My research in chapter 4 shows that the CCP was enthusiastic rather than passive in promoting the household model. The cadres faced immense political pressure to follow the guidelines of the central leadership. The mainstream view holds that those people who opposed decollectivization were local cadres who were afraid of losing control. But my research suggests that the cadres and a small section of the peasantry implemented and benefited from decollectivization, while most of the peasants were not enthusiastic, and even opposed decollectivization in some cases.
Based on the evidence, I argue that decollectivization served as the political basis for the capitalist transition in China, in that it not only disempowered the peasantry but also broke the peasant-worker alliance and greatly reduced the potential resistance to the reform. The political significance of rural reform for the CCP cannot be overstated, and this was exactly why the mainstream interpreted decollectivization as spontaneous.
But if decollectivization was not driven by efficiency and spontaneity, why did it eventually succeed without major resistance? What were the internal contradictions of the rural collective regime that facilitated (if not “led to”) its demise?
My fieldwork in Songzi County, documented in chapter 5, offers insights on this question. I find that rural collectives had remarkable achievements. Many of them did experience shirking (work avoidance) and inefficiency, not because of egalitarianism but because of stratification—because of a cadre-peasant, manager-worker divide. The actual demise of rural collectives was mostly due to political pressure from the Communist Party. But the stratification contributed to peasants’ passiveness in resisting the institutional change.
Stratification was at the root of unsatisfactory performance and was the focus of peasants’ complaints during the collective era. Decollectivization, on the contrary, seemed to be able to destroy stratification by destroying the whole collective, which, in turn, sometimes generated better performance in what had been dysfunctional collectives. That was probably one of the most important reasons why most peasants accepted the new policy without serious opposition. The rising income due to the procurement price adjustment probably also contributed to peasants’ faith in the new policies. Certainly, other factors, like propaganda efforts from the cadres, should not be overlooked.
But was decollectivization a genuine solution to the stratification? Logically, stratification is not an integral aspect of collectives per se. In fact, the socialist element of the collectives put some constraint on stratification, at least on income distribution, but there were no such restrictions once it was dismantled: decollectivization disempowered the peasantry and allowed even greater and more explicit stratification and eventually class division.
Taking all these factors together, this book provides an alternative framework for analyzing the dramatic transition from communes to capitalism in the Chinese countryside. I hope this discussion will be useful to anyone who is willing to learn from the great history of socialism, humanity’s efforts to end what we might call our prehistory.
Chinese Agrarian Change in World-Historical Context
INTRODUCTION
The twentieth century was an age of both revolution and counterrevolution. The first three quarters of the century saw revolutionary changes in social relations, mainly driven by the worldwide socialist movement that spread after the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917 and by the national independence movement that erupted after the Second World War. The last quarter was characterized by worldwide waves of privatization and deregulation, sometimes referred to as neoliberalism. This dramatic cycle shaped many crucial aspects of social relations in the contemporary world, in particular the trajectories of agrarian change.
After the Second World War, many countries implemented agrarian reforms that sought to protect peasants to varying degrees from landlords and usurers. One key element of these policies was redistributive land reform. In some places—for example, South Korea and Taiwan—“land to the tiller” was implemented. Land redistribution was relatively well enforced, and most peasants became small commodity producers. In other countries, like Peru and Chile, agriculture was even partly collectivized. Countries like Egypt, with no significant land reform, at least tried to put a cap on land rent and place restrictions on the size of individual landholdings. In socialist states like China and Cuba, the agrarian reforms included collectivization—collective ownership of the land by the peasants—partly to prevent potential class differentiation in the new peasantry.
This period has been called “the Golden Age of land reform.”1 These agrarian reforms were unprecedented in human history, both in scale and in content. One of the crucial features of agrarian reforms of this period was the reformers’ goal of attacking pre-capitalist, mostly feudal or colonial, relations; this was often called “modernization.” In most countries, the peasants were seen as allies of reform in varying degrees, depending on each country’s internal conditions, while feudal lords or other traditionally privileged groups were the targets. In other words, for the first time in history, factions of the capitalist class compromised with peasants on a world scale.
Keep in mind that the compromise was not static. On the contrary, it was as riddled with contradictions as any social formation and was constantly changing. For example, the capitalist class encouraged compromise with the peasants at the expense of landlords in East Asian countries, while at the same time it quickly crushed the progressive reforms enacted by Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Internationally coordinated capitalists overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in the 1970s and quickly undid a large portion of the previous land reform. At the same time, they launched the Alliance for Progress, which encouraged Latin American states to institute land reforms. Capitalists retreated from the compromise only when they sensed that they needed to do so, but in general they kept it and peasants saw improvements in their lives, and peasants benefited from it.
At the same time, agrarian reform in many countries was often constrained, in part because of the bourgeois character of the reform, and peasant proprietors often turned against revolution. For example, in Peru during the early 1960s, rich tenants became reactionary after land reform; similar events happened in a number of other countries as well.2 Specific factors, like the form of the state, also matter. In India, for example, although the state has tried to create conditions for capitalist development, the democratic form of the state and class alignment in the society limits the effectiveness of land reforms.3
Both political and economic factors created the capitalist-peasant compromise in the first place. The political forces came from both internal and external class dynamics. Internally, the peasantry usually served as an important force in the revolutions, and the demand for agrarian reforms was a major part of the mobilization campaign for independence or revolution. This was the case for the newly independent states and socialist countries. External pressure was also crucial, especially in capitalist countries where the agrarian reforms came mainly from above.
Given the strong global communist movement and the example of the Soviet Union, peasants became inspired or even mobilized by domestic communists. If the national bourgeoisie was not able to carry out reforms to appease peasants, then capitalists in the rich capitalist countries would intervene. This is what happened in the case of Taiwan, where, in the face of the appealing example of socialist China, land reform was carried out jointly by the U.S.