The CCP leaders agreed on the need to eliminate pre-capitalist relations, but they disagreed on the best solution going forward. Liu Shaoqi, then the second most powerful figure in the CCP, advocated for a capitalist-oriented solution. Liu once made the comment that small cooperatives cannot develop into socialist collectives and that the decline of cooperatives was good because it implied peasants were now better-off and could rely on themselves. Liu even quoted the example of Saint-Simon to argue that one can still be a socialist while being a capitalist.15
In the early 1950s, collectivization was not yet on the agenda, but in some places peasants spontaneously organized themselves into small cooperatives. Provincial leaders in Shanxi Province reported to Liu, suggesting that peasants should be further mobilized to build collectives; otherwise the rich peasants and exploitation would revive.
However, Liu was very much opposed to the idea of collectivization without a strong national industrial base and mechanization, calling such an idea “dangerous and utopian.”16 He even explained his vision of rural development: “now the countryside has class division, that is the basis of future revolution; in the future we can directly appropriate it [the new rich part of the peasantry].”17
At the same time, some other leaders preferred a more populist solution.18 Deng Zihui, then the head of the rural work department of the CCP, was one of the outspoken members of this faction. Deng had a pessimistic view of peasants’ “socialist consciousness” and argued that peasants preferred family farming to collective labor. He clearly disagreed with the capitalist solution, but he was skeptical about the socialist solution because of the lack of an industrial base and experience.19
In spring 1955, the relationship between the CCP and the peasants grew intense. Some peasants even commented that “the communists were worse than the nationalists.”20 At least two reasons were behind this attitude. First, new collectives were rapidly organized without sufficient mobilization and the middle peasants were afraid that their precious means of production would become publicly owned. Second, the state’s grain procurement quota was so high that peasants did not have much left for their own consumption.
Deng Zihui believed that although the problem with grain procurement was significant, the fundamental problem was collectivization. He then pushed forward a policy of “contraction” in Zhejiang Province that aimed to dramatically reduce the number of collectives and the level of grain procurement. Within less than two months, the number of collectives had dropped sharply, by 30 percent.21
Unlike the previous two factions, Mao and his allies aimed to transform the agrarian relations by developing rural collectives. In an influential report, Mao laid out his arguments for collectivization.22 First, as a response to Liu Shaoqi, he argued that agricultural collectivization served as the basis of mechanization, not the other way around. His rationale was that the mobilized and collectivized peasants could better resist natural disasters and manage their labor power and establish better conditions for the adoption of new technology and crop varieties. Collectivization would also increase peasants’ purchasing power and thus increase demand for national industrial products. Mao also pointed out that the CCP would lose its political base among the poor peasants if they again suffered from the development of capitalism. He criticized Deng Zihui for overlooking the strong incentives of the poor peasants to work collectively owing to their lack of means of production. No single peasant family could afford or economically use a tractor, but a collective might be able to do both. Moreover, Mao critically examined the issue of “lack of experience,” arguing that the peasants could only gain experience in building collectives by doing it themselves. Finally, the Soviet Union, the socialist state role model at that time, also gave important support to Mao’s claim. Drawing on the Soviet Union’s achievements after collectivization, Mao argued that collectivization was crucial for socialist industrialization and the development of agriculture itself. Mao further argued that the CCP could do a better job than the Soviet leadership by learning the lessons of its mistakes.
On the surface, these were merely different views on the sequence and pace of rural development, but they had profound political economy implications. Like Liu, many CCP leaders thought socialism and collectivization would come in the distant future, and they did not want to develop it until they felt its historical necessity. Implicitly, they were assuming the countryside had to go through a capitalist transformation before it became socialist.23 Other people, like Deng Zihui, wanted neither capitalism nor socialism and preferred to stabilize the petty-producer economy.
These pro-capitalist and populist views actually gained significant support from the new Chinese elites. In the early 1960s, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, most of the central leaders supported decollectivization.24 It was estimated that 20 percent of the rural population adopted varieties of private household farming.25
This time, the pro-capitalist and pro-populist factions seemed to march hand-in-hand. Liu Shaoqi was very pessimistic and predicted that grain output under collectives would decrease for a long time.26 Deng Xiaoping, who became national leader after Mao’s death, was also in favor of decollectivization; he claimed that it should be officially encouraged nationwide, while collective agriculture must be “pushed back enough.”27 Deng also made the famous claim that “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or yellow [usually “white” in English quotations of Deng], as long as it catches mice.” In other words, it did not matter what method is used as long as it works.28 The whole reform package implemented by these leaders was later called sanziyibao, which promoted private household farming.29
Mao defended the rural collectives. First, he argued, grain production under the collectives began to recover in 1962, which was much sooner than the pessimistic expectations. Second, Mao pointed out the growing polarization in several poor provinces that had adopted decollectivization, with some peasants becoming landless and others becoming usurers. It was in this context that Mao later commented: “Why do I regard baochandaohu [decollectivization] as a serious threat? China is an agricultural state. Once agrarian relations change, our socialist industrial base will shake. Urban production relations will change inevitably and polarization will grow rapidly. How could we communists defend workers and peasants?”30
In the end, China pursued the socialist path like many other countries, despite the strong support of the nonsocialist path among the leadership. This was due to socialist politics and ideology (plus direct influence from the socialist bloc), the need for industrialization, and, finally, Mao’s unquestionable authority. At one point, it seemed that “only socialism could save China.” However, as in other countries, the nonsocialist path eventually ruled, and the Chinese proverb was ironically twisted to read “only China could save socialism.”
FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS
As China pursued the socialist path, the three alternative solutions to the agrarian question were translated into two major factions in the CCP: those who wanted to continue developing the collectives (socialist path) and those who wanted to go back to the pre-collectivization stage (the historical intersection of capitalist and populist paths).
These solutions did not “fall from the sky”: they appealed to different classes in Chinese rural society. In general, poor peasants and ordinary workers (the majority) were likely to benefit more from the socialist path, while the middle and rich peasants (potential capitalist farmers) and bureaucrats (potential capitalists) might gain more from the other models, as the later reforms partly illustrated.
As a matter of fact, the socialist model had remarkable achievements. Due to the introduction of technologies such as new crop varieties and better fertilizer as well as their rapid diffusion via collective-based networks in the countryside, agricultural