that time. The official condemnation and rectification of the communes “Left errors” came in June 1981. See “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China (June 27, 1981),” Peking Review 24, no. 27 (July 1981): 20–26. “At a work conference called by the Central Committee in April 1979, the Party formulated the principle of ‘readjusting, restructuring, consolidating and improving’ the economy as a whole in a decisive effort to correct the shortcomings and mistakes of the previous two years in our economic work and eliminate the influence of ‘Left’ errors that had persisted in this field…. The Party has worked conscientiously to remedy the errors in rural work since the later stage of the movement for agricultural cooperation, with the result that the purchase prices of farm and sideline products have been raised, various forms of production responsibility introduced whereby remuneration is determined by farm output, family plots have been restored and appropriately extended, village fairs have been revived, and sideline occupations and diverse undertakings have been developed. All these have greatly enhanced the peasants’ enthusiasm. Grain output in the last two years reached an all-time high, and at the same time industrial crops and other farm and sideline products registered a big increase. Thanks to the development of agriculture and the economy as a whole, the living standards of the people have improved.”
12. Luo, Economic Changes, 90, 94–95.
13. Fairbank and Goldman, China, 398.
14. Riskin, China’s Political Economy, 288.
15. Zhou, How the Farmers, 2–3.
17. He, Governance, Social Organisation and Reform, 42. His work includes almost no discussion of Xiaogang between 1962 and 1976.
18. “The Xiaogang Village Story.”
19. Thurston, Muddling Toward Democracy, 7.
20. “The Xiaogang Village Story.”
21. Saich, Governance and Politics, 61.
22. Zhao, Prisoner of the State, 142.
23. Saich, Governance and Politics, 61.
24. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 443.
25. Jonathan Unger, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 97.
26. Fei, Rural Development in China, 232–33.
27. Fairbank and Goldman, China, 411–12.
28. Hu Yaobang, “Zai qingzhu zhongguo gongchandang chengli liushi zhounian dahui shang de jianghua (1981nian 7yue 1ri)” [Speech at the meeting in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (July 1, 1981)], in Sanzhong quanhui yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian xia [Selected Important Documents since Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee], ed. Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiu shi [Central Chinese Communist Party Literature Research Office] (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1981); see the English version at https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/02.htm.
29. Zhou, How the Farmers, 1.
30. See “Resolution on Certain Questions.”
31. Huang Yasheng, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xiv.
32. The term “Reform and Opening Up” also has been used to include China’s experimental foreign trade and investment policies introduced in select special economic zones along the coastline beginning in the early 1980s. For the purposes of this study, however, this term refers only to the policy changes Deng Xiaoping and his reform faction pursued in the agricultural sector. Rural reforms happened first, and were the most important from both an economic and a political perspective.
33. In 1984, American poet and scholar Willis Barnstone, who had visited China in 1972, was denied a visa for his Fulbright teaching fellowship. On a subsequent visit, the vice president of the Foreign Studies University told him: “Willis, do you remember when you were going to come to China, but we didn’t give you a visa? We were afraid you were a Maoist. The last thing we wanted was a Maoist!” See Ian Johnson, “Q. and A.: Willis Barnstone on Translating Mao and Touring Beijing with Allen Ginsberg,” New York Times, April 17, 2015.
34. Luo, Economic Changes, 90.
35. In March 2016, a group of former Henan officials, wrote to China’s Supreme Court demanding the rehabilitation of more than 1 million people whom they said were wrongfully arrested after Deng’s victorious “reformers” rounded up numerous people whose only crime, they argue, was belonging to the wrong faction. “Unlikely Hero: A Local Leader Jailed for Extremism During the Cultural Revolution Has Many Devoted Followers,” Economist, August 6, 2016.
36. Although the phrase “to get rich is glorious” often is attributed to Deng Xiaoping, there is no proof he actually said it. See Evelyn Iritani, “Great Idea but Don’t Quote Him,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2004.
37. Bramall, Industrialization, 145.
38. The term “green revolution” was coined in 1968 by the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) William Gaud. Gaud juxtaposed the term with the Soviet’s “violent Red Revolution,” arguing that agricultural productivity growth was a political as well as economic imperative. William Gaud, “AID Supports the Green Revolution,” Address before the Society for International Development, Washington, DC, March 8, 1968. Sigrid Schmalzer observes that “contrary to common perception … the green revolution in red China looked strikingly similar to the green revolution as Gaud had imagined it.” Sigrid Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3. Accounts of the green revolution are too numerous to list here. For one particularly noteworthy contribution see Raj Patel, “The Long Green Revolution,” Journal of Peasant Studies 40, no. 1 (2013): 1–63.
39. Schmalzer, Red Revolution, 9.
40. Wong, “Some Aspects,” 492.
41. White’s book won the 1999 Association for Asian Studies Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Outstanding Nonfiction Scholarly Book on China. Lynn T. White III, Unstately Power: Volume I Local Causes of China’s Economic Reforms (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 93.
42. White, Unstately Power, 85.
43. Bramall, Industrialization, 145.
44. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 253.
45. Louis Putterman, Continuity and Change in China’s Rural Development: Collective and Reform Eras in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15.
46. Putterman, Continuity and Change, 15.
47. Examples of these publications include: G. F. Sprague, “Agriculture in China,” Science 188, no. 4188 (May 1975): 549–55. Merle Esmay and Roy Harrington, Glimpses of Agricultural Mechanization in the PRC: A Delegation of 15 Members report on their technical inspection in China Aug. 18–Sept. 8, 1979 (St. Joseph, MI: American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1979); American Plant Studies Delegation, Plant Studies in the People’s Republic of China: A Trip Report of the American Plant Studies Delegation (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1975); Jacob A. Hoefer and Patricia J. Tsuchitani, Animal Agriculture in China: A Report of the Visit of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China Animal Sciences Delegation (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1980); Per Brinck, Insect Pest Management in China: A Delegation Report (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, 1979).
48. Three excellent examples of such publications, which are too numerous to recount here, include Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Joseph Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder, The Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). For the late 1970s and early 1980s, see Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
49. American Plant Studies Delegation.
50. Sprague, “Agriculture in China,” 549.
51. Esmay and Harrington, Glimpses of Agricultural Mechanization, 2.
52. Esmay and Harrington, Glimpses of Agricultural Mechanization, 1, 9.
53. Bruce Stone, “The Basis for Chinese Agricultural Growth in the 1980s and 1990s: A Comment on Document No. 1, 1984,” The China Quarterly 101 (1985): 114. Also see Naughton, Chinese Economy, 253.
54. Bruce Stone, “Developments in Agricultural Technology,” The China Quarterly 116 (1988): 767.
55. Anthony M. Tang and Bruce Stone, Food Production in the People’s Republic of China (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1980), 6, 117, 123.
56. In addition to his book, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), Benedict Stavis also published Making Green Revolution: The Politics of Agricultural Development in China (Ithaca, NY: Rural Development Committee of Cornell University, 1974); People’s Communes and Rural Development in China (Ithaca, NY: Rural Development Committee of Cornell University, 1974); “Agricultural Research and Extension Services in China,” World Development 6, no. 5 (1978): 631–45.
57. Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 15.
58. The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, which traces the political process associated with agricultural mechanization and its relationship to yield output, has its weak points. Stavis’s work suffers, argues Vivienne Shue in her review for the American Political Science Review, because he fails to adopt any particular theory or model to assist in explaining policy change over time. The discussion leaps from the consequences of technological insufficiencies, to the vagaries of Politburo infighting, to the machinations of middle-level bureaucratic politics. Shue writes, “All are treated more or less equally as ‘constraints’ on the process of China’s agricultural mechanization, providing the reader almost no help in weighting the import of these various factors, and no clues for the construction of predictive hypotheses.” The book is, she concludes, more a chronicle than an analysis that “touches only the high points.” Shue was not alone in suggesting Stavis was painting an overly rosy picture of Chinese agricultural development. Audrey Donnithorne’s review in the Journal of Asian Studies notes that Stavis’s last chapter “is devoted to an advocacy of the Chinese system.” See Vivienne Shue, “Book Review: The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China, by Benedict Stavis,” American Political Science Review 73, no. 3 (1979): 926–927. Also see Donnithorne, “The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China by Benedict Stavis,” Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (1979): 760.
59. Stavis, “Agricultural Research and Extension,” 631.
60. Stavis, Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 261.
61. Stavis, Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 18.
62. For additional works that help explain the sources of commune productivity, see Marc Blecher and Vivienne Shue, Tethered Deer: Government and Economy in a Chinese County (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Steven Butler, Agricultural Mechanization in China: The Administrative Impact (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Jean Oi, Rural China takes Off (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism; Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); William Parish and Martin King Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
63. These conclusions were supported by interviews with agricultural historians and rural residents in Jiangxi, Henan, Jiangsu, Jilin, Hubei, Guangdong, and Shandong.
64. Luo, Economic Changes, 92.
65. Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia (London: The Strand Magazine, 1891).
66. Bramall and White III provide especially valuable provincial and sub-provincial-level data.
67. Research trips to acquire agricultural data were made, in chronological order, to Henan Agricultural University (2011), Jiangxi Agricultural University (2011), Nanjing Agricultural University (2012), Nanjing University (2012), Huazhong Agricultural University (2012), Wuhan University (2012), Jilin Agricultural University (2012), Jilin University (2012), Dalian University of Technology (2013), Liaoning Normal University (2013), Sichuan University (2013), Sun Yatsen University (2013), Zhejiang University (2014), and Henan University (2015).
68. This approach was informed by Naughton, who also uses grain, meat, and edible oil production to measure China’s national agricultural productivity. That study, however, is missing data from 1958 to 1963 and from 1967 to 1976. See Naughton, Chinese Economy, 253.
69. China’s 1978 Ten-Year Plan and its accompanying State Council report both called for the expanded production of cash crops, including oil-yielding plants. Although the former document was later forsworn, the latter was not and remains available on the Chinese government’s official website. Office of National People’s Congress Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, Department of Development Planning, National Development and Reform Commission, ed., “1976–1985 nian fazhan guomin jingji shinian guihua gangyao (caoan)” [Ten-Year Plan for the Development of National Economy as of 1976–1985 (draft)], in Jianguo yilai guomin jingji he shehui fazhan wunian jihua zhongyao wenjian huibian [Selected Important Documents of the Five-Year Plans for National Economy and Societal Development since the Founding of PRC] (Beijing: China Democracy and Legal Press, 2008). Hua Guofeng, “1978 State Council’s Governmental Report,” presented at the First Plenary Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress, February 26, 1978, February 16, 2006, http://www.gov.cn/test/2006-02/16/content_200704.htm.
70. In 1980 China had 99,305,333 hectares of arable land, compared with the United States, which had 188,755,333 hectares. See Agricultural Economic Statistics, 1949–1983 [Nongye jingji ziliao, 1949–1983] (Beijing: Ministry of Agriculture Planning Bureau, 1983), 590.
71. After visiting Chinese facilities in 1974, Sprague observed that U.S. pigs generally reached approximately 100 kg in six months or less, whereas their Chinese counterparts were about half that weight in eight months to a year. Sprague, “Agriculture in China,” 555.
72. “China’s Economic Policy and Performance,” in Cambridge History of China, vol. 15, The People’s Republic, Part 2: Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982, ed. John K. Fairbank and Roderick MacFarquhar (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 517. Also see Tang and Stone, Food Production, 6; Fan and Pardey, “Research, Productivity, and Output,” 127; and On Kit Tam, China’s Agricultural Modernization, 64.
73. I have long maintained that official Chinese economic data can be used to reveal macroeconomic trends. See Joshua Eisenman, Eric Heginbotham, and Derek Mitchell, China and the Developing World: Beijing’s Strategy for the Twenty-First Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 41.
74. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013), 531.
75. Interview with Li Yankun, associate director of the Central Party School of the CPC Central Committee, Tonglu County, Zhejiang Province, November 7, 2015.
76. Fairbank and Goldman, China, 356.
77. Bramall, Industrialization, 145.
2. INSTITUTIONAL ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION
1. Mao Zedong, “On Contradiction,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 1 (Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 322.
2. Dwight Perkins and Shahid Yusuf, Rural Development in China (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 74. Also see John Wong, “Some Aspects of China’s Agricultural Development Experience: Implications for Developing Countries in Asia,” World Development 4, no. 6 (1976): 493.
3. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 75.
4. Benedict Stavis, People’s Communes and Rural Development in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Rural Development Committee, 1974), 43.
5. Stavis, People’s Communes, 44.
6. Stavis, People’s Communes, 44.
7. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 75.
8. Mao Zedong, On the Question of Agricultural Co-operation (Beijing, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), 33–34.
9. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 75–76.
10. Richard Baum, “Lecture 14: The Chinese People Have Stood Up,” in The Fall and Rise of China (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2010), 24 audio discs.
11. Stavis, People’s Communes, 44.
12. Stavis, People’s Communes, 44.
13. Stavis, People’s Communes, 44.
14. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 76.
15. Nicholas Lardy, Agriculture in China’s Modern Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 39–40.
16. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 77.
17. Stavis, People’s Communes, 35.
18. Stavis, People’s Communes, 44.
19. William Skinner, “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part III,” Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 3 (1965): 385.
20. Stavis, People’s Communes, 44.
21. Comment on article “Mobilize Women to Take Part in Production to Solve the Difficulties of the Insufficiency of Labor Power,” cited in Pang Xianzhi, Upsurge of Socialism in China’s Countryside: Document of Historical Significance in the Party’s Leadership of the Socialist Revolution in the Rural Areas (Peking, China: Xuexi, 1956), 27; also available in Socialist of Socialism in the China’s Countryside (Beijing, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1957), 286.
22. “History of Struggle Between the Two Lines (on China’s Farm Machinery Front),” Nongye Jixie Jishu [Agricultural Machinery Technique], no. 9 (1968) in Selections from China Mainland Magazines (hereinafter referred to as SCMM), no. 633 (November 1968): 10.
23. “History of Struggle,” SCMM 633, 10.
24. Huang Jing, “The Problem of Farm Mechanization in China,” People’s Daily, October 24–25, 1957.
25. “The Research Work in Agricultural Machinery Should Be Ahead of Agricultural Mechanization,” Zhongguo Nongye Jixie [China Agricultural Machinery], no. 9 (September 1962): 2–4.
26. Mao Zedong, “Intraparty Correspondence (April 29, 1959),” in Miscellany of Mao Tsetung Thought: 1949–1968, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Joint Publication Research Service, 1978), 171; also see Mao Zedong, Mao Papers, Anthology and Bibliography, ed. Jerome Chen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 7. Chen dates the letter as November 29, 1959.
27. Mao Zedong, “Speech at the Lushan Conference (July 23, 1959),” in Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956–1971, ed. S. Schram (New York: Pantheon Press, 1975), 144; “Resolution of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Adjusting the Main Indicators of the National Economic Plan of 1959 and Carrying out the Movement of Increasing Output and Conservation,” People’s Daily, August 28, 1959.
28. Editorial, “Nongcun gongzu gaige de xinfazhan” [The New Development of Farm Tool Reform], People’s Daily, January 13, 1960; Editorial, “Kaizhan yige shougong caozuo jixiehua banjixiehua de quanmin yundong” [Carry Out a National Movement of Manual Operation for Mechanization and Semi-Mechanization], People’s Daily, February 25, 1960.
29. Niu Zhonghuang, “On the Technical Transformation of China’s Agriculture,” People’s Daily, August 26, 1969.
30. Mao Zedong, “Communes are Better,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, August 9, 1958, extracted from the account of Mao’s inspection tour in Shandong as reported in People’s Daily, August 13, 1958.
31. Lardy, Agriculture in China, 41.
32. Richard Baum, “Lecture 18: The Great Leap Forward (1958–60),” in The Fall and Rise of China (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2010), 24 audio discs.
34. Shui Fu, “A Profile of Dams in China,” in The River Dragon Has Come, ed. Dai Qing (New York: Routledge, 2015).
35. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 1949–1983 [Nongye jingji ziliao, 1949–83] (Beijing, China: Ministry of Agriculture Planning Bureau, 1983), 47, 80.
36. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 77.
38. Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, 1949–1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
39. Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 138.
40. Stephan Uhalley, A History of the Chinese Communist Party (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), 131.
41. Uhalley, A History, 131.
42. Victor Lippit, “The Commune in Chinese Development,” Modern China 3, no. 2 (April 1977): 232.
43. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 78–79; Y.Y. Kueh, Agricultural Instability in China, 1931–1991: Weather, Technology and Institutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 155.
44. Jonathan Unger, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 75.
45. Parris H. Chang, “Struggle Between the Two Roads in China’s Countryside,” Current Scene 6 (1968); also see Parris H. Chang, Patterns and Processes of Policy Making in Communist China, 1955–1962: Three Case Studies (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1973), chap. 5.
46. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 78.
47. Richard Baum, Prelude to Revolution: Mao the Party, and the Peasant Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 162–64; also see Lardy, Agriculture in China, 44; Uhalley, A History, 128, 131.
48. Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 139; also see Unger, The Transformation, 75; Baum, Prelude to Revolution, 164.
49. Unger, The Transformation, 75.
50. Stavis, People’s Communes, 57–58.
51. Lardy, Agriculture in China, 43–44.
52. Dick Wilson, “The China After Next,” Far Eastern Economic Review (1968): 193.
53. Stavis, People’s Communes, 58.
54. A.Z.M. Obaidullah Khan, ed., “Class Struggle in Yellow Sandhill Commune,” The China Quarterly 51 (1972): 536–37.
55. The canonical text on the rural household’s willingness to sacrifice some measure of profit maximization in favor of a baseline food security is James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). This position was challenged by Samuel Popkin. See Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
56. Unger, The Transformation, 76.
57. “Communiqué of the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Committee of the CPC,” Xinhua, September 28, 1962.
58. Xinhua, January 14, 1963, cited in Zheng Zhuyuan, Scientific and Engineering Manpower in Communist China, 1949–1963 (Washington, DC: U.S. National Science Foundation, 1965), 281–82.
59. Liu Rixin, “Exploration of a Few Problems Concerning Mechanization of Our Agriculture,” People’s Daily, June 20, 1963.
60. Editorial, “‘Demonstration Farms’ Are Main Centers through Which Agricultural Science May Serve Production,” People’s Daily, October 25, 1964.
61. Chao Kang, Agricultural Production in Communist China, 1949–1965 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 111.
62. “Tian Chenlin’s Crime of Sabotage,” SCMM 624, 3.
63. Benedict Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 183 and 195.
64. “Completely Settle the Heinous Crimes,” SCMM 610, 30.
65. “Reactionary Nature of China’s Khrushchev,” SCMM 613, 22.
66. “Reactionary Nature of China’s Khrushchev,” SCMM 613, 20–21.
67. In the course of Mao’s talk at Enlarged Meeting of the Political Bureau, March 20, 1966, see Mao, Miscellany, 379.
68. Perkins and Yusuf, Rural Development, 76.
69. Stavis, Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 202–203.
70. Xiang Nan, “Stable and High Yields and Agricultural Mechanization,” People’s Daily, March 22, 1965; and Xiang Nan, “Agricultural Mechanization Can Be Achieved with Good and Fast Results,” People’s Daily, July 6, 1965. The People’s Daily series was culled from Xiang’s article “An Inspection Report on the Mechanization of Our Agriculture,” Zhongguo Nongye Jixie, May 1965, 11–20.
73. Work team of Central-South Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, “Where Should Revolutionary Zeal be Exerted? Second Question Concerning Organization of a High Tide in Agricultural Production,” Nanfang Ribao, March 28, 1965.
74. “Wipe Out State Monopoly and Promote Mechanization on the Basis of Self-Reliance in a Big Way,” Nongye Jixie Jishu, no. 6 (September 1967) in SCMM 610 (January 1968): 14.
75. “Shanxi Held Provincial People’s Congress and Elected Representatives for Third National People’s Congress,” People’s Daily, October 16, 1964.
76. China Pictorial, no. 1 (January 1968): 27; Chen Yonggui, “Tachai Goes Ahead in the Struggle Against China’s Khrushchov,” Peking Review 10, no. 50 (December 1, 1967): 22.
77. Baum, Prelude to Revolution, 119–20.
78. Chen Yonggui, “Dazhai zai Mao Zedong sixiang de guanghui zhaoyao xia qianjin” [Dazhai Moves Forward in the Brilliant Shine of Mao Zedong Thoughts], Red Flag [Hongqi] no. 5 (March 10, 1967): 49–50.
80. Mao, “Talk on the Four Cleanups Movement.”
81. Luo Hanxian, Economic Changes in Rural China (Beijing, China: New World Press, 1985), 97.
82. “Chairman Mao with Representatives of National People’s Congress,” People’s Daily, December 30, 1964.
83. “Postulation by the CPC Hubei Provincial Committee Concerning Gradual Realization of Agricultural Mechanization,” Canton Evening News, April 4, 1966; also see “Editor’s Note on Postulation by the CPC Hubei Provincial Committee Concerning Gradual Realization of Agricultural Mechanization,” People’s Daily, April 9, 1966.
84. Benedict Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 224.
85. Mao, “Instructions on Agricultural Mechanization,” in Miscellany, 373; also available in “Last-Ditch Struggle,” SCMM 613, 26; On Kit Tam, China’s Agricultural Modernization: The Socialist Mechanization Scheme (Kent, England: Croom Helm), 37.
86. Mao Zedong, “A Letter on Farm Mechanization (March 12, 1966),” Peking Review 20, no. 52 (December 26, 1977): 7–9.
87. See “Postulation by the CPC Hubei Provincial Committee,” and “Editor’s Note on Postulation.”
89. “Woguo nongye jixie gongye jinnian huode zuida fazhan” [China’s Agricultural Mechanization Has Realized the Maximum Development This Year], People’s Daily, October 18, 1966.
90. “Running Enterprises in Line with Mao Tse-tung’s Thinking (April 3, 1966),” People’s Daily editorial, Peking Review 9, no. 16 (April 15, 1966): 11.
91. Stavis, Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 238–40.
92. Revolutionary Committee for Jincheng County, Shanxi, “Use Mao Tse-tung’s Thought to Direct the Work of Sending down the Farm Machines and Tools of State Stations,” Nongye Jixie Jishu, no. 11 (November 8, 1968) in SCMM 643, 4.
93. “It Is Good for Tractors to Revert to Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line—Report on Investigation of Change in Management of Tractors by the Collective in Lankao County, Henan,” Nongye Jiexie Jishu, no. 10 (October 8, 1968) in SCMM 643, 17.
94. On Kit Tam, China’s Agricultural Modernization, 40–41.
95. Production Brigade no. 2, Hsukuang Commune, O-ch’eng County, Hubei, “The Question of Mechanization by the Collective,” Nongye Jixie Jishu, no. 9 (September 1968) in SCMM 644, 15.
96. “Communiqué of the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (August 12, 1966),” Peking Review 9, no. 34 (August 19, 1966): 4–8.
97. Stavis, Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 226–27.
98. Lin Chen, “The Agricultural Plight of the Chinese Communists,” Issues and Studies 5, no. 5 (1970): 41–42; Stavis, Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 228.
99. Writing group of the Peking Revolutionary Committee, “The Road to China’s Socialist Industrialization,” Red Flag, no. 10 (October 1969): 30.
100. Radio Shanghai, November 10, 1969, in United States Foreign Broadcast Information Service China Report, November 19, 1969.
101. Although some overzealous local leaders did infringe on the Three Small Freedoms, these decisions were taken contrary to the official policy as stated within the Sixty Articles.
102. The national ethos of life under conditions of resource scarcity had a powerful psychological influence on two generations of Chinese. Their waste-not-want-not approach to personal consumption and savings is comparable to that of the U.S. Great Depression generation.
3. CHINA’S GREEN REVOLUTION
1. The Dazhai Commune and Brigade, located in Xiyang County, Shanxi Province, began its rise to national prominence in 1964 and 1965 and became the model for the eponymous nationwide agricultural modernization program. For a description of the evolution of Dazhai during the 1960s, see Richard Baum, Prelude to Revolution: Mao the Party, and the Peasant Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 117–22.
2. The relevant official documents, which are located in appendix C, are State Council Report on the 1970 Northern Regions Agricultural Conference, December 11, 1970; and Hua Guofeng, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference (Central Document no. 21) Mobilize the Whole Party, Make Greater Efforts to Develop Agriculture and Strive to Build Dachai-Type Counties,” Peking Review 18, no. 44 (October 31, 1975): 7–10.
3. For the Nobel Prize–winning economic theory that best explains this development approach, see W. Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” The Manchester School 22, no. 2 (May 1954): 139–91.
4. For a detailed analysis of China’s 1970s agricultural research and extension system, see Sigrid Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); also see Benedict Stavis, “Agricultural Research and Extension Services in China,” World Development 6, no. 5 (May 1978): 631–45; and Lynn T. White III, Unstately Power: Vol. 1, Local Causes of China’s Economic Reforms (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 85.
5. While conducting fieldwork between 2011 and 2015, I had the pleasure of exchanging views with numerous experts at provincial-level agricultural universities around China, who explained the agricultural modernization process in their provinces.
6. Data available at Zheng Jiaheng, Zhongguo tongji nianjian [Statistical Yearbook of China] (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 1992), 158. For an excellent explanation of how decollectivization precipitated this fall in agricultural investment, see Jean Oi, Rural China Takes Off (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 19–23.
7. Louis Putterman, Continuity and Change in China’s Rural Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.
8. David Bachman, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1985), 104–1055.
9. Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 151.
10. Bachman, Chen Yun, 102–105.
11. Friedman et al., Revolution, Resistance, 155.
12. Friedman et al., Revolution, Resistance, 155.
13. Friedman et al., Revolution, Resistance, 155.
14. Harry Harding, “Modernization and Mao: The Logic of the Cultural Revolution and the 1970s,” conference paper presented to the Institute of World Affairs, San Diego State University, August 1970, 11.
15. Benedict Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 229. For instance, see “Jiaxing diqu jianchi liangtiao luxian douzheng, fazhan nongye jidian shiye” [Adhere to Two-line Struggle, Develop Agricultural Electronics and Mechanization in Jiaxiang (Zhejiang Province)]; “Xinzhouxian jiasu fazhan nongye jixiehua” [Speed up the Development of Agricultural Mechanization in Xinzhou County (Hubei Province)]; “Shuangchengxian zili gengsheng ban nongye jiexie” [Self-reliance and Undertake Agricultural Machinery in Shuangcheng County (Heilongjiang Province)], People’s Daily, October 19, 1970.
16. Harding, “Modernization and Mao,” 19.
17. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 634.
18. Fan Shenggen and Philip Pardey, “Research, Productivity, and Output Growth in Chinese Agriculture,” Journal of Development Economics 53, no. 1 (June 1997): 126–27.
19. “Ba puji xiandai nongye kexue jishu jianli zai qunzhong de jichu shang” [Build Dissemination of Modern Agricultural Science and Technology on the Foundation of the Masses], People’s Daily, May 21, 1964. Dangdai Zhongguo congshu bianji weiyuanhui, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo de Nongye [Agriculture of Contemporary China] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992), 571.
20. “Banhao sanjiehe de yangbantian, cujin nongke kexue shiyan yundong” [Organizing three-in-one demonstration fields and promoting the agricultural scientific experiment movement], People’s Daily, March 28, 1965.
21. American Plant Studies Delegation, Plant Studies in the People’s Republic of China: A Trip Report of the American Plant Studies Delegation (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1975), 118, 120.
22. Xinhua tongxun she, ed., Dagao kexue zhongtian, jiasu nongye fazhan: jieshao Hunan Huarong xian siji nongye kexue shiyan wang [Greatly Undertake Scientific Farming, Accelerate Agricultural Development: Introducing Hunan Province, Huarong County’s Four-Level Agricultural Scientific Experiment Network] (Beijing: Remin meishu chubanshe, 1975).
23. Xinhua tongxun she, Dagao kexue zhongtian.
24. Schmalzer, Red Revolution, 22, 40–41.
25. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 633–34.
26. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 633–35; also see Han Dongping, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (Boston, MA: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 136.
27. Han, The Unknown, 136.
28. Han, The Unknown, 136.
29. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 634.
30. Schmalzer, Red Revolution, 137.
31. This idea can be traced back to Guanzi’s “Quan xiu” in the spring and autumn periods (771 to 476 B.C.). In contemporary Chinese, the common phrase is “Shinian shumu, bainian shuren.”
32. Shanxi sheng Xinxian diqu geweihui, Nonglin shuili ju keji xiaozu, eds. Xinxian diqu nongye kexue shiyan [Xin County region agricultural scientific experiment], n.p., 1971, 15.
33. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 634.
34. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 631–37; also see Schmalzer, Red Revolution, 40.
35. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 636–37.
36. Justin Y. F. Lin, “The Household Responsibility Reform and the Option of Hybrid Rice in China,” Journal of Developmental Economics 36, no. 2 (1991): 359.
37. Nicholas Lardy, “Prospects and Some Policy Problems of Agricultural Development in China,” Journal of Agricultural Economics 68, no. 2 (1986): 452–53.
38. Leo Orleans, China’s Experience in Population Control: The Elusive Model, prepared for the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974); also included in Neville Maxwell, China’s Road to Development (New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 101.
39. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 34–35.
40. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 46.
41. American Plant Studies Delegation, xiii.
42. Orleans, China’s Experience, 102.
43. For a description of China’s family planning policies, see Tyrene White, China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949–2005 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
44. “Chinese Observer on Population Question,” Peking Review 49 (December 7, 1973): 10–11.
45. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 35.
46. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. Chung Kuo, Cina, RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana, 1972, film. At 1 hour, 1 minute, 16 seconds, Antonioni films an illegal urban settlement, with voiceover dialogue stating, “There is also a new growing Beijing. Although the government does not favor urban expansion, the natural growth cannot be stopped.”
47. Orleans, China’s Experience, 106.
48. Suzanne Paine, “Balanced Development: Maoist Conception and Chinese Practice,” World Development 4, no. 4 (April 1976): 290.
49. Orleans, China’s Experience, 106.
50. Speech by Wang Renzhong to U.S. delegation in China, quoted in Merle Esmay and Roy Harrington, Glimpses of Agricultural Mechanization in the PRC (St. Joseph, MI: American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1979), 7; also see John Wong, “Some Aspects of China’s Agricultural Development Experience: Implications for Developing Countries in Asia,” World Development 4, no. 6 (1976): 493.
51. Dwight Perkins, Rural Small-Scale Industry in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 255.
52. Arthur Galston, Daily Life in People’s China (New York: Washington Square Press, 1973), 111.
53. Keith Griffin and Ashwani Saith, Growth and Equality in Rural China (Geneva: Asian Employment Programme, 1981), 151.
54. Harding, “Modernization and Mao,” 16.
55. Orleans, China’s Experience, 106.
56. Griffin and Saith, Growth and Equality, 151.
57. Benedict Stavis, People’s Communes and Rural Development in China (Ithaca, NY: Rural Development Committee of Cornell University, 1974), 111.
58. Steven Butler, Agricultural Mechanization in China: The Administrative Impact (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 22.
59. Stavis, People’s Communes and Rural Development, 111.
60. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization, 33.
61. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization, 22; Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization, 79.
62. Wu Chou, Report from Tungting: A People's Commune on Taihu Lake (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975) 14.
63. Guan Shengtang, interview, Yuhai County, Jiangxi Province, December 26, 2011.
64. Griffin and Saith, Growth and Equality, 150.
65. Peggy Printz and Paul Steinle, Commune: Life in Rural China (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977), 68–69.
66. Galston, Daily Life, 107–109.
67. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization, 22.
68. Chris Bramall, The Industrialization of Rural China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23.
69. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization, 22.
70. Bramall, Industrialization, 23.
71. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization, 22.
72. Griffin and Saith, Growth and Equality, 150.
73. Griffin and Saith, Growth and Equality, 150.
74. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization, 22.
75. “Twelve Million School Graduates Settle in the Countryside,” Peking Review 19, no. 2 (January 9, 1976): 11–13.
76. Thomas Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 33.
77. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains, 39–40.
78. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains, 38.
79. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains, 40.
80. Zhongguo qingnian bao [China Youth Daily] (September 8, 1964), in Communist China Digest, no. 132, Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) no. 27303, November 10, 1964.
81. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains, 222–24.
82. Radio Nanchang, December 29, 1975; Zhi Jian, “Gunggu he fazhan shangshan xiaxiang de chengguo” [Consolidate and develop the effectiveness of up to the mountains and down to the countryside], Red Flag [Hongqi], no. 7 (July 1, 1975): 6–9.
83. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 634.
84. Works on the relationship between Sent-Down urbanites and their rural hosts include Shi Tiesheng, “Wode yaoyuan de qingpingwan” [My Faraway Qingpingwan], Qingnian wenxue [Youth Literacy] 1 (1983); Liang Xiaosheng, Jinye you baofengxue [The Snowstorm Tonight] (Shanghai: Wenhui Publishing House, 2009); Liu Yaqiu, “Zhiqing kunan yu xiangcun chengshi jian guanxi yanjiu” [A Study on the Relationship between the Hardship of Educated Youth and Rural Cities], Qinghua daxue xuebao [Journal of Tsinghua University] 23, no. 2 (2008): 135–48.
85. China’s National Bureau of Statistics, Chinese Population Census 2000,
86. Han, The Unknown, 127.
87. Robert J. Lifton, “Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals: A Psychiatric Evaluation,” Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (November 1956): 75–88; Theodore Hsi-en Chen, “The New Socialist Man,” Comparative Education Review 13, no. 1 (February 1969): 88–95.
88. Friedman et al., Revolution, Resistance, 132.
89. Sun Guihua, interview, December 10, 2011.
90. Galston, Daily Life, 188.
91. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 634.
92. Galston, Daily Life, 189.
93. Galston, Daily Life, 191.
94. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 120.
95. Bruce Stone, “Developments in Agricultural Technology,” The China Quarterly 116 (December 1988): 767.
96. Yuan-li Wu and Robert Sheeks, The Organization and Development of Scientific Research and Development in Mainland China (New York: Praeger, 1970), 355–57.
97. Galston, Daily Life, 51, 77.
98. American Plant Studies Delegation, 118, 120.
99. Wong, “Some Aspects,” 493.
100. Han, The Unknown, 133. See also description of “5406” at “Prospects for the Technical Development of Bio-fertilizer,” State Intellectual Property Office of the PRC website.
101. Bruce Stone, Evolution and Diffusion of Agricultural Technology in China (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1990), 51–52.
102. Per Brinck, Insect Pest Management in China: A Swedish Delegation Report (Stockholm: Ingenjorsvetenskapsakademien, 1979), 10–11.
103. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 639.
104. Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 355.
106. Han, The Unknown, 133; also see Richard Hoyt, “Gibberellic Acid in Plant Growth,” eHow.com, undated.
107. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 639.
108. Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 359–360.
109. Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 355. See also Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 639.
110. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 638–40.
111. Scott Rozelle, “Annex I: China’s Corn Economy, A Brief Introduction,” n.d., posted on University of California, Davis website.
112. Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 352.
113. Stone, Evolution and Diffusion, 44.
114. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 638–40.
115. Schmalzer, Red Revolution, 73–100.
116. See Lin, “Household Responsibility Reform,” 355; also Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 633 and 638; and Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 353.
117. Lin, “Household Responsibility Reform,” 354–56.
118. Mobo Gao, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2008), 147; and “Li Zhensheng breeds wheat to help feed the nation,” People’s Daily, February 28, 2007.
119. Valerie Karplus and Xing Wang Deng, Agricultural Biotechnology in China: Origins and Prospects (New York: Spring, 2008), 40; also Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 638.
120. Karplus and Deng, Agricultural Biotechnology, 40.
121. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 296–97.
122. Jae Ho Chung, “The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in the Post-Mao Era, 1977–87,” The China Quarterly, no. 134 (June 1993), 264–90.
123. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 298.
124. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 299.
125. Chu Li and Tien Chieh-yun, Inside a People’s Commune: Report from Chiliying (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), 135.
126. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 296.
127. Han, The Unknown, 130–31; also see Marc Blecher and Vivian Shue, Tethered Deer: Government and Economy in a Chinese County (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
128. Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 359.
129. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 297.
130. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 296–97.
131. Perkins, Rural Small-Scale Industry, 121.
132. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 296–99.
133. Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 358.
134. Richard Baum, “Lecture 18: The Great Leap Forward (1958–60),” The Fall and Rise of China (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2010), 24 audio discs.
135. Stavis, “Agricultural Research,” 635.
136. Wu and Sheeks, The Organization and Development, 360.
138. Anthony Tang and Bruce Stone, Food Production in the People’s Republic of China (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1980), 6, 123; also see Harding, “Modernization and Mao,” 19.
139. Han, The Unknown, 129.
140. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 288.
141. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 291.
142. Bruce Stone, “The Basis for Chinese Agricultural Growth in the 1980s and 1990s: A Comment on Document No. 1, 1984,” The China Quarterly 101 (March 1985): 114; see also Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 253.
143. Harding, “Modernization and Mao,” 16.
144. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 290.
145. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 286–87.
146. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 286–87, 290.
147. Han, The Unknown, 131.
148. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 286–87.
149. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 288–89.
150. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 294–95.
151. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 295.
152. Lardy, “Prospects,” 453.
153. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 286–89.
154. Putterman, Continuity and Change, 13. For two more authoritative account of rural industrialization, see Bramall, Industrialization; and American Rural Small-Scale Industry Delegation, Rural Small-Scale Industry in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
4. ECONOMICS
1. E. L. Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 67.
2. Barry Naughton, “Rural Saving and Credit Supply Before and After Collectives,” paper presented to UCLA Seminar on Economic and Historical Perspectives on China’s Collectives, February 21, 1987, 6.
3. I assume a Cobb-Douglas production function given by Y = AKαL1-α (0 < α < 1), and, which expressed in per capita form becomes y = Akα.
4. The official policy documents detailing the reforms that produced China’s 1970s green revolution available in appendix C are the “State Council Report on the 1970 Northern Regions Agricultural Conference,” dated December 11, 1970; and Central Document No. 82, “Central Committee Instructions on Distribution within Communes,” December 26, 1971.
5. Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, Endogenous Growth Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 11.
6. Robert Barro and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 15.
7. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 103, 111, 118, 138.
8. For an excellent description of this fall in agricultural investment, see Jean C. Oi, Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 10–23.
10. W. Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 22, no. 2 (1954).
11. Lewis, “Economic Development,” 401–402.
12. Lewis, “Economic Development,” 412.
13. Lewis, “Economic Development,” 412–13.
14. Nicholas Kaldor, Causes of Growth and Stagnation in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43.
15. Lewis, “Economic Development,” 419.
16. Lewis, “Economic Development,” 415.
17. Kaldor, Causes of Growth, 43.
18. Lewis, “Economic Development,” 415.
19. Kaldor, Causes of Growth, 44–45.
20. Bruce Stone, “Developments in Agricultural Technology,” The China Quarterly 116 (1988): 767.
21. Kaldor, Causes of Growth, 47.
22. Lewis, “Economic Development,” 416–17.
23. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 1949–1983 [nongye jingji ziliao, 1949–1983] (Beijing: Ministry of Agriculture Planning Bureau, 1983), 514.
24. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 516–17.
25. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 516–17.
26. Traditionally, rural China suffered from overconsumption. Although this problem is often blamed on gluttonous elites, in some areas, the extensive number of traditional Chinese traditional festivals also played a role. Jonathan Spence notes that although “heat and hunger, dampness and diseases are never far away,” in nineteenth-century Hua County, Guangdong rural residents used precious resources on rites. To placate the grain spirits, villagers might sacrifice a pig, “eat dried fish in bulk,” “burn model houses of bamboo and stay awake all night,” or hang strings of oranges from their doors. Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 34–37.
27. Lau Siu-kai, “The People’s Commune and the Diffusion of Agri-Technology in China,” paper presented at Communication and Cultural Change in China, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 1978, 39.
28. Barro and Sala-i-Martin, Economic Growth, 21.
29. Leslie T. C. Kuo, Agriculture in the People’s Republic of China: Structural Changes and Technical Transformation (New York: Praeger, 1976), 45.
30. Jonathan Unger, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 88–89.
31. Unger, The Transformation, 87–89.
32. Steven Butler, “Price Scissors and Commune Administration in Post-Mao China,” in Chinese Rural Development, ed. William Parrish (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985), 104–105.
33. Butler, “Price Scissors,” 105.
34. Gordon Bennett, Ken Kieke, and Ken Yoffy, Huadong: The Story of a People’s Commune (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 98.
35. Unger, The Transformation, 78–79. In Weihai, Shandong, for instance, the job of drying corn was considerably easier than shucking, although the workpoints awarded were the same and women did both jobs. There was a good deal of jockeying among members at team meetings to determine who would be assigned which job. Sun Guihua, interview, Los Angeles, July 30, 2013.
36. Unger, The Transformation, 76–77.
37. Li Huaiyin, “Institutions and Work Incentives in Collective Farming in Maoist China,” Journal of Agrarian Change 17, no. 4 (2016): 4.
38. Bennett et al., Huadong, 98. Unger, The Transformation, 88–89.
39. Butler, “Price Scissors,” 104.
40. Li, “Institutions,” 4.
41. Peggy Printz and Paul Steinle, Commune Life in Rural China (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973), 84–85.
42. Sun Guihua, interview, Los Angeles, August 29, 2013.
43. Bennett et al., Huadong, 98.
44. Li Huaiyin, Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948–2008 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 131–32.
45. Li, Village China, 10–11. For depictions of local cadres as “native emperors” (tuhuangdi) see Daniel Kelliher, Peasant Power in China: The End of the Reform Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 19–25; J. Sachs and W.T. Woo, “Structural Factors in the Economic Reforms of China, Eastern Europe, and the Former Soviet Union,” Economic Policy 18 (1994): 114–15; Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 30–33.
46. Li, Village China, 11.
47. Peter Nolan and Gordon White, “Distribution and Development in China,” Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars 13, no. 3 (1981): 13–14.
48. Nolan and White, “Distribution and Development,” 11–12.
49. Shanxi Datong City Farm Machine Station of Changtang Commune, “Rely on the Masses to Run the Farm Machine Station Democratically,” Nongye Jixie Jishu [Agricultural Machinery Techniques], no. 9 (September 1968) in Selections from China Mainland Magazines, no. 644: 10.
50. Nolan and White, “Distribution and Development,” 11–12.
51. Naughton, “Rural Saving,” 1–2.
52. Naughton, “Rural Saving,” 5.
53. Naughton, “Rural Saving,” 6.
54. Naughton, “Rural Saving,” 5, 10–11.
55. Harry Harding, “Modernization and Mao: The Logic of the Cultural Revolution and the 1970s,” conference paper presented to the Institute of World Affairs, San Diego State University, August 1970, 19.
56. Zhou, How the Farmers, 2.
57. Benedict Stavis, People’s Commune and Rural Development in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 53–54; also see William L. Parish, Jr., “Socialism and the Chinese Peasant Family,” Journal of Asian Studies 34 (1975): 619.
58. Dali Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 144–45.
59. John Pelzel, “Economic Management of a Production Brigade in Post-Leap China,” in Economic Organization in Chinese Society, ed. W.E. Willmott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 393.
60. Steven Butler, Agricultural Mechanization in China: The Administrative Impact (New York: East Asian Institute of Columbia University, 1978), 9.
61. Keith Griffin and Ashwani Saith, Growth and Equality in Rural China (Geneva: Asian Employment Programme, 1981), 127.
62. The private sector was a touchy ideological subject in 1970s China, and Antonioni was excoriated in the official Chinese press because of his depiction. Andrea Barbato, Chung Kuo—Cina, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy: RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana, 1973), film.
63. Guan Shengtang, interview, December 26, 2011.
64. Li Huaiyin, interview, March 21, 2015.
65. Interviews in Gansu and Jiangxi, November and December 2011.
66. “Jianchi shehui zhuyi daolu, xianzhi zichan jieji faquan” [Maintain the Socialist Road, Restrict Bourgeois Rights], Red Flag [Hongqi], no. 8 (August 1975): 26.
67. Virgil Mays, “Swine Production,” in China: A Report of the Visit of the CSCPRC Animal Science Delegation, ed. Jacob Hoefer and Patrica Tsuchitani (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1980), 48–50.
68. Mays, “Swine Production,” 41.
69. By 1979, all Chinese pigs were immunized against hog cholera and swine erysipelas; see Mays, “Swine Production,” 51.
70. Mays, “Swine Production,” 49.
71. G. F. Sprague, “Agriculture in China,” Science 188, no. 4188 (1975): 555.
73. Ding Shaosheng, “Duzu ziben zhuyi daolu, maikai shehui zhuyi dabu” [Block the Capitalist Road, Take Big Steps for Socialism], Shehui yu pipan [Society and Critiques] (November 1975): 8–9.
74. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization in China, 11.
75. “Buduan gonggu nongcun shehui zhuyi zhendi” [Continue to Consolidate the Position of Socialism in the Villages], Lishi renzhi [Understandings of the History] 2 (1975): 37.
5. POLITICS
1. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1962).
2. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 5.
7. Kanter, Communes, 3–4.
8. Cited in Kanter, Communes, 3, 7.
9. Plato, “The Republic,” in The Republic of Plato: with Studies for Teachers, ed., William L. Bryan and Charlotte L. Bryan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 120.
10. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 184.
11. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 189.
12. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 183.
13. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 184.
14. Michael Gold, “Is the Small Farmer Dying?” New Republic, October 7, 1931, 211.
15. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 190–91.
16. Deborah Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More: The Industrialization of American Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 31.
17. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 189.
18. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 203.
19. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 191.
20. Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 46.
21. Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare, 46.
23. Kanter, Communes, 6–7.
24. Ran Abramitzky, “On the (lack of) Stability of Communes: An Economic Perspective,” in Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion, ed. Rachel McCleary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.
25. Abramitzky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 1. Also see Edward Lazear, “Salaries and Piece Rates,” Journal of Business 59, no. 3 (1986): 405–31; Edward Lazear, “Performance Pay and Productivity,” American Economic Review 90, no. 5 (2000): 1346–61; Edward Lazear, “The Power of Incentives,” American Economic Review 90, no. 2 (2000): 410–14; Bengt Holmstrom, “Moral Hazard in Teams,” The Bell Journal of Economics 13, no. 2 (1982): 324–40. For a survey on the literature on incentives in firms, see Canice Prendergast, “The Provision of Incentives in Firms,” Journal of Economic Literature 37, no. 1 (1999): 7–63; Canice Prendergast, “The Tenuous Trade-off between Risk and Incentives,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 5 (2002): 1071–102. For the results of laboratory experiments on free-riding, see Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, “Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments,” American Economic Review 90, no. 4 (2000): 980–94. For a review of the selection and incentive effects of increased income equality within communes, see Ran Abramitzky, “The Effect of Redistribution on Migration: Evidence from the Israeli Kibbutz,” Journal of Public Economics 93, no. 3 (2009): 498–511.
26. Illiterate individuals were more likely to enter Shaker communes, see John Murray, “Human Capital in Religious Communes: Literacy and Selection of Nineteenth Century Shakers,” Explorations in Economic History 32, no. 2 (1995): 217–35. Individuals who earned lower wages were more likely to enter kibbutzim, see Ran Abramitzky, “The Limits of Equality: Insights from the Israeli Kibbutz,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 3 (2008): 1111–59.
27. More educated and skilled members were more likely to leave Israel’s kibbutzim as the outside economy began to offer greater returns to skills in the 1980s and 1990s. See Ran Abramitzky, “The Effect of Redistribution on Migration.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Equality, a socialist commune in Washington State, lost its more talented members when they were lured by new outside opportunities. Similarly, the decline of members at Sunrise, a commune in Michigan, was attributed to its proximity to Detroit, which experienced an economic boom at the end of the Great Depression; see Iaácov Oved, Two Hundred Years of American Communes (New Brunswick, Canada: Transaction Books, 1993). Literate members of Shaker communes in nineteenth-century America were more likely to exit; see Murray, “Human Capital.” Those leaving Bishop Hill, a Swedish religious commune, were primarily members with a greater chance of success outside; see Donald Pitzer. America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
28. Amia Lieblich, Kibbutz Makom: Report from an Israeli Kibbutz (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Haim Barkai, Kibbutz Efficiency and the Incentive Conundrum (Jerusalem: Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, 1987); Laurence Iannaccone, Sacrifice and Stigma: Reducing Free-riding in Cults, Communes, and Other Collectives (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1992); Eli Berman, Sect, Subsidy, and Sacrifice: An Economist’s View of Ultra-orthodox Jews (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1998); Richard Sosis, “Religion and Intragroup Cooperation: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Analysis of Utopian Communities,” Cross-Cultural Research 34, no. 1 (2000): 70–87; Levhari Keren and Michael Byalsky, “On the Stability and Viability of Co-operatives: The Kibbutz as an Example,” Acta Oeconomica 56, no. 3 (2006): 301–21.
29. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 18.
30. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 18.
31. Among nineteenth-century American communes, religious communes tended to be the longest lasting type; see Sosis, “Religion and Intragroup Cooperation. In Israel, religious kibbutzim have been more successful than their secular counterparts; see Aryei Fishman, Judaism and Modernization on the Religious Kibbutz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Aryei Fishman, “Religious Socialism and Economic Success on the Orthodox Kibbutz,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 150, no. 4 (1994): 763–68. Members of religious kibbutzim tend to cooperate more with other members than members of secular kibbutzim; see Richard Sosis and Bradley Ruffle, “Religious Ritual and Cooperation: Testing for a Relationship on Israeli Religious and Secular Kibbutzim,” Current Anthropology 44, no. 5 (December 2003): 713–22.
32. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 18.
33. Kanter, Communes, 3, 7. From 1787 to 1796, Shaker communities were under the strict leadership of Father Joseph Meacham. Edward Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple Songs Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1940), 5.
34. Hogan, “Robert Owen.”
35. Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple, 5.
36. Laurence Iannaccone, “Sacrifice and Stigma: Reducing Free-Riding in Cults, Communes, and Other Collectives,” Journal of Political Economy 100, no. 2 (1992): 271–91.
37. Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple, 5.
38. Kanter, Communes, 10.
39. Oved, Two Hundred Years, 185. Also see Donald Pitzer, America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
40. Menachem Rosner, Itzhak Ben David, Alexander Avnat, Neni Cohen, and Uri Leviatan, The Second Generation: Continuity and Change in the Kibbutz (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
41. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 18.
42. Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple, 5.
43. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 3–4.
44. A religion, according to Emile Durkheim, is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them”; see Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 62.
45. David Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 7.
46. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 7.
47. Tuo Wang, The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics Between Politics and Performance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 10; also see Richard Baum, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 113.
48. Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 136–37.
49. Madsen, Morality and Power, 136–37.
50. Madsen, Morality and Power, 136–37.
51. Marc Blecher, China Against the Tides: Restructuring Through Revolution, Radicalism and Reform, 3rd ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), 98.
52. Martin K. Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 13–14, 211–12.
53. Whyte, 13–14, 211–12.
54. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 21.
55. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 12. Also see Whyte, Small Groups, 212–13.
56. Madsen, Morality and Power, 131.
57. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 12.
58. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 21.
59. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 20.
60. Madsen, Morality and Power 133.
61. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 20.
62. Chen Ruoxi, The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 44.
64. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 7.
65. “Ba qiye bancheng Mao Zedong sixiang daxuexiao” [Change Businesses into Universities of Mao Zedong Thought], People’s Daily, August 28, 1966.
66. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 11 and 15.
67. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 13.
69. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 27.
70. Sun Guihua, interview, March 1, 2013.
71. Jin Chunming, Huang Yuchong, and Chang Huimin, “Wen Ge” Shiqi Guaishi, Guaiyu [Strange Events and Strange Language During the “Cultural Revolution”] (Peking: Qiushi chubanshe, 1989), 189.
72. Zhang Dong, Boji Yishu Rensheng: Tian Hua Zhuan [A Biography of Tian Hua] (Beijing: Zhongguo Dianying Chubanshe, 2006), 218.
73. Madsen, Morality and Power, 134.
74. Madsen, Morality and Power, 134.
75. Madsen, Morality and Power, 136.
77. Madsen, Morality and Power, 135.
78. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 21.
79. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 22.
80. Alexander Cook, Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23.
81. Fang Houshu, “Stories Behind the Publication of the Little Red Book,” Xinhua, July 13, 2004.
82. For detailed descriptions of how rituals help define group membership, see Iannaccone, “Sacrifice and Stigma”; Berman, Sect, Subsidy, and Sacrifice; Sosis, “Religion and Intragroup Cooperation.”
83. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 27.
84. Yu Juan, “Wenge qijian guwu yaobei maozhuixi yulu” [The Required Quotation Exchange while Shopping during the Cultural Revolution], October 6, 2012, www.xici.net/d121565728.htm.
85. Li Huaiyin, e-mail correspondence, December 8, 2015.
86. Madsen, Morality and Power, 136.
87. Tang Ying, interview, December 4, 2015.
88. Whyte, Small Groups, 216. Whyte described “pockets of privacy and de-politicization” and observed that “in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, some efforts are being made to cover the existing ‘dead spot’ in the politicization of society.” It is noteworthy that as he was writing in 1974, Whyte considered the Cultural Revolution was already over.
89. Lu Lian, Yangtian Changxiao: Yige Danjian Shiyinian De Hongweibing Yuzhong Yutianlu [A Long Sigh: A Memoir of a Red Guard Imprisoned for Eleven Years] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Press, 2005), 286.
90. Wang, The Cultural Revolution, 20.
91. Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 146.
92. Ralph L. Powell, “Everyone a Soldier: The Communist Chinese Militia,” Foreign Affairs (October 1960): 3.
93. Richard Thornton, China: The Struggle for Power, 1917–1972 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 245.
94. Whyte, Small Groups,143.
95. “Quanguo douyao xue jiefangjun” [Learn from the PLA across the Country], People’s Daily, February 1, 1964. “An Mao Zedong sixiang ban qiye” [Establish enterprises based on Mao Zedong Thought], People’s Daily, April 3, 1966.
96. Zheng Keming, “Report to Jiangxi’s Militia Work Conference,” Jiangxi Ribao [Jiangxi Daily], December 13, 1959.
97. Freidman et al., Revolution, Resistance, 139–41.
98. Friedman et al., Revolution, Resistance, 140–41.
99. “Hold the Great Red Banner of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Still Higher, Bring the Mass Movement of Creatively Studying and Applying Chairman Mao’s Works to a New Stage and Turn the PLA Into a Truly Great School of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought,” Peking Review 10, no. 3 (January 13, 1967): 8–13.
100. Chu Li and Tien Chieh-yun, Inside a People’s Commune (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), 128.
101. Madsen, Morality and Power, 133.
102. Freidman et al., Revolution, Resistance, 140
103. Madsen, Morality and Power, 138.
104. Tang Ying, interview.
105. Abramitsky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 15.
106. Sun Guihua, interview, November 10, 2014.
107. Blecher, China Against the Tides 98.
108. More social interaction among neighbors leads households to become more collectively oriented, see Thomas Macias and Kristin Williams “Know Your Neighbors, Save the Planet Social Capital and the Widening Wedge of Pro-Environmental Outcomes,” Environment and Behavior 48, no. 3 (2016): 391.
109. Madsen, Morality and Power, 139.
110. William T. Liu, “Family Change and Family Planning in the People’s Republic of China,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, New York, April 19, 1974; see Leo Orleans, “China’s Experience in Population Control: The Elusive Model,” in China’s Road to Development, ed. Neville Maxwell (New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 121.
111. Peggy Printz and Paul Steinle, Commune: Life in Rural China (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977), 71.
112. Madsen, Morality and Power, 139.
113. Madsen, Morality and Power, 138, 140.
114. Madsen, Morality and Power, 141.
115. Sun Guihua, interview, March 1, 2013.
116. Arthur Galston and Jean Savage, Daily Life in People’s China (New York: Crowell, 1973), 115.
117. Orleans, “China’s Experience in Population Control,” 107.
118. Galston and Savage, Daily Life, 119.
119. Chen, The Execution, 43.
120. Fei Xiaotong, China’s Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 116.
121. Tang Ying, interview.
123. Blecher, China Against the Tides 144.
124. Printz and Steinle, Commune, 85.
125. Madsen, Morality and Power, 142.
126. Jonathan Unger, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 78.
127. Madsen, Morality and Power, 124.
128. Unger, The Transformation, 79.
129. Unger, The Transformation, 77–78.
130. Unger, The Transformation, 79.
131. Madsen, Morality and Power, 143,
132. Unger, The Transformation, 79.
133. Madsen Morality and Power, 144.
134. Unger, The Transformation, 88–89.
135. Han Dongping, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and China in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 17–19, 70–71.
136. Unger, The Transformation, 79, 83–84.
137. Madsen, Morality and Power, 143.
138. Unger, The Transformation, 76–77.
139. Gordon Bennett, Huadong: The Story of a Chinese People’s Commune (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 98.
140. Bennett, Huadong, 98; Steven Butler, “Price Scissors and Commune Administration in Post-Mao China,” in Chinese Rural Development, ed. William Parrish (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1985), 106; Li Huaiyin, Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948–2008 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 131–32.
141. Li, The Transformation, 131–32.
142. Rebecca McInroy, “Two Guys on Your Head: Egocentric Bias: Why You Think You Invented the Internet, and Why You’re Kinda Right,” KUT National Public Radio, October 15, 2015.
143. For a discussion of the selection and incentive effects of equal sharing see Abramitzky, “On the (lack of) Stability of Communes,” 18. In the context of Israeli kibbutzim, see Bradley Ruffle and Richard Sosis, “Cooperation and the In-Group-Out-Group Bias: A Field Test on Israeli Kibbutz Members and City Residents,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 60, no. 2 (2006): 147–63; Ran Abramitzky, “Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality—Incentives Trade-off,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 1 (2011): 185–208.
1. For a review of the dynamics of Chinese agricultural collectivization, see Ying Bai and James Kai-sing Kung, “The Shaping of an Institutional Choice: Weather Shocks, the Great Leap Famine, and Agricultural Decollectivization in China,” Explorations in Economic History 54 (October 2014): 1–26.
2. Henan Agricultural Statistics, 1949–1979 [Jianguo sanshinian Henan sheng nongye tongji ziliao] (Zhengzhou: Henan Provincial Bureau of Statistics Agriculture Department, 1981).
3. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 3.
4. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 221.
5. Ran Abramitzky “On the (lack of) Stability of Communes: An Economic Perspective,” in Oxford Handbook the Economics of Religion, ed. Rachel McCleary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–4.
6. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 1949–1983 [Nongye jingji ziliao, 1949–1983] (Beijing: Ministry of Agriculture Planning Bureau, 1983), 80–81.
7. Kanter, Communes, 3 7.
8. Edward Andrews, The Gift to be Simple Songs Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers (New York: J.J. Augustin, 1940), 5.
9. Andrews, The Gift to be Simple, 5.
10. The assumption that commune cadres adjusted subunit size in responsive to economic stimuli is not universally accepted. Kate Xiao Zhou argues that “cadres organized farming on a commune, brigade, or team basis, regardless of the implications for productivity.” See Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 3.
11. Studies that examine the Great Leap Forward agricultural crisis include Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Holt, 1998); Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker & Co, 2010); Justin Yifu Lin, “Collectivization and China’s Agricultural Crisis in 1959–1961,” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 6 (December 1990): 1228–52; James Kai-sing Kung and Shuo Chen, “The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: Career Incentives and Political Radicalism During China’s Great Leap famine,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 1 (February 2011): 27–45.
12. Liu Fangying, trans., Issues and Studies (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1979), 94.
13. For a summary of the different roles of the commune and its subunits, see Benedict Stavis, People’s Commune and Rural Development in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Rural Development Committee, 1974).
14. Frederick T. Evers, Joe M. Bohlen, and Richard D. Warren, “The Relationships of Selected Size and Structure Indicators in Economic Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly 21, no. 2 (June 1976): 326–42; Nan Weiner and Thomas A. Mahoney, “A Model of Corporate Performance as a Function of Environmental, Organizational, and Leadership Influences,” Academy of Management Journal 24, no. 3 (September 1981): 453–70.
15. Howard E. Aldrich, Organizations and Environments (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979); Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn, The Social Psychology of Organizations, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1978); Henry Mintzberg, The Structuring of Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979); Malcolm C. Sawyer, The Economics of Industries and Firms: Theories, Evidence, and Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); William G. Shepherd, The Economics of Industrial Organization (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979); Kenneth D. George and Caroline Joll, Industrial Organisation: Competition, Growth, and Structural Change, 3rd ed., vol. 5 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981).
16. Katz and Kahn, The Social Psychology; Ephraim Yuchtman, and Stanley E. Seashore, “A System Resource Approach to Organizational Effectiveness,” American Sociological Review 32, no. 6 (December 1967): 891–903.
17. Richard Z. Gooding and John A. Wagner III, “A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relationship Between Size and Performance: The Productivity and Efficiency of Organizations and Their Subunits,” Administrative Science Quarterly 30, no. 4 (December 1985): 462–63.
18. Gooding and Wagner, “A Meta-Analytic Review,” 477.
19. Gooding and Wagner, “A Meta-Analytic Review,” 478.
20. Dan R. Dalton, William D. Todor, Michael J. Spendolini, Gordon J. Fielding, and Lyman W. Porter, “Organization Structure and Performance: A Critical Review,” Academy of Management Review 5, no. 1 (January 1980): 49–64; P.G. Herbst, “Measurement of Behavior Structure by Means of Input-Output Data,” Human Relations 10 (1957): 335–46; R. W. Revans, “Human Relations, Management, and Size,” in Human Relations and Modern Management, eds. Hugh-Jones and Edward Maurice (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1958), 77–120.
21. James H. Davis, Group Performance (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969); John Fleishman, “Collective Action as Helping Behavior: Effects of Responsibility Diffusion on Contributions to a Public Good,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38, no. 4 (April 1980): 629–37; Bernard P. Indik and Stanley F. Seashore, Effects of Organization Size on Member Attitudes and Behavior (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1961); Raymond A. Katzell, Richard S. Barrett, and Treadway C. Parker, “Job Satisfaction, Job Performance and Situational Characteristics,” Journal of Applied Psychology 45, no. 2 (April 1961): 65–72; R. Marriott, “Size of Working Group and Output,” Occupational Psychology 23 (1949): 47–57; Ivan D. Steiner, “Models for Inferring Relationships Between Group Size and Potential Group Productivity,” Behavioral Science 11, no. 4 (July 1966): 273–83; Ivan D. Steiner, Group Processes and Productivity (New York: Academic Press, 1972).
22. Phoebe M. Carillo and Richard E. Koeplman, “Organization Structure and Productivity: Effects of Subunits Size, Vertical Complexity, and Administrative Intensity on Operating Efficiency,” Group and Organization Studies 16, no. 1 (March 1991): 55.
23. Carillo and Kopelman, “Organization Structure,” 44–59.
24. Carillo and Kopelman, “Organization Structure,” 57.
25. Gooding and Wagner III, “A Meta-Analytic Review,” 475; also see James M. Buchanan, The Demand and Supply of Public Goods (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968); Gareth R. Jones, “Task Visibility, Freeriding, and Shirking: Explaining the Effect of Structure and Technology on Employee Behavior,” Academy of Management Review 9, no. 4 (October 1984): 684–95; Bibb Latane, “The Psychology of Social Impact,” American Psychologist 36, no. 4 (April 1981): 343–56; James W. McKie, “Changing Views,” in Social Responsibility and the Business Predicament, eds. James W. McKie (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1974), 17–40; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Oliver E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (New York: Free Press, 1975).
26. For example, see Indik and Seashore, Effects of Organization Size; Revans, “Human Relations.”
27. Richard Albanese and David D. Van Fleet, “Rational Behavior in Groups: The Free-Riding Tendency,” Academy of Management Review 10, no. 2 (April 1985): 244–55.
28. Fleishman, “Collective Action.”
30. For example, see Buchanan, The Demand and Supply; Olson, The Logic.
31. Gooding and Wagner III, “A Meta-Analytic Review,” 476.
32. Dalton et al., “Organization Structure,” 53.
33. John R. Kimberly, “Organizational Size and the Structuralist Perspective: A Review, Critique, and Proposal,” Administrative Science Quarterly 21, no. 4 (December 1976): 571–97.
34. Gooding and Wagner III, “A Meta-Analytic Review,” 484.
35. Gooding and Wagner III, “A Meta-Analytic Review,” 462–81. Studies that use the number of employees include Marriott, “Size of Working Group and Output” and Charles A. Glisson and Patricia Yancy Martin, “Productivity and Efficiency in Human Service Organizations as Related to Structure, Size, and Age,” Academy of Management Journal, 23, no. 1 (March 1980): 21–37; Evers et al., “The Relationships of Selected Size,” use the log number of employees.
36. Dalton et al., “Organization Structure,” 49–64.
37. Victor D. Lippit, “The Commune in Chinese Development,” Modern China 3, no. 2 (April 1977): 248.
38. Bai and Kung, “The Shaping,” 1–26; Lippit, “The Commune,” 229–55; Greg O’Leary and Andrew Watson, “The Role of the People’s Commune in Rural Development in China,” Pacific Affairs 55, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 593–612.
39. Steven Butler, Agricultural Mechanization in China: The Administrative Impact (New York: East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 1978), 33–34.
40. Butler, Agricultural Mechanization, 18.
41. The income and accounting tasks have been shifted downward to brigades in 1959 and to production teams in 1961; see Lippit, “The Commune,” 229–55.
42. Justin Yifu Lin, “The Household Responsibility System in China’s Agricultural Reform: A Theoretical and Empirical Study,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 36, no. 3 (April 1988): 199–224; Peter Nolan, “De-Collectivisation of Agriculture in China, 1979–82: A Long-Term Perspective,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 7, no. 3/4 (September/December 1983): 381–403; Peter Nolan, The Political Economy of Collective Farms: An Analysis of China’s Post-Mao Rural Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
43. By 1984, 99 percent of production teams had adopted the HRS; see Justin Yifu Lin, “Rural Reforms and Agricultural Growth in China,” The American Economic Review 82, no. 1 (March 1992): 38.
44. James Kai-sing Kung, “Transaction Costs and Peasants’ Choice of Institutions: Did the Right to Exit Really Solve the Free Rider Problem in Chinese Collective Agriculture?” Journal of Comparative Economics 17, no. 2 (June 1993): 486. Kung’s suggestion that teams could not use piece rates is, generally speaking, incorrect after 1970.
45. The number of teams in Henan remained relatively stable from 364,628 in 1962 to 333,657 in 1978. Between 1963 and 1979, the within-year standard deviation of the average number of households per team across counties ranged from 5.1 to 11.5. This observation was made anecdotally by Lippit, “The Commune.”
46. Zhang Letian, Gaobie Lixiang: Renmin Gongshe Zhidu Yanjiu [Farewell to Dreams: A Study on the Commune System] (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1998), 260.
47. The ten prefectures are Anyang (安阳), Xinxiang (新乡), Shangqiu (商丘), Kaifeng (开封), Luoyang (洛阳), Xuchang (许昌), Zhoukou (周口), Zhu Madian (驻马店), Nanyang (南阳), and Xinyang (信阳).
48. Dali L. Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
49. “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu zai nongcun jianli renmin gongshe wenti de jueyi (August 29, 1958)” [CPC Central Committee’s Resolution on the Establishment of People’s Communes in Rural Area] in Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected Important Documents since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China], vol. 11 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1997).
50. When interaction is not included, the commune absolute size is negatively associated with per capita crop production with a p-value of 0.05; neither brigade size nor team size has statistically significant coefficients. When the three-way interactions between commune, brigade, and team sizes are included, none of the variables per se or the interactions are statistically significant.
51. The correlation between commune and brigade absolute size is 0.43 (p-value=0.000), the correlation between commune absolute size and team size is −0.29 (p-value=0.000), and the correlation between brigade absolute size and team size is −0.36 (p-value=0.000).
52. Mean centering does not change the coefficient of the interaction term between commune relative size and team size.
53. Rather than estimating the black line using year fixed effects, I instead estimate annual commune organizational structure’s contribution to agricultural production based on the two size variables and their interaction of each observation, and the regression coefficients of the three values in table 6.1, column 4.
54. Data from 1958 were dropped from this analysis because of lagging independent variables.
7. BURYING THE COMMUNE
1. Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 141.
2. Daniel Kelliher, Peasant Power: The Era of Reform, 1979–1989 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 30–31.
3. Frederick Teiwes, “A Critique of Western Studies of CCP Elite Politics,” IIAS Newsletter, 1996.
4. Susan Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 38. For works on rural residents’ actual views and responses to decollectivization see Jonathan Unger, “The Decollectivization of the Chinese Countryside: A Survey of Twenty-Eight Villages,” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 4 (1985): 585–606; Jonathan Unger, “Remuneration, Ideology, and Personal Interests in a Chinese Village, 1960–1980,” in William L. Parish, ed., Chinese Rural Development: The Great Transformation (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985); Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant in Mao’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); William Hinton, The Great Reversal: the Privatization of China, 1979–1989 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).
5. Ren Xiangqin, interview, January 2016. Ren is from Lingbao County, Henan. She was a member of the Sixth Production Team, Yanxie Brigade, Chuankou Commune.
6. Tong Huaiping and Li Chengguan, Deng Xiaoping baci nanxun jishi [Record of Deng Xiaoping’s Eight Southern Journeys] (Beijing: Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe, 2002), 81.
7. Wang Shaoguang and Hu Angang, The Chinese Economy in Crisis: State Capacity and Tax Reform (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 111.
8. Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 9.
9. Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 439.
10. Baum, Burying Mao, 27.
11. Baum, Burying Mao, 27.
12. Avery Goldstein, From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics: Structural Constraints and Politics in China, 1949–1978 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 211–24; Lucian W. Pye, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1981), 22–27.
13. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 351.
14. “Learn from Dazhai in Agriculture,” People’s Daily, September 23, 1970.
16. Richard Thornton, China: A Political History, 1917–1980 (New York: Westview Press), 377.
17. Merle Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 49.
18. David Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968–1981 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 65.
19. These articles appeared in the People’s Daily on February 3, 4, 10, and 27, 1975. “Jianchi duli zizhu zili gengsheng de fangzhen” [Adhere to the Principle of Independence and Self-reliance], People’s Daily, February 3, 1975; “Luxian duilletou, liangmian shuangfengshou” [Right Route Leads to Harvest of Grain and Cotton], People’s Daily, February 4, 1975; “Jianchi jixu geming, pipan ziben zhuyi qingxiang” [Insist on Continuing the Revolution, Criticize the Capitalist Tendencies], People’s Daily, February 10, 1975; “Wei geming duo gaochan, wei guojia duozuo gongxian” [Achieve High Yields for the Sake of Revolution, Make More Contributions for the Country], People’s Daily, February 27, 1975; “Gonggu wuchan jieji zhuanzheng shi changqi de zhandou renwu” [To Consolidate the Dictatorship of Proletariats Is a Long-Term Combat Task], People’s Daily, February 27, 1975.
20. Ji Yan, “Xianzhi zican jieji faquan de sixiang wuqi” [Ideological Weapon for Restricting Bourgeois Right], Red Flag [Hongqi], no. 4 (April 1975): 30–36; Jiang Weiqing, “Jinyibu jiaqiang nongcun de wuchan jiejie zhuanzheng” [Further Consolidate the Dictatorship of Proletariats in Rural Areas], Red Flag, no. 5 (May 1975): 14–19; Cheng Yue, “Xuehao lilun zhixing zhengce” [Understand the Theory, Implement the Policy], Red Flag, no. 6 (June 1975): 10–12.
21. Jiang Qing, “Jiang Qing’s Letter to the Delegates Attending to the CCP-CC All-China Conference on Professional Work in Agriculture (July 2, 1975),” Issues and Studies (October 1975): 86–87. Teiwes and Sun dispute the authenticity of the document, but not its representation of the radicals’ views. See Teiwes and Sun, The End of the Maoist Era, 349.
22. Zhang, “1975 nian nongye xue dazhai”; also see Teiwes and Sun, The End of the Maoist Era, 358, 363.
23. Wu Jicheng, “Jiang Qing and the Dazhai Agricultural Conference,” [Jiang Qing yu nongye xue dazhai huiyi] in Witnessing History: China 1975–1976 [Jianzheng lishi: Zhongguo, 1975–1976], ed. Zhang Shujun (Changsha: Hunan People’s Press, 2008), 30.
24. Teiwes and Sun, The End of the Maoist Era, 354.
25. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 67.
26. Wu, “Jiang Qing,” 28–29.
27. “Comrade Chen Yung-kuei’s Report at the Second National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture,” Peking Review 20, no. 2 (January 7, 1977), 9.
28. The September issue of Red Flag contained Five Articles condemning the ancient popular novel The Water Margin; see “Lu Xun ping shui hui” [Lu Xun’s Reviews of The Water Margin], Red Flag, no. 9 (1975): 5; “Duanping: zhongshi dui shuiwu de pinglun” [Attach Importance to Comments on The Water Margin], Red Flag, no. 9 (1975): 6–7; Fang Yanliang, “Shi renmin dou zhidao touxiangpai, xuexi Lu Xun dui Shuihui de lunshu” [Let All People Know About Yielders, Learn Lu Xun’s Critiques of The Water Margin], Red Flag, no. 9 (1975): 8–12; “Yibu xuanyang touxiang zhuyi de fanmian jiaocai, ping Shuihu” [A Negative Example Advocating Capitulationism, the Review of The Water Margin], Red Flag, no. 9 (1975): 13–17; Zhong Gu, “Ping Shuihu de touxiang zhuyi luxian” [Discussions about the Capitulationism Courses in The Water Margin], Red Flag, no. 9 (1975): 18–25. On September 4 the People’s Daily published an editorial condemning the novel buttressed with commentary from Mao; see “Carry out the Discussions About the Water Margin,” People’s Daily, September 4, 1975. According to Thornton, the campaign was intended to undermine Deng; see Thornton, China, 377.
29. Jiang Qing, “Jiejian Dazhai dagui ganbu he sheyuan shide jianghua” [Speech to Dazhai brigade cadre and commune members], Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, September 12, 1975, http://ccradb.appspot.com/post/3182. Both Chinese and Western researchers generally agree that this version of Jiang’s speech is either fake or a summary of her remarks. Whether precise or not, this quote captures the essence of Jiang’s remarks as revealed in other official accounts and the memoirs of those who attended the 1975 Dazhai Conference. Attempts to acquire the speech from the Central Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC proved unsuccessful.
31. Jiang, “Address at the National Conference.”
33. Teiwes and Sun, The End of the Maoist Era, 359. Similarly, in 1974, Mao had called on Deng to present his Three Worlds Theory to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Once in power, however, Deng quickly disavowed that Maoist theory and moved toward reconciliation, first with the United States and then with the Soviet Union.
34. Zhongguo zhongyang wenxian yanjiu shi [Central Chinese Communist Party Literature Research Office] ed., Deng Xiaoping nianpu (1975–1997) [A Chronology of Deng Xiaoping, 1975–1997] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2004), 18.
35. Wu Jicheng, “Jiang Qing and the Dazhai Agricultural Conference,” 30.
37. “Conference on Learning Agriculture from Dazhai and Agricultural Rectification,” people.com, August 14, 2014, http://history.people.com.cn/n/2014/0814/c387654–25468491.html. For excepts from Deng’s September 15, 1975, speech in Chinese, see Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts of Speech at the Opening Ceremony of National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture,” Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, September 15, 1975, http://ccradb.appspot.com/post/3183.
38. Given Deng’s previous efforts to undermine Dazhai in the mid-1960s, it is plausible that Mao had enlisted Jiang to try to provoke Deng to make an unscripted anti-Dazhai comment, and then after the ploy failed, quickly disavowed her statements. There is, however, no proof this occurred.
39. Teiwes and Sun, The End of the Maoist Era, 354.
40. Deng Liqun, Deng Liqun guoshi jiangtanlu [Record of Deng Liqun’s Lectures on National History] (Beijing: Zhonghua renmin gongheguo shigao bianweihui, 2000), vol. 3, 102.
42. Deng Xiaoping, “Things Must Be Put in Order in All Fields.”
43. Mao Mao [Deng Rong], Wode fuqin Deng Xiaoping: “Wenge” suiyue [My Father Deng Xiaoping: The “Cultural Revolution” Years] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2000), trans. Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years (New York: Bertelsmann, 2005), 398–99; Chen Dabin, Ji’e yinfa de biange: yige zishen jizhe de qinshen jingli yu sikao [The Revolution Sparked by Famine: The Personal Experiences and Reflections of a Senior Journalist] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1998), 40–41.
44. Hua Guofeng, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference (Central Document No. 21) Mobilize the Whole Party, Make Greater Efforts to Develop Agriculture and Strive to Build Dachai-type Counties,” Peking Review 18, no. 44 (October 31, 1975): 7–10.
45. Xinhua Press Release, March 12, 1976.
46. Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference,” 10.
47. Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference,” 9.
48. Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference,” 10.
49. Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference,” 10.
50. Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference,” 10.
51. Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference,” 10.
52. Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference,” 8.
54. Chen Yonggui, “Chedi pipan ‘sirenbang’, xianqi puji dazhaixian yundong de xingaochao” [Thoroughly Expose and Criticize the “Gang of Four,” Set off a New Upsurge in Popularizing Dazhai Movement], People’s Daily, December 24, 1976; Chedi jiefang pipan “sirenbang” cuandang duoquan de taotian zuixing [Thoroughly Expose and Criticize the Monstrous Crimes of the “Gang of Four” in Overthrowing the Party and Seizing Power] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1977), 189; “Comrade Chen,” 9.
55. Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Mass Criticism Group, “Two Line Struggle around the First National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture,” Red Flag, no. 1 (January 1977).
57. Issues and Studies, October 1977.
58. “Ministry Mass Criticism Group Exposes Crimes of ‘Gang of Four’ in Undermining Agriculture,” Xinhua News Agency, no. 6817 (November 1976): 406; also see “Comrade Chen,” 9.
59. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 68.
60. Guo Jian and Yongyi Song, Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), xxxvii.
61. “Yaohai shi fupi ziben zhuyi” [The Critical Issue Is the Restoration of Capitalism], People’s Daily, February 17, 1976.
62. Chi Heng, “Cong zichan jieji minzhupai dao zouzipai” [From the Bourgeois Democrats to the Capitalists], People’s Daily, March 2, 1976.
63. “Fan’an bude renxin” [The Overturn Cannot Win Popular Support], People’s Daily, March 10, 1976.
64. Baum, Burying Mao, 37.
65. “Resolution of CPC Central Committee On Dismissing Teng Hsiao-ping From All Posts Both Inside and Outside Party,” Peking Review 19, no.15 (April 9, 1976): 3.
66. Thornton, China, 383.
67. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 68.
68. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 68–69; also see Thornton, China, 387–88, and Baum, Burying Mao, 39–40.
69. Baum, Burying Mao, 43.
70. Hua Guofeng, “Memorial Speech by Hua Kuo-Feng, First Chairman of Central Committee of Communist Party of China and Premier of State Council, at Mass Memorial Meeting for Great Leader and Teacher Chairman Mao Tsetung,” Peking Review 19, no. 39 (September 24, 1976): 15.
71. Baum, Burying Mao, 39.
72. “Comrade Wu De’s Speech at the Celebration Rally in the Capital,” Peking Review 19, no. 44 (October 29, 1976): 13.
73. “Third Session of Standing Committee of Fourth National People’s Congress Convened in Peking,” Peking Review 19, no. 50 (December 10, 1976): 11.
74. Mao Zedong, “On the Ten Great Relationships (April 25, 1956),” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), vol. 5.
75. Thornton, China, 392–93.
76. Chen, “Thoroughly Expose and Criticize,” 14–15.
77. Chen, “Thoroughly Expose and Criticize,” 15.
78. Fang Weizhong, ed., Zhonghua renmin gongheguo jingji dashiji, 1949–1980 [Major Economic Events of the PRC, 1949–1980] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1985), 582; Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 70–71.
79. “Jiakuai nongye fazhan sudu shi quandang de zhandou renwu” [Accelerating the Pace of Agricultural Development Is the Combat Task of the Whole Party], People’s Daily, December 11, 1977.
80. Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Puji Dazhai Xian Gongzuo zuotanhui taolun de ruogan wenti [Outline Report for the Politburo on the Working Forum for Popularizing Dazhai Counties], 21 Shiji xiangzhen gongzuo quanshu [Town Work Book of 21st Century] (Beijing: Zhongguo nongye chubanshe, 1999); also see Zhang Quanyou, Hongyawan de mimi: 1978 nian longxi shuaixian shixing baochan daohu shilu [The Secret of Hongyawan: Record of Longxi that Firstly Conducted Households Production Contract in 1978] (Lanzhou Shi: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2010), 219.
81. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 71.
82. Baum, Burying Mao, 5.
83. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: Free Press, 1999), 437.
84. Baum, Burying Mao, 14.
85. Baum, Burying Mao, 46.
86. Thornton, China, 395–96.
87. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 169.
88. Thornton, China, 395; also see Wang Hsiao-hsien, “The Turmoil in Yunnan,” Issues and Studies 13, no. 12 (December 1977): 41–52.
89. Wu Xiang et al., “Wan Li tan shiyijie sanzhong quanhui qianhou de nongcun gaige” [Wan Li on Agricultural Reform Before and After the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee], in Gaibian Zhongguo mingyun de 41 tian [The 41 Days That Changed the Destiny of China], eds. Yu Guangyuan et al. (Shenzhen: Haitian Publishing House, 1998), 281–89.
90. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 437–38.
91. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 437–38; also see Liu Changgen and Ji Fei, Wan Li zai Anhui [Wan Li in Anhui] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2002), 83.
92. Jilin Provincial Radio, November 14, 1977, cited in Peter Nolan and Gordon White, “Distribution and Development in China,” The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 13, no. 3 (1981): 14.
93. “Zhuahao shouyi fenpei, shixian zengchan zengshou” [Refine Income Distribution, To Achieve an Increased Production], People’s Daily, December 20, 1977.
94. Sichuan Provincial Radio, December 22, 1977, cited in Nolan and White, “Distribution and Development,” 14.
95. Du Xianyuna, “Minyi ruchao, lishi jubian” [Waves of Historic Changes in Public Opinions] in Gaibian Zhongguo mingyun de 41 tian [The 41 Days That Changed the Destiny of China], eds. Yu Guangyuan et al. (Shenzhen: Haitian Publishing House, 1998), 218–23; Liu and Ji, Wan Li zai Anhui, 83.
96. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 171–72.
97. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 171–72.
98. Dong Tai, “Nongcun jishi maoyi shi ziben zhuyi de ziyou shichang ma?” [Is the Rural Market a Free Trade Market for Capitalism?] People’s Daily, January 31, 1978; Wei Jianyi, “Luoshi zhengce shi zuohao beigeng gongzuo de zhongyao huanjie” [Implementing the Policy is an Important Piece in Preparation for Farming], People’s Daily, February 22, 1978.
99. “Jianjue jiuzheng pingdiao shengchandui zicai de waifeng” [Correct the Unhealthy Trend of Leveling the Wealth of the Production Team], People’s Daily, April 2, 1978.
100. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 171.
101. Wan Li, “Diligently Carry out the Party’s Agricultural Policy,” Red Flag, no. 3 (March 1978): 92–97.
102. Nolan and White, “Distribution and Development,” 15.
103. “‘Sanji suoyou, duiwei jichu’ yingai wending” [“The System of Three Level Ownership with the Production Team as the Basic Ownership Unit” Should Be Maintained], People’s Daily, March 15, 1979.
104. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 438.
105. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 439.
106. Liu and Ji, Wan Li zai Anhui, 163.
107. Hua’s Ten-Year Plan and its accompanying State Council report in February 1978 both called on communes to “not only focus on grain production, but also on cash crops including cotton, oil-yielding and sugar-yielding plants.” See Office of National People’s Congress Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, Department of Development Planning, National Development and Reform Commission, ed., “1976–1985 nian fazhan guomin jingji shinian guihua gangyao (caoan)” [Ten-year Plan for the Development of National Economy as of 1976–1985 (draft)], in Jianguo yilai guomin jingji he shehui fazhan wunian jihua zhongyao wenjian huibian [Selected Important Documents of the Five-Year Plans for National Economy and Societal Development since the Founding of PRC] (Beijing: China Democracy and Legal Press, 2008); Hua Guofeng, “1978 State Council’s Governmental Report,” presented at the First Plenary Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress, February 26, 1978), February 16, 2006, http://www.gov.cn/test/2006-02/16/content_200704.htm.
108. Office of National People’s Congress Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, Department of Development Planning, National Development and Reform Commission, “1976–1985 nian fazhan guomin jingji shinian guihua gangyao (caoan)” [Ten-Year Plan for the Development of National Economy as of 1976–1985 (draft)].
109. Baum, Burying Mao, 96.
110. “Luoshi dangde zhengce, jianqing nongmin fudan” [Implement the Party’s Policy, Lighten the Peasants’ Burden], People’s Daily, July, 5, 1978.
111. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 171.
112. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 71.
113. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 73.
114. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 71, 73, 171.
115. Meisner, Mao’s China, 435–36.
116. Goldman, From Comrade, 31.
117. Goldman, From Comrade, 31–32.
118. Goldman, From Comrade, 43.
119. Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles” in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping 1975–82 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1995), 182, 183.
120. Ye Jianying, “Speech at the Closing of Ceremony of the Central Work Conference of the CPC Central Committee (December 13, 1978),” in Ye Jianying xuanji [Selected Works of Ye Jianying] (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1996), 494.
121. Goldman, From Comrade, 49.
122. Meisner, Mao’s China, 437.
123. Chen Yonggui and Ji Dengkui lost control over agricultural policy, which was placed under the newly appointed reformist Vice-Premier Wang Renzhong; Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 173.
124. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 174.
125. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 175; also see Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 441.
126. Meisner, Mao’s China, 438.
127. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 175.
128. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 441.
129. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 440; also see Wu Xiang et al., “Wan Li,” 288.
130. Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, 1982–1992 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 314–316; Zhongguo zhongyang wenxian yanjiu shi, Deng Xiaoping nianpu, May 31, 1980.
131. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 175.
133. Wu Xiang et al., “Wan Li,” 289; Liu and Ji, Wan Li zai Anhui, 178–79; Yang Jisheng, Deng Xiaoping shidai: Zhongguo gaige kaifang ershinian jishi [The Age of Deng Xiaoping: A Record of Twenty Years of China’s Reform and Openings] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 1998), vol. 1, 187–88; Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 442.
134. Yang Yichen huiyilu [Memoirs of Yang Yichen] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 316; Li Haiwen and Liu Ronggang, “Guizhou shixian lianchan chengbaozhi de qianqian houhou: Fang Chi Biqing” [The Story of the Implementation of the Output-Linked Contract System in Guizhou: An Interview with Chi Biqing], Zhonggong dangshi ziliao [CCP History Materials], no. 68 (1998): 90; Wang Weiqun, “Weida de diyibu: Zhongguo nongcun gaige qidian shilu” [The First Step: The True Account of the Starting Point of China’s Rural Reform], December 17, 2008, http://news.qq.com/a/20081217/001228.htm; Wu Xiang, “E duzi shi tuidong gaige de zuichu liliang” [Hungry Stomachs Are the Earliest Force Driving Reform], January 20, 2013, http://www.reformdata.org/content/20130120/15430.html; Zhongguo shehui kexuyuan jingji yanjiusuo [Economics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Science], Xue Muqiao gongzuo biji, xiace (1963–1982) [Xue Muqiao’s Work Notes (1963–1982)], internal materials, 416–18; Dali L. Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 170.
135. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform: Initial Steps Toward a New Chinese Countryside (London: Routledge, 2015), 184.
136. Teiwes and Sun, Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform, 184.
137. Teiwes and Sun, Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform, 185, 187.
138. For Chinese materials documenting the policy process associated with decollectivization see “Guanyu jinyibu jiaqiang he wanshan nongye shengchan zerenzhi de jige wenti” [On Several Issues in Further Strengthening and Perfecting the Agricultural Responsibility System] (September 27, 1980) in Nongye jitihua zhongyao wenjian huibian (1958–1981) [Selected Important Documents of Agricultural Responsibility System], 411; Zhang Wanshu, “Dabaogan neimu” [The Inside Story of All-round Contracting], Zhongguo zuojia [Chinese writers], no. 11 (2007): 35; Ma Guochuan, “Weida de chuangzao: Du Rensheng fangtanlu” [(Household Farming Is) A Great Innovation (of the Peasants): Record of an Interview with Du Runsheng], December 17, 2008, http://www.aisixiang.com/data/23385–2.html; Ren Bo, “Ziyuan bingfu renduo dishao maodun guidingle Zhongguo nongdi zhidu: Zhuanfang yuan zhongyang nongcun zhengce yanjiushi zhuren Du Runsheng” [The Natural Resource Endowment Contradiction of a Large Population and Limited Land Determines China’s Rural Land System: A Special Visit to Former Central Rural Policy Research Office Director Du Runsheng], October 5, 2002, http://magazine.caixin.com/2002-10-5/100079968.html. Lin Shanshan and Du Qiang, “Jiuhaoyuan de nianqingren” [The Young People of Compound No. 9], Nanfang renwu zhoukan [Southern People Weekly], no. 28 (2013), August 26, 2013; “Nongcun gaige zuotanhui tanhua jilu” [Record of Talks at the Seminar on Rural Reform], July 18, 2003, 4.
139. Teiwes and Sun, Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform, 187.
140. Teiwes and Sun, Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform, 187.
141. Teiwes and Sun, Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform, 187, 190–91.
142. Lu Mai, “Zhongguo nongcun gaige de juece guocheng” [The Policy-making Process of China’s Rural Reform], http://gongfa.com/nongcungaigejuece.htm; Zhang Jingdong, Du Runsheng tamen [Du Runsheng and Those Sharing His Views] (Hong Kong: Zhongguo guoji wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2011), 27; Zhou Qiren, “Shencai feiyang Du Ruizhi” [The Ebullient Du Ruizhi], March 18, 2003, http://www.eeo.com.cn/2013/0318/241351.shtml; Xi zhongxun zhuan [Biography of Xi Zhongxun] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2013), vol. 2, 439.
143. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 169–70.
144. Zhao, Prisoner of the State, 141.
145. Zhao, Prisoner of the State, 141.
146. Li Lanqing, Breaking Through: The Birth of China’s Opening-Up Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 31.
147. Meisner, Mao’s China, 428.
148. Baum, Burying Mao, 37–38.
149. Baum, Burying Mao, 51.
150. Meisner, Mao’s China, 433.
151. Li, Breaking Through, 31–32.
152. Baum, Burying Mao, 46–47.
153. Deng Xiaoping, “Closing Address at the Eleventh CCP Congress,” Peking Review (September 2, 1977): 38–40.
154. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 172.
155. Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism, 174.
156. Robert L. Worden, Andrea Matles Savada, and Ronald E. Dolan, eds. China: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office for the Library of Congress, 1987).
157. Wang Shuguang and Hu Angang, The Chinese Economy, 111.
158. Meisner, Mao’s China, 441–43.
159. Baum, Burying Mao, 65.
160. “Unlikely Hero: A Local Leader Jailed for Extremism During the Cultural Revolution Has Many Devoted Followers,” Economist, August 6, 2016.
161. Meisner, Mao's China, 443.
162. Yong Zhou, ed. “Jiang Qing: ‘Without Law, Without Heaven,’” in Great Trial in Chinese History: The Trial of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Cliques, Nov. 1980–Jan. 1981 (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), 105.
163. Deng Xiaoping, “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China,” speech during the preparatory meeting for the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, June 22, 1981; see Deng, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, 51, 287.
164. Meisner, Mao’s China, 446.
165. Wu Li ed., Zhonghua renmin gongheguo jingjishi, 1949–1999 [An Economic History of the PRC, 1949–1999] (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 1999), vol. 2, 838–40.
166. “CPC Central Committee announcement on Realizing the Separation of Government from the Commune and Establishing Village Governments (October 12, 1983),” in Xinshiqi nongcun he nongye gongzuo zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected Important Documents of Rural Areas and Agricultural Work in the New Era] (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian chubanshe, 1992), http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64184/64186/66701/4495412.html.
167. Richard Baum, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 213.
168. Baum, Burying Mao, 10.
169. Zhao, Prisoner of the State, 141.
8. CONCLUSION
1. Lin Biao, “Comrade Lin Biao’s Speech at Peking Rally Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution (November 6, 1967),” in Advance Along the Road Opened up by the October Socialist Revolution (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 1–10.
2. Agricultural Economic Statistics, 1949–1983 [Nongye jingji ziliao, 1949–1983] (Beijing: Ministry of Agriculture Planning Bureau, 1983), 80–81.
3. W. Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 22, no. 2 (1954): 155–56.
4. Interviews with former commune members, Tonglu County, Zhejiang, November 7, 2015.
5. Ran Abramitzky “On the (lack of) Stability of Communes: An Economic Perspective,” in Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion, ed. Rachel McCleary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 170–71.
6. Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 136–37.
7. Abramitzky, “On the (lack of) Stability,” 1.
8. Office of National People’s Congress Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, Department of Development Planning, National Development and Reform Commission, “1976–1985 nian fazhan guomin jingji shinian guihua gangyao (caoan)” [Ten-Year Plan for the Development of National Economy as of 1976–1985 (draft)], in Jianguo yilai guomin jingji he shehui fazhan wunian jihua zhongyao wenjian huibian [A Selection of Important Documents Regarding the Five-Year Plan for National Economy and Societal Development since the Founding of PRC] (Beijing: China Democracy and Legal Press, 2008).
9. “‘Sanji suoyou, duiwei jichu’ yingai wending” [“The System of Three Level Ownership with the Production Team as the Basic Ownership Unit” Should Be Maintained], People’s Daily, March 15, 1979.
10. Daniel Leese, “A Single Spark: Origins and Spread of the Little Red Book in China,” in Mao’s Little Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 24.
11. Huang Yasheng, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 36.
12. Zhongguo tongji nianjian [China Statistical Yearbook] (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 1994), 31, 215, 218; Wang Shaoguang and Hu Angang, The Chinese Economy in Crisis: State Capacity and Tax Reform (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 111.
13. Pei Minxin, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 26; Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 142.
APPENDIX C: ESSENTIAL OFFICIAL AGRICULTURAL POLICY STATEMENTS ON THE COMMUNE, 1958–1983
1. People’s Daily, September 10, 1958, translated in Peking Review 1, no. 29 (September 16, 1958): 21–23.
2. Mark Selden and Patti Eggleston, The People’s Republic of China: A Documentary History of Revolutionary Change (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 516–17.
3. Liu Fangying, trans., Issues and Studies 15, no. 10 (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1979): 93–111; 15, no. 12 (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1979): 106–115.
4. The “Strike” refers to a crackdown on the activities of “counterrevolutionary” elements in China, and the “Three Antis” were “graft and embezzlement,” “profiteering,” and “extravagance and waste.”
5. The “Program” refers to the National Program for Agricultural Development.
6. The “three freedoms and one contract” policy refers to more sideline plots for private use, more free markets, more enterprises with sole responsibility for their own profit or loss, and fixing output quotas on a household basis.
7. The “four big freedoms” refers to freedom of usury, of hiring labor, land sale, and private enterprise.
8. The grain yield targets set by the National Program for Agricultural Development for different areas of the country are 200 kilograms per mu (one-fifteenth of a hectare) for areas north of the Yellow River, the Qinling Mountains, and the Bailong River; 250 kilograms per mu for areas south of the Yellow River and north of the Huai River; and 400 kilograms per mu for areas south of the Huai River, the Qinling Mountains, and the Bailong River. To surpass the 200-kilogram target is described as “crossing the Yellow River” and to exceed the 400-kilogram target as “crossing the Yangtze River.”
9. The “five excesses” were excessive assigned tasks, meetings and assembles, paper works, organizations, and side jobs for activists.
10. Issues and Studies 9, no. 6 (March 1973).
11. “Four category elements” refers to landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements.
12. “Barefoot doctors” refers to medical officials in the rural areas. Because of the shortage of qualified physicians, Chinese Communists provided several months of medical training to elementary school and middle school graduates and then assigned them to rural areas to practice medicine. These “doctors” also had to perform farming work as ordinary commune members. According to Red Flag no. 3 (September 10, 1968), the barefoot doctors made “an outstanding achievement” in the suburbs of Shanghai.
13. “Three nondisengaged” refers to (1) not disengaged from reality; (2) not disengaged from productive labor; and (3) not disengaged from the masses.
14. The Sixty Articles refers to “The Statute Governing the Work of Rural People’s Communes” published in 1960, which is composed of sixty articles.
15. “Production grading and sending up” refers to arbitrary grading of production results and sending the products to higher levels.
16. Guofeng Hua, “Report on the 1975 Dazhai Conference (Central Document No. 21) Mobilize the Whole Party, Make Greater Efforts to Develop Agriculture and Strive to Build Dachai-Type Counties,” Peking Review 18, no. 44 (October 31, 1975): 7–10, 18.
17. The grain yield targets set by the National Program for Agricultural Development for different areas of the country are 200 kilograms per mu (one-fifteenth of a hectare) for areas north of the Yellow River, the Qinling Mountains, and the Bailong River; 250 kilograms per mu for areas south of the Yellow River and north of the Huai River; 400 kilograms per mu for areas south of the Huai River, the Qinling Mountains, and the Bailong River. To surpass the 200-kilogram target is described as “crossing the Yellow River” and to exceed the 400-kilogram target as “crossing the Yangtze River.”
18. The Eight-Point Charter for agriculture includes soil improvement, rational application of fertilizer, water conservancy, improved seed strains, rational close-planting, plant protection, field management, and innovation of farm implements.
20. The “five guarantees” refers to “childless and infirm old persons who are guaranteed food, clothing, medical care, housing and burial expenses by the people’s commune.”
21. Chinese Law and Government 19, no. 4 (1986): 34–37.
22. The originally translated transcript does not include this paragraph.