Collectivisation (1952 to 1957)

The problem with all of the reform of the last post, too, was it wasn’t what Mao was really on about (or at least it wasn’t all he was on about); it was at least partly only his popular means to a relatively obscured end (for the time being, at least). He required peasant support and these reforms went some way to acquiring it but what he really aimed at was rapid industrialisation on the Marxist-Leninist model and the most efficient way to feed industrial workers, feed the peasants and fund the industrialisation.

The gentry (the landlord classes) that had been in charge for centuries were removed as obstacles to Mao doing whatever he wanted in the countryside and he thus ensured that what now remained of any consequence for him were mostly complaisant and satisfied peasants ready to support whatever the CCP ‘suggested’ next. Mao was preparing to modernise farming in the way the gentry appeared unwilling or unable to do, bound as they, too, were (as much as anybody) by the Chinese tradition. This is an example of how pragmatically Mao ruled.

The model of the Soviet Union at this time impressed Mao and adopting it seemed the only way to survive economically while dragging a semi-feudal semi-colony into the modern industrial world. Soviet heavy industry had developed rapidly in the three and a bit decades since the USSR had been established notwithstanding the demands of the intervening and brutal Second World War.

In the country, Mao required a gradual/rapid process of collectivisation (large scale joint-venture farming replacing in stages mainly nuclear family farming of small private plots) to begin as soon as the people could be brought along with it. This was basic economics: economies of scale could be much more easily achieved with larger production units (also with more buying clout when it came to the purchase of modern technologies and equipment). Also, modernisation ideas were most easily and efficiently disseminated from the centre (the source of all good) to these relatively few and large structures. The final argument for collectivisation as far as Mao was concerned was the potential for a bourgeois utopia to produce a new landlord class if allowed to develop as organically as bourgeois utopianists might have wished. There was to be no regression. Continual socialist progress was vital in orthodox Marxist ‘theology’.

There were three stages of collectivisation undergone in quick succession following the initial land reform: the set up of Mutual Aid Teams, then of Lower-stage Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives and finally of Higher-stage Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives.

In the first stage (from 1952 to 1954) five to eight households pooled their animals, tools and labour in working alternatively on each other’s land (initially voluntarily) in a joint venture.

The next stage occurred from 1954 to 1955 and the co-ops now consisted of around 30 combined households and their plots. All property and labour was pooled and income was divided according to a formula based on the initial amount of property ‘invested’ in the co-op.

Finally, collectives of from 100 to 300 households formed in 1956 and 1957 and all income was now ‘earned’ by an annual tally of ‘work points’. Private property in arable farmland was now virtually meaningless.

All of the stages were designed to progressively increase the agricultural productivity of the land. You can see the gradual increase in scale and change to the incentives provided by changed determinations of income for the individual households. There were also none too subtle changes in the voluntariness or otherwise of the ventures.