Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1950s) – Precursors of the Great Leap Forward

The first update to what I’ve already written about the land reforms of the 50s that I need to give for this history is the phase that occurred in 1958 and 1959 just as the Great Leap was getting underway. The move was made from the Higher-stage Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives of from 100 to 300 households to the People’s Communes. The total number formed was 24,000 and the notable difference was that they now aimed to and began to engage in more than agriculture. They also became engaged in industry, education, health, administration and military training. Typically a commune consisted of a large number of villages combined. Further economies of scale were hoped for. Some of the new features of the rural communal landscape included:

1) The idea of ‘walking on two legs’ (regional self-sufficiency) – farmers and farming would be organised by the localised cadres ‘sent down’ so that a region’s farmers could be taught to produce their own tools (and also produce other items) in regional light industrial plants;

2) So the countryside was to become industrialised for the first time. The rural/urban divide would be broken down;

3) The commune was to replace the family to some extent as the recognised basic social unit in the countryside;

4) Women were brought into production more;

5) Peasants were to become ‘proletarianised’; and

6) The whole operation became militarised in its style (with marching and expected sacrifices included). Campaign posters of the period often had a distinctly military flavour.

This element of militarisation and urbanisation as models of efficiency just made sense in the fledgling PRC of the 1950s concerned at how to emerge from the thrall of and repel the powerful forces of feudalism locally and capitalism worldwide, aided as they often both had been historically by powerful military and urban industrial bases, and aware of how successful the Red Army and Soviet urban industrial development had apparently been. Here’s a quote from a Red Flag issue from August 1958 that hints at the nature of all of this:

The working people have unfalteringly accepted the organisational forms of the people’s commune and have unfalteringly transformed many antiquated production relationships... The rapid development of agriculture demands that they greatly emphasise their own organisational character, demands that in their work they act faster, in a more disciplined and efficient way, that they can better be shifted around within a broad framework, like the workers in a factory or the soldiers in a military unit.

And another:

The people’s commune, which combines the industrial, agricultural, commercial, educational and military, is an advancing army fighting against nature, fighting for the industrialisation of the village, the urbanisation of the village and for the happy future of communism in the villages.