From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty

by Zhun Xu

An account of China's transition into a global capitalist economy, as agrarian reform in the 1980s led Chinese peasants to industrial cities and into poverty

In the early 1980s, China undertook a massive reform that dismantled its socialist rural collectives and divided the land among millions of small peasant families. Known as the decollectivization campaign, it is one of the most significant reforms in China's transition to a market economy. From the beginning, the official Chinese accounts, and many academic writings, uncritically portray this campaign as a huge success, both for the peasants and the economy as a whole. This mainstream history argues that the rural communes, suffering from inefficiency, greatly improved agricultural productivity under the decollectivization reform. It also describes how the peasants, due to their dissatisfaction with the rural regime, spontaneously organized and collectively dismantled the collective system.

A closer examination suggests a much different and more nuanced story. By combining historical archives, field work, and critical statistical examinations, From Commune to Capitalism argues that the decollectivization campaign was neither a bottom-up, spontaneous peasant movement, nor necessarily efficiency-improving. On the contrary, the reform was mainly a top-down, coercive campaign, and most of the efficiency gains came from simply increasing the usage of inputs, such as land and labor, rather than institutional changes. The book also asks an important question: Why did most of the peasants peacefully accept this reform? Zhun Xu answers that the problems of the communes contributed to the passiveness of the peasantry; that decollectivization, by depoliticizing the peasantry and freeing massive rural labor to compete with the urban workers, served as both the political and economic basis for consequent Chinese neoliberal reforms and a massive increase in all forms of economic, political, and social inequality. Decollectivization was, indeed, a huge success, although far from the sort suggested by mainstream accounts.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, Economics

224 pages, Paperback

Published June 22, 2018

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dramatic input changes in the transition period were indeed an endogenous result of the preexisting institutions: the remarkable development of the socialist economy in the former period built the conditions for the dramatic output growth.

...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 thus greatly reduced potential resistance to the reform.”

There was certainly work avoidance in the collectives, but…this was not the result of egalitarianism or the collective regime per se, but rather the by-product of nonsocialist superstructure (such as politics and power structure), including stratification.

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A fairly quick read adapted from multiple journal articles and a solid overview that delivers pretty much what it promises. Reminded me of an undergrad lecture on Burke about the use of aesthetic continuity to disguise changes so as to avoid getting the masses 'riled up'--the party at the time actively pushed decollectivization, but decades later now pushes a revisionist narrative that it was spontaneous and a politically 'neutral' tinkering under pressure for efficiency. Paradoxically, much like a liberal pointing to entrenched party leader privileges, they used this stratification as justification for outright dismantlement, without mentioning the even greater accruing of privileges that would be possible in their preferred alternative structures.

An effective, shorter companion to Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution which similarly explores proletarianization to facilitate rapid industrialization.

Paul Baran already foresaw that at the early stage of a progressive economy, mass consumption should rise very slowly, if at all Indeed, it was an advantage for the peasants to have collectives from which they could always borrow with no interest. Moreover, in my interviews...[the older peasants] tended to think of themselves as allied with industrial workers. That is, they believed China needed to build its industry, with the support of agriculture. Once industry got stronger, industry could support agriculture with its technology and capital, and both would be developed.

It's revealing that labourers on collective farms in the Mao era reflect an internalization of the Feldman and Preobrazhensky's earlier Soviet models which argued essentially this. Especially given a "poor country attempting to build its own modern industry, [which] could only extract surplus from itself." Yet as the initial quote highlights, the groundwork was laid but its effects only took off concurrently with decollectivization.

In an exemplifying stark mirror image, "Jimo county in Shandong Province achieved remarkable development in the collective era, but after the implementation of decollectivization, mechanization decreased immediately (in some cases, peasants dismantled the tractors and divided the metal)." Hence massive scale movement of migrant workers and a push for more capitalistic concentration of agricultural production. Only more recently have we seen a compulsory reckoning with the consequences of dismantling social infrastructure (medical facilities, schools, etc.) in the countryside, but the situation is in a serious state of flux.

One thing absent from this work is any predictions about the likely direction of Chinese developments. It's rather, like The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, a clarion call for critical re-examination to counter the nationally hegemonic narrative of the Mao era as experimentation with "actually existing socialist" alternatives, so that the right lessons can be learned.

[Ramzey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decollectivization since the 1980's has been labeled a spontaneous, grassroots collective action against the previous collectives. In this version of events, most peasents wanted decollectivization, and the CCP was passive in reform. But a closer reading of history reaveals the opposite to be true.

Zhun xu debunks myths about decollectivization that it was spontaneous and apolitical and that the only people who opposed decollectivization were the cadre, not the peasents.

There is also misleading discussions on the rural collectives about work avoidance.
In the conventional wisdom, work avoidance was caused by egalitarianism. Deng xiaoping once famously said that egalitarianism actually led to general poverty.
Some writers considerd rural collectives to have been to egalitarian, which caused inefficiency and brought about the demise of the system.

Zhun xu says there was a problem but it was not because of egalitarianism but because of Political stratification within the communes and the non-socialist superstructure.

[Chris Meulbroek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zhun Xu presents a class analysis of agrarian transformation in China that closely interrogates mainstream interpretations of the matter, both through deconstructing their models and presenting alternative evidence. He essentially argues that agrarian reform policy measures arose out of party/class politics rather than the spontaneous, market-seeking will of the peasants, and that decollectivization's effects on efficiency aren't clear-cut at all. I wished it was longer - only about 110 pages in main text.

[Stephen S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and well written & researched counter-history to Deng Xiaoping's decollectivization reforms that are heralded as great success for the communist movement.

[daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zhun Xu makes an incredibly convincing argument that China's decollectivization, contrary to what many people claim, did not itself bring any gains in productivity and that the main goal was instead to depoliticize the peasantry as part of a wider national strategy to transition to capitalist relations without opposition. He uses statistics, reconstructs studies, and presents his findings with much nuance and honesty. This will definitely be an important book in my intellectual development despite being relatively short. Anybody with an interest in Chinese economic history, socialism, and Deng Xiaoping Thought should read this.

[Matt Morris]

Read reviews of this & other books at https://miscmss.blogspot.com/2020/07/...

[Andy Febrico Bintoro · Rating 4 out of 5]

We could learn many things in this book. The data is there and maybe the problems stated here also can be found on other developing or developed countries.