Agricultural reform and rural transformation in china since 1949

Political Programs in Practice1 The Origins and Development of China’s “Three Rural Issues” 25 Lu Xueyi 2 The Scale and Distribution of New Rich Peasants after the People’s Republic of C

Series Editor Thomas DuBois (Australian National University)

Editorial Board Joel Andreas (Johns Hopkins University)

Liping Bu (Alma College) Brian Demare (Tulane University)

Xiaoping Fang (Nanyang Technological University) Xiaofei Kang (George Washington University) Huaiyin Li (The University of Texas at Austin) Glenn Tiffert (University of Michigan)

Luman Wang (Virginia Military Institute)

Michael Szonyi (Harvard University)

VOLUME 2

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Agricultural Reform and Rural Transformation in China

since 1949

Edited by

Thomas DuBois Huaiyin Li

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Political Programs in Practice

1 The Origins and Development of China’s “Three Rural Issues” 25

Lu Xueyi

2 The Scale and Distribution of New Rich Peasants after the People’s Republic of China’s Land Reforms 52

Su Shaozhi

3 The Deep Plowing Movement of the “Great Leap Forward” 74

Zhu Xianling, Ding Zhaojun and Hu Huakai

4 A Study of the Construction of Terraced Fields in Liulin County, Shanxi Province in the Era of Collectivization 101

9 Analysis of the Construction of Village Collective Economic

Organizations and Related Issues in Changshu City—Four Case Studies 212

Zheng Yougui

Part 2

Flows of Goods, Money and People

10 The History of Rural Private Lending in Hubei Province,

1952–1954 231

Su Shaozhi and Chang Mingming

11 The South-to-North and North-to-South Flows of Grains and

Cereals—Changes to Directions and Quantities of Flows of Grains and Cereals between North and South in Contemporary China 267

Zheng Yougui, Ou Weizhong, Kuang Chanjuan and Jiao Hongpo

12 Three Historic Changes to Inter-regional Grain Flows in the People’s Republic of China and Their Causes 287

Qu Shang and Su Shaozhi

13 Rural Population Flows in the Era of Collectivization—A Study of the Border Region between Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong

Beijing University of Technology; President, Chinese Association for Rural Sociology.

The Chinese word nongmin is typically translated into English as “peasant.” Its constituent characters are nong, which can mean “farming,” “agriculture,” or

“rural areas” in general, and min, which means “person” or “people.” A min is thus literally a “farmer” or a “rural person.” Prior to the recent era, most

nong-nongmin in China were peasants in the traditional definition, operating

un-der a feudal system Shortly after the communist liberation of China, min became a political denomination of class, at which point the status of nongmin became preferable to that of dizhu, or “landlord.” So in discussions

of China’s official class system of that time, it is appropriate to translate min as “peasant(s).” However, around the same time, the People’s Republic of China instituted the hukou or household registration system based on Soviet precedent This system divided China’s population into two categories: nongye,

nong-“agricultural” or in other words “rural,” and feinong, “non-agricultural” or in

other words “urban.” Citizens registered “agricultural” generally belong to a lage collective, which allots them parcels of land, some designated for farm-ing, and some for homesteading Urban citizens are not allocated any land, but have other advantages in the cities where they are registered, in ease of finding employment and access to public schools and other public services Chinese people with either kind of registration are citizens who can apply for passports

vil-or party membership vil-or official service, i.e with “citizens’ rights,” but there are distinct differences in the rights of either group In one of many examples, one often hears of the hundreds of millions of “rural migrants” in China, citizens registered “rural” despite living and working in urban areas, and their lack

of access to full rights In modern China, when one uses the term nongmin,

especially in official literature—an example being the “three rural issues” or

sannong wenti—it is almost certainly in reference to hukou status, especially

when statistics are being given So in this book, I almost always render the term

nongmin as “rural citizen(s),” as I feel this term succinctly captures the nature

of the population being described, unless in a particular instance it is clear that the author was referring to political class status or the occupation of farming

in particular

Chinese Agriculture and Rural Development

Reexamined: Western and Chinese Perspectives

Huaiyin Li and Thomas DuBois

Since the dismantling of the People’s Communes and the gradual introduction

of the Household Responsibility System (hrs) in the early 1980s, rural China has witnessed tremendous economic and social changes Grain production has grown prodigiously, township and village enterprises (tves) have flour-ished, huge numbers of migrant workers have flowed into the cities, and the rapid process of urbanization has reduced the number of rural dwellers to just over half of China’s total population Observers have tended to juxtapose these recent developments against the poor economic conditions in the countryside prior to 1978, emphasizing the low agricultural productivity and widespread rural poverty that was prevalent before and during the era of collective ag-riculture Political and scholarly perspectives have largely agreed that it was the failure of Maoist agricultural policies that drove the decollectivization and reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era, even as these reforms created new problems

of wealth disparity, environmental degradation, and food insecurity

Agriculture has always been at the heart of prc policy: the government herited a country that was overwhelmingly rural, and predicated its social and economic revolution heavily on rural transformation Despite the stunning in-dustrial growth of the past few decades, China remains heavily invested in ag-riculture Since the 1980s, Chinese historians have revisited and reassessed the history of agricultural development in the People’s Republic, from the dawn of the collective movement, to the new realities of the 1980s and beyond This vol-

in-ume brings together fourteen articles from the journal Dangdai Zhongguo shi yanjiu to introduce Chinese scholarly perspectives on many of the most impor-

tant issues about agricultural development and institutional changes in rural China during and after the Maoist era Beginning with an overall assessment

of the challenges and prospects of agricultural growth and social change in rural China, this volume includes articles on the background and dynamics of agricultural collectivization in the early to mid-1950s, the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and various facets of rural industrialization and economic development following decollectivization in the early 1980s

stitutions that shaped collectivized agriculture, as well as the motivations that subsequently drove the Great Leap Forward, decollectivization and rural in-dustrialization In the process, we will suggest some of the ways that the work presented in this volume engages some of the perspectives and concerns pre-sented in English language scholarship on post-1949 rural China.

Overview: Economic Strategy and Agricultural Growth

The dynamics and complexity of agricultural growth and agrarian changes in post-1949 China cannot be fully comprehended without placing them into the larger context of the Chinese state’s overall development strategy; it was after all these long-term, macroeconomic goals that determined the state’s priori-ties in investment, the formulation of microeconomic policies, and plans for the relationships among different economic sectors Like many other develop-ing countries in Asia during the decades following World War ii, the newly established People’s Republic of China was confronted with the urgent task

of economic development through industrialization, and had to choose tween two alternative strategies The first was to encourage the improvement

be-of family-based agriculture by means be-of modern inputs (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machines, improved seeds, etc.) provided by the industrial sector, and by integrating family farming with regional, national, and global markets

In turn, improved productivity would enable rural “surplus labor” to flow from agriculture into the industrial sector, thus propelling industrialization with the supply of cheap labor force and the subsequent process of urbanization This was the course of agricultural growth and rural development widely seen in other East Asian economies in the postwar decades.1 The second was to priori-tize industrial growth, especially investment in capital-intensive heavy indus-try (the manufacturing of machinery, energy, smelting, and transportation), without significant investment in agriculture and light industry for consumer goods In the absence of external capital such as foreign loans or direct foreign

1 In these regimes as well, the development of family farming often included the tion of existing agrarian elites, see T.J Pempel, “The Developmental Regime in a Changing

marginaliza-Worlds Economy,” Meredith Woo-Cumings (ed.) The Developmental State in Historical spective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999): pp 164–165.

Per-investment, high-speed industrial growth relied on state extraction of nomic resources from agriculture, which in turn necessitated forced measures

eco-of agrarian collectivization and mobilization The Soviet Union had already pioneered just such an approach, successfully achieving its goal of rapid indus-trialization, but at the expense of a stagnant agriculture sector and the peren-nial shortage of consumer goods

Throughout the Mao era, the Chinese leadership oscillated between the two strategies outlined above, but generally it was the latter that prevailed The former, which served initially only as a temporary and supplementary solution

to the problems caused by overly aggressive agrarian extraction, would ally come to dominate China’s development strategy in the post-Mao period The key factor behind the Maoist state’s preference for the strategy of heavy industrial development was primarily geopolitical Mao was prompted by the success of the Stalinist model, the Sino-Soviet alliance in the 1950s, the West’s embargo of China, and his own eagerness to narrow the gap between China

eventu-and industrial nations to advocate the policy of “leaning to one side” (yi bian dao)—borrowing Soviet political and economic institutions, while pioneering

its own strategy of economic growth As Perkins and Yusuf pointed out, from the 1950s through the 1970s, the economic planners in the central government persistently prioritized the expansion of heavy industry, which accounted for from 40 percent to over 50 percent of the state’s capital construction invest-ment in most years.2 The limited availability of capital for investment in agri-culture drove the state to aggressively mobilize the rural workforce as the pri-mary means to increase grain output Compared to the phenomenal increase

in industrial output, grain production increased by only 2.25 percent annually from 1955 to 1980, which was no better than that in many other developing countries The sluggish growth of agricultural output was a result not only of the state’s lack of investment in, and excessive extraction from agriculture, but also of the mismanagement of local collective organizations and the ineffi-ciency in labor input Therefore, since the mid-1960s, modern capital input, especially in the application of chemical fertilizers and the introduction of new strains of crops, became increasingly important for agriculture, and con-tributed to at least half of the increases in agricultural production, which grew

“at a respectable 4 percent or more per year.”3

Mark Selden offers a nuanced analysis of China’s economy under Mao by distinguishing between the two phases before and after the summer of 1955

2 Dwight Perkins and Shahid Yusuf, Rural Development in China (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1984).

3 Ibid., 198.

tional collectivism,” in the form of compulsory procurement of crops at low state prices, the forced transition to collectives, and low investment in agri-culture Although Selden acknowledges the obvious achievements of Maoist rural development, the overall direction of policy worked against rural inter-ests and accounted for the stagnation in agricultural productivity and peasant income from the collectives, the continued poverty of the rural population, and a widening gap in living conditions between urban and rural areas.4 In a similar vein, Andrew Walder questions the effectiveness of China’s develop-ment strategy after 1956 He emphasizes the facts that per capita gdp growth

in China from 1950 to 1973 was only 2.9 percent, largely on par with India, but significantly lower than the level achieved by its East Asian neighbors As late

as 1978, 30 percent of the Chinese rural population remained below the erty line, not to mention the death of tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward and another 1.1 to 1.6 million during the Cultural Revolution.5

pov-To date, Philip Huang has provided the most sophisticated explanation of the dynamics of agricultural growth in Maoist China Huang agrees that the rapid expansion of state power in the rural society through collectivization and party networks at the village level made possible local government pro-grams to construct water-control and irrigation projects, increase the use of chemical fertilizers and tractors, and promote the double-cropping of hybrid rice in the Yangzi delta in the 1960s and 1970s However, the most important factor that contributed to agricultural growth, Huang argues, was the full mo-bilization of women’s labor by the collectives The demands of the rapidly ex-panding population for more income to satisfy their subsistence needs, efforts

by collectives to maximize crop yields, and the disappearance of off-farm ployment opportunities drove farmers to intensify labor input in production until the marginal return of their added labor input disappeared Labor in-tensification did increase output per unit area, which reached its highest level

em-in the late 1970s just before the abolition of the collective system However, these gains were achieved at the cost of stagnation and even decline in labor productivity or output per workday, as best measured by the cash value of the

4 Mark Selden, The Political Economy of Chinese Socialism (Armonk, ny: M.E Sharpe, 1988):

pp 3–23.

5 Andrew Walder, China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University

Press, 2015): pp 315–334.

farmers’ daily work points, which remained largely unchanged throughout the Maoist era Huang refers to this process as agricultural involution, which in his opinion had existed in China’s rural economy for centuries before the Com-munist revolution.6

This volume begins with one similarly sweeping meta-analysis: Lu Xueyi’s

still timely perspective on the “three rural issues” (san nong wenti) Unlike the

chapters that follow, this piece was a speech rather than an academic research article, and as such it offers an unusually frank assessment of the ways in which the past decades of rural reform have succeeded and those in which they have

not The success story has been the development of agriculture (nongye), by

which Lu refers to the aggregate level of production Simply put, decades of successful investment in agriculture mean that depletion of the national grain supply is no longer a threat, even (as one later chapter notes) in the case of

an international embargo However, this success has come at the expense of

rural areas (nongcun), which are poorly managed and burdened by high levels

of official debt, and the welfare of rural citizens (nongmin), who have fallen

behind their urban counterparts, and are owed a debt for their contribution

to national construction Worth particular notice are Lu’s recommendations, which include abolishing the system of registering households as urban or ru-ral (with severely restricted options for the latter), as well as deep structural reforms of local government and the reinstatement of the Rural Work Depart-ment As Lu’s listeners, and later readers, would no doubt have understood, each of these proposed reforms speaks to a specific moment of decision during China’s decades of agrarian transformation

Agricultural Collectivization in the 1950s

Commencing after the 1952 completion of land reform, the process of tivization continued for five years and proceeded in three stages.7 The first

collec-stage was the organization of “mutual aid teams” (huzhuzu), each of which

consisted of a few to more than a dozen households Participating holds joined the teams voluntarily, and retained ownership of land and other

house-6 Philip C.C Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially Chapter 11.

7 Land reform itself was a multi-stage process, which commenced on a small scale in the ian soviets of the 1920s, and continued gradually in areas under communist control The date

agrar-of 1952 refers to the point at which the reforms had been completed in newly acquired gions, and the program officially declared complete.

re-the availability of shared use resources The second stage began in 1954, with the state-led transition from mutual aid teams to “agricultural production

cooperatives” (nongye hezuoshe, also known as primary cooperatives, and

more generally as apcs).8 These cooperatives each comprised an average of

30 households, which as before continued to retain ownership of land, draft animals, and large farming tools, but were required to allow their collective use by the coop In return, households received payments of land dividends Because state policy limited such dividends to 45 percent of a coop’s total dis-tribution to member households (the remaining 55 percent was based on labor contribution to the collective), the apcs were considered to be “semi-socialist”

in nature The third stage began in the summer of 1956, with the transition

to “advanced cooperatives” (gaoji nongye hezuoshe) This new generation of

agrarian cooperatives was both larger, with each coop having an average of 250 households, and fully socialist in nature Member households were required to renounce private ownership of land and farming tools, and their income from the collective was determined solely by their labor contribution The advanced cooperative movement proceeded quickly, and involved coercion by local gov-ernments in merging the original (primary) apcs and the mobilization of in-dependent households By the end of 1956, nearly 90 percent of all households

in the non-minority provinces were participating in the advanced collectives.The state’s strategy for agricultural transformation, therefore, underwent

a dramatic change from its original scheme of voluntary and gradual tion to the radical plan of accelerated, compulsory collectivization During the early 1950s, the consensus among prc leaders and economic planners seems

transi-to have been that agricultural collectivization would be a lengthy process, quiring at least fifteen years They believed further that agricultural collectives could be established widely and firmly only when China’s national economy was sufficiently industrialized as to provide agricultural machinery and other modern inputs.9 At the same time, planners recognized that industrial growth would rely on agricultural development Agricultural surpluses were necessary

re-8 It should be noted that different types of agricultural cooperatization remain in use outside

of China, and that terminology such as apcs is shared with a broader current literature on agrarian development.

9 Pang Xianzhi and Jin Congji, Mao Zedong zhuan [The biography of Mao Zedong] (Beijing:

Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2011): pp 1307–1308.

not only to feed the urban centers where industry was to be concentrated, but also to repay development loans from the Soviet Union, and to fund the con-struction of industry in the absence of investment capital As Wang Danli dis-cusses in Chapter 14 of this volume, the grain crisis of 1953 marked the moment

of decision in this obvious conflict of priorities between agricultural ment and surplus extraction It was at this point that state planners moved from simply regulating the grain market, and instituted the grain monopoly that would remain in place until 1978

develop-As is well known, Mao personally championed the move to accelerate the transition to advanced cooperatives He did so for both productive and ideo-logical reasons Long before the Communist revolution, observers had agreed that China’s independent family farming was, in the words of one party reso-lution, “isolated, scattered, conservative, and backward,” and that the ineffi-ciency of household agriculture constrained the larger project of national de-velopment.10 The other, and as Mao increasingly emphasized, more important reason, was the struggle between the two roads of socialism and capitalism

in the countryside For Mao, the continuation of independent farming would inevitably lead to differentiation among peasant families and give rise to the resurgence of capitalism in agricultural production, in which rich peasants predominated The transition to socialism in the countryside was the single solution to both the backwardness of agricultural production and the problem

of endemic rural exploitation

In sharp contrast with Mao’s ideological rhetoric, Western scholars have generally emphasized the practical economic difficulties that challenged the leadership in the mid-1950s The greatest challenge, according to Mark Selden, lay in the crisis of the First Five-Year Plan, which projected an annual growth of nine percent in grain production in 1953 and 1954, whereas the actual growth

in both years was less than two percent “Acceleration of cooperative tion, Mao now held, could stimulate productive energies, making possible fulfillment of the plan and opening new possibilities for accumulation.”11 On the other hand, the problems of polarization and class differentiation, Selden suggests, were not as acute as Mao claimed; by 1954, “the already diminished rich-peasant advantage over poor peasants in per capita cultivated acreage

forma-10 The negative assessment of household farming went back to the agrarian economists of

the Rural Reconstruction movement See for example Martin C Yang, A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province, New York: Columbia University Press, 1945 Quote from Pang

and Jin 2011: 1325.

11 Selden 1988: 82.

ever, she also takes into account the factor of “stubborn persistence of wide disparities in wealth between classes,” which explained why poor and lower-middle peasants, who made up 70–80 percent of all peasants, were “ready and eager to join in cooperative farming ventures.”13 According to Louis Putterman, however, collectivization was not merely a tool by which the state could more effectively extract agrarian surplus, but was more important as a means of projecting power into the countryside, and breaking any remaining resistance among the former rural elite.14

Three chapters in this volume highlight specific challenges as they were seen at the time While he does not mention the debate over Party motiva-tions in such terms, it is clear that Wang Danli sees in 1953 a moment where the needs of production took precedence over those of the social revolution

He attributes the formation of the state grain monopoly—a fundamental change that coincided with the beginning of collectivization—almost solely

to the economic priorities of industrialization, with no mention of political

or class conflict In a similar way, Su Shaozhi and Chang Mingming’s Chapter

10 on private lending presents an image of early rural reform that is far less focused on class leveling than on increasing productivity Su and Chang show that planners sought primarily to free up productive capital, much of which was being hoarded by rich peasants In the years before collectivization, cadres

in Hubei not only tolerated private lending among peasants, they positively encouraged it This process included even recognizing the validity of some debts incurred before the revolution, ones that many lenders and borrowers alike had assumed would have been wiped clean under the new regime Cen-tral and provincial directives to protect the interests of creditors grew out of the recognition that private lending was necessary to keep capital flowing into agrarian improvements To that end, rural cadres were instructed to assure rich peasants that money lent under fair terms of interest would indeed be repaid, and would not have adverse implications for the class status of the lender

In Chapter 2, Su Shaozhi recreates the view from 1955, when cadres sought to assess the reemergence of rural class statification three years after

Re-the official conclusion of land reform Taking a broad national perspective,

Su found that a small stratum of rich peasants had begun to emerge in areas where land reform had been conducted early, particularly in rapidly developing provinces such as Liaoning, but had not yet appeared in areas where the reforms had been instituted more recently The more significant change was the one suggested by Selden: the striking transition of people from poor to the ranks of middle peasants This latter change suggests that land reform was successful overall, and was quite likely the reason behind the fact that cadres collecting the data did not seem to regard the reemer-gence of a small number of rich peasants as a crisis Their rather calm assessment that a certain number of peasants would always succeed, by virtue of either hard work or good luck, is particularly striking given that

it was made just before the onset of the politically charged panic over the perceived reemergence of rural exploitation that pushed the acceleration of Maoist collectivism

The Great Leap Forward

The process of collectivization was on the whole relatively smooth and cessful There was no widespread resistance of the sort that had been seen in the Soviet Union, and the large number of grassroots rural cadres gradually learned to deal with the movement’s numerous logistical difficulties: how to award different numbers of work points to individual peasants, calculate the different forms of income distributed to peasant households, coordinate tasks and labor remuneration between different production teams, and requisition privately owned land to construct public projects.15 Complete collectivization under the advanced coops actually made these problems easier to handle Ad-vanced coop cadres enjoyed complete control in assigning tasks and distribut-ing income, even if coop members became more vulnerable to abuse Scholars have expressed different opinions about whether the advanced coop changed cadre loyalties: Helen Siu suggests that the larger coops were more beholden

suc-to the state, while others believe that they tended suc-to remain true suc-to their roots origins.16 Philip Huang is probably the most accurate in suggesting that

grass-15 Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development Since 1949 (Oxford, uk:

Oxford University Press 1987): 81–95; Shue 1980: 300–308.

16 Helen F Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989): p 168 Shue 1980: 56, 66–67; William Parish and

Martin King Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press 1978): pp 106–144.

in the Great Leap Forward (glf) from 1958 to 1960 Unlike the largely ful phases of land reform and agricultural collectivization that had come be-fore it, the glf ended in disaster, which in turn produced a profound impact

success-on the course of institutisuccess-onal changes in China’s ecsuccess-onomic and political velopment over the decades to come Among the many puzzles surrounding the history of the glf, the most intriguing is why Mao launched the program when he did After all, Mao’s stated objective of establishing socialist collective agriculture had already been declared complete with the formation of the ad-vanced cooperatives in 1957 Yet even these cooperatives did not last long Just one year later, the glf merged the advanced coops into the gigantic People’s

de-Communes (renmin gongshe) which had an average of approximately 4,500

households and a population of 23,000, and became the basic unit of planning, production and distribution The People’s Communes were beset with prob-lems: commune leaders (who no longer had the close ties to the grassroots) exerted arbitrary command over the labor force, enforced overly egalitarian systems of labor remuneration, and diverted the most able villagers from farm-ing to tasks such as the construction of earthwork projects and the smelting

of useless iron and steel These problems, together with drought, the state’s excessive procurement of grain, and (at the outset) the wasteful consumption

of food at collective canteens exacerbated nationwide crop failures, causing severe food shortages in 1959 and 1960, and a nationwide famine that claimed millions of lives

Past studies have emphasized two major factors behind Mao’s decision to embark on the glf Domestically, party leaders were growing dissatisfied with the results of the First Five-Year Plan In 1957, the last year of the First Five-Year Plan, grain production grew by only 1.3 percent, and the industrial growth rate was the second lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic At the same time, population growth accelerated, reaching 2 percent annually in the 1950s,

in contrast to 1 percent in the first half of the twentieth century Increases in both the consumption needs of the people and industry’s demands for raw materials from agriculture placed unprecedented stress on grain production and supply As Roderick MacFarquhar observed, for ccp leaders, “…the grain shortages of the late summer of 1957 must have indicated clearly enough that

17 Siu 1990: 321.

a fundamental reappraisal of their development strategy was essential.”18 Agricultural collectivization alone could not solve the bottleneck in economic growth.

Externally, the gradual souring of China’s relations with the Soviet Union, behind which China still lagged economically, naturally prompted the former

to imitate elements of its neighbor’s economic strategies and tion The 1959 announcement of the Seventh Economic Plan for the Soviet Union, with its stated objective of catching up with the United States in fifteen years in per capita industrial output, clearly inspired Mao to claim that the glf would allow China to overtake Britain in the exactly same time period An un-spoken motive behind Mao’s initiation of the glf was his personal rivalry with Nikita Khrushchev, the new leader of the Soviet Union, for supremacy in the ideological realm of socialist economic construction Mao disagreed openly with Khrushchev’s reversal of Stalin-era policies, and his own goals for the glf were precisely and overtly Stalinist, in that they prioritized the development

institutionaliza-of heavy industry at the expense institutionaliza-of agriculture and production institutionaliza-of consumer goods.19 Mao’s ultimate goal for the glf was to show to Moscow and the rest of the communist world that China could eventually surpass the Soviet Union in socialist construction and the transition to communism

Reports of food shortages and inefficiencies in production served only to radicalize the program, putting pressure on local cadres to outdo each other in demonstrating enthusiasm Recurrent political movements, in particular the

1957 Anti-Rightist campaign and the 1959 attack on Peng Dehuai and his Party clique” demonstrated the price of honest criticism, and the danger of being identified with “rightist deviation.” People at all levels had little choice but to join the fanaticism for poorly-planned projects, exhibit support for obvi-ously nonproductive tasks, and willingly suspend belief in the face of clearly exaggerated production figures The central government’s 1959 decision to ex-port as many as 4.2 million tons of grain in order to support some Third World countries and pay off China’s debt to the Soviet Union, exacerbated further a food shortage that had plainly reached disastrous proportions.20

“anti-Recent studies have focused on determining and prioritizing the reasons behind the famine that accompanied the failure of the glf Justin Lin, for instance, rejects the role of natural disasters, local mistakes in production

18 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Vol 2, The Great Leap ward 1958–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983): p 3.

For-19 Walder 2015: 320.

20 Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010): 83, 104–107.

research finds that the death toll during the famine was linked positively

to the popularity of public canteens, which were found more commonly in provinces that were poorer, had fewer ccp party members, and leaders who tended to be more supportive of the radical policies.22 Others have echoed the importance of provincial leadership, but reached different conclusions about the exact significance of political status and ambitions Kung and Chen assert that those who were within sight of elevation to the Party’s Central Committee were more likely to implement radical policies such as the excessive procure-ment of grain.23 Three years later, Dali Yang et al published a rejoinder to this theory, attributing the most radical tendencies to leaders whom Mao had per-sonally appointed to the Central Committee.24 In addition, local conditions including population density, level of rural development, and natural agrarian productivity all played an enormous role in the way in which different regions experienced the famine

This volume presents a different perspective on the GLF by focusing on the local development of some of its most characteristic institutions Rather than addressing the level of political ambition as such, three chapters offer instead different examples of how the politicization of production during the glf distorted perceptions and priorities Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the dissemina-tion of two production techniques, terracing and deep plowing, and hint at the ways that even technological innovation could take on the characteristics

of a political movement The practice of terracing sloping land to increase ricultural area was itself nothing new, but it was vastly expanded during the 1950s due both to the prevalent attitude that bigger is always better, and to the communes’ ability to mobilize labor on an mass scale Terraces such as those constructed in the model farms of Dazhai, Shanxi were indeed marvels of

ag-21 Justin Y Lin, “Tizhi gaige he Zhongguo nongye zengzhang” Institutional reforms and cultural growth in China China Center for Economic Research, Beijing University; 2008: 1–17.

agri-22 Dali Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

23 James Kung and Shuo Chen, “The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: Career Incentives and

Political Radicalism during China’s Great Leap Famine,” American Political Science Review

(2011) 105, 1: 27–45.

24 Dali Yang, Huayu Xu and Ran Tao, “A Tragedy of the Nomenklatura? Career incentives,

political loyalty and political radicalism during China’s Great Leap Forward,” Journal of Contemporary China (2014) 23, 89: 864–883.

agricultural construction, but they came at a price Similar projects in nearby Yanggao did increase yields, but at the cost of diverted labor and lost yields that could scarcely be mentioned at the time The deep plowing campaign shows how the idea of the “mass line,” wherein the Party adopts the revolu-tionary genius that originates with and arises from the masses, was replicated even in the realm of technological innovation According to the stylized nar-rative, the technique of deep plowing was pioneered by peasants of a produc-tion brigade, perfected by rural cadres and research institutes, and broadly dis-seminated back to the masses Like terracing, the technique of deep plowing did produce some advantages, and did increase yields in some areas However, the politically charged atmosphere of the glf demanded that the practice be accepted universally and eventually came to demand extreme investments of human input; tens of millions of peasants would turn their backs on existing techniques to “wage war on the land,” often unable to admit when the tech-nique did not work.

In Chapter 5 of this volume, Li Chunfeng illustrates a similar trajectory hind the acceptance and criticism of public canteens, one of the signature social and economic policies of the glf Like terracing and deep plowing, the story of the formation of public canteens was presented as having arisen from the spontaneous initiative of the masses, who set up military style messes near the fields during the busy seasons The acceptance and development of canteens closely tracks the events of the glf: as they began to reveal serious drawbacks as food waste, canteens quietly began to fall into disfavor Ironi-cally, the political reaction to Peng Dehuai’s criticism of the glf saved the canteens, as Mao championed the cause personally, and cadres nationwide again competed to demonstrate their enthusiasm for a policy that was clearly flawed

be-In a way, the most important legacy of the glf was its undeniable failure be-In the aftermath, opposing factions were emboldened to dramatically shift poli-

cy, in the hope of rehabilitating the ruined economy Although some of these new policies, such as the introduction of “household responsibility for produc-

tion under contract” (baochan daohu) and introduction of household plots did

anticipate the market reforms of the 1980s, it is important to view the policies

of the 1960s in their own right Wang Yugui presents one view of this period in Chapter 7 of this volume, in which he examines the 1961 campaign to provide restitution for property that had been illegally seized or destroyed during the previous years Nominally instituted at the urging of Mao himself, in reality, this campaign aimed to underscore the political shift away from the leftist poli-cies now branded as the “vogue of communism,” and to restore the damaged image of the Party in the countryside But here again, the central state was by

no means omniscient Like the glf, the process of making reparations was

positive for China’s economic growth in the long run For all the blindness and irrationality that often accompanied their planning, projects such as the con-struction of water-control and irrigation systems aided rural development con-siderably The three-tiered commune system, Carl Riskin argues, also “turned out to be a flexible instrument for organizing farmland capital construction, facilitating technical change, introducing some social welfare protection to rural people, and instituting rural industrialization Many of the small and medium-size industries that sprang up in the countryside after 1962 originated

in the backyard factories of the Leap.”25

One of the positive legacies of collectivization, if not of the glf specifically, was the fuller incorporation of women into the workforce, the change that Philip Huang posits as the greatest productive transformation of the twentieth century.26 Although traditionally, women had been involved in various aspects

of rural production, particularly in handicrafts such as weaving, it was the bor policies of the collectives that both encouraged (through the allocation

la-of work points) and allowed (by freeing them from other duties) women to commit fully In Chapter 6 of this volume, Han Xiaoli discusses the introduc-tion and evolution of collective childcare, a key component in the evolution

of this change In some contrast to the triumphant tone of some of the other chapters, this one presents in some detail the struggles cadres faced in gaining acceptance of the practice—women who did not want to care for other peo-ple’s children, others who were happy to let their own children run free in the fields, and so on It was only with the professionalization of childcare, both the provision of work points to village carers and their eventual replacement by politically vetted outsiders that allowed the centers to take root and transform into a stable element of the local landscape as kindergartens

Decollectivization and Rural Industrialization

The dismantling of collectivized agriculture was not a single event, but rather a process that continued for years after Mao’s death The official account of this

25 Riskin, 1987: p 138.

26 Huang, 1990.

process emphasized the peasants’ own initiative, epitomized by the actions of eighteen villagers from Xiaogang in Fengyang County, Anhui Province, who

in the winter of 1978 secretly divided the fields of their production team to households for independent farming Over subsequent years, collectives across China imitated this audacious but illegal act, leading ultimately to the imple-mentation in agriculture of the Household Responsibility System This basic narrative has been widely accepted by scholars, who agreed that the introduc-tion of the hrs was indeed a spontaneous, bottom-up process in which villag-ers participated voluntarily.27 According to this view, it was the common recog-nition of the inefficiencies of collective agriculture, and the ultimate failure of the collectives to improve rural living conditions that prompted the rapid and smooth acceptance of the hrs

However, in reality, reactions to decollectivization were more complex, pecially at the local level It is true that the vast majority of the rural popula-tion was still living at the subsistence level by the end of the collective era, and that in many localities the villagers indeed took the first step in dismantling the communes However, the situation was often quite different in areas where collectivization had significantly enhanced production This was particularly true when the increase was clearly attributable to the use of modern inputs (improved crop varieties, chemical fertilizers, and improved water control), and material incentives (such as the wide implementation of the piece rate work point system and the increase in the work point share in grain distribu-tion) In fact, the growth of agricultural production accelerated prior to 1978 in the country as a whole, reaching the highest level in the most prosperous areas such as the Yangzi delta in 1978, just before the collective system was disman-tled.28 In areas that had benefitted from collective agriculture, the emphasis was instead on reform, for example by upgrading the basic accounting unit from the production team to the larger brigades.29 Thus although the hrs did indeed benefit many peasants, not every part of the country embraced it spon-taneously At the national level, it was only possible to implement it through a coordinated, top-down effort.30

es-27 E.g., Susan Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China (Berkeley, ca: sity of California Press, 1993): pp 38–41; Kate Xiaohong Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996).

Univer-28 Stone, Bruce 1988 “Developments in Agricultural Technology.” China Quarterly, 116 Dec.:

767–822: 818; Putterman, 1993: 36; Huang, 1990: 242.

29 Putterman, 1993: 31; David Zweig, Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968–1981 (Cambridge,

ma: Harvard University Press, 1989): 39.

30 Riskin, 1987: pp 286–290.

nual growth rate of 2.9 percent from 1952 to 1978 According to Justin Lin’s mate, the introduction of the hrs and hence, of farmers’ improved incentives, accounted for 49 percent of this growth, while the increased application of chemical fertilizers contributed 32 percent and the increase in the state’s pro-curement price of major crops contributed another 16 percent.31

esti-Another unanticipated but profound consequence of the transition to the hrs was the flow of labor from agriculture into non-agricultural sectors This move was by no means unprecedented—as You Haihua shows in this volume, significant population movement was quite common, even during the collec-tive era State or commune authorities arranged some of this migration, most notably the transfer of labor to work on large projects, and especially the re-location to the countryside of the generation of sent-down youth However, much of it was voluntary, as people moved where their labor was more valued, while others escaped into sparsely settled mountains

This trickle of voluntary movement greatly expanded with the tion of the hrs Released from their obligations as members of agricultural collectives, hundreds of millions of rural dwellers suddenly were free to leave the land and engage in whatever work they chose, so long as they paid an ag-ricultural tax and various fees to local governments, and sold the contracted amount of harvest to the state under the procurement program As a result, a growing number of villagers sought work in construction, transportation, and commerce, or established their own family businesses

implementa-The most conspicuous feature of the economic and social transformation following decollectivization was the development of rural enterprise The first stage of this process had emerged within the collectives themselves Already possessing both managerial expertise and a structure for the allocation and remuneration of labor, existing collective bodies began as early as 1978 to make the transition into profit-making Commune Brigade Enterprises (cbes) Feng Xiaohong’s chapter in this volume traces the process by which cbes in Hebei were encouraged by national and provincial legislation to branch into small scale industries such as weaving and acrylic knitting, gradually building exper-tise, networks and economies into zones of regional specialization

31 Justin Lin, “Rural Reforms and Agricultural Growth in China,” The American Economic Review, 82.1 (1992): 34–51.

The opening of the labor market spelled the decline of cbes, but it also laid the foundation for the rise of a new generation of rural entrepreneurs, and for larger and more market oriented township and village enterprises (tves) Over time, three patterns of tves began to emerge, each geographically associ-ated with a different part of the country The first was the so-called Wenzhou model Typical of the coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian, in this model private investors (mostly villagers) started small-scale factories to manufacture labor-intensive goods, which were then sold to domestic consumers through nationwide marketing networks In the second pattern, prevalent in the Pearl River Delta, factories received investment from Chinese in Hong Kong or over-seas, and manufactured goods primarily for export The third was the Sunan (southern Jiangsu) model, best exemplified by the factories in southern Jiangsu province but also seen widely throughout rural China In this model, village or township governments took advantage of the public funds they had accumu-lated during and after the Mao era and established collectively owned (i.e., not state owned) factories to manufacture a wide array of industrial goods Where-

as vast numbers of migrant workers came to power the factories and populate the unplanned urban sprawl (often called “urban villages”) of the Pearl River Delta, employees of the Sunan firms were largely local villagers, who would

“enter the factory but not the city” (jinchang bu jincheng) and “leave the farm but not the countryside” (litu bu lixiang).32

Local government cadres vigorously encouraged and promoted the new lectively-owned factories These cadres were incentivized to start new factories

col-in their home villages or townships to obtacol-in the extra revenue available from local governments to fuel public projects, as well as for their personal material gain, as they completely controlled the firms they established.33 The greatest problem of such industrial firms, therefore, was the ambiguity and complexity

of their ownership and property rights, which further entangled local ment officials in the management of the factories, making it difficult for the tves to run as efficient, profit-making businesses sensitive to market condi-tions As a solution to the innate problems of the tves under the Sunan model, most of those enterprises underwent a process of privatization in the 1990s, which they became integrated more fully into the market economy During and since the 1990s, most of these enterprises have either reorganized their ownership structure, or been privatized outright

govern-32 Samuel Ho, “Rural Non-Agricultural Development in Post-Reform China: Growth,

Devel-opment Patterns, and Issues,” Pacific Affairs, 68.3 (1995): 360–391.

33 Jean C Oi, Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1999).

economy, and emphasizes how the professionalization of village and ship government eased the transition into a market economy However, while other firms in the Sunan model relied heavily on promotion by local officials, Bixi was somewhat unique in that it enjoyed attention from the highest levels Already in the early 1980s, Li Peng and other central leaders were promoting the “Bixi Road,” initially as a pilot project, and later as a replicable model of successful development What is not stated, of course, is the effect that such high level promotion had on the region, particularly on its ability to attract loans and investment Without downplaying the success of the region, it is also worth noting the similar role that the state had played in promoting earlier generations of model production areas.

town-Unique Perspectives and Contributions

Although many of the chapters in this volume run parallel to, or in some way engage the major themes in English language scholarship on post-1949 rural China, there are tangible differences in their approach and perspec-tive One obvious difference derives from the nature of sources Most of the scholars featured in this volume enjoyed access to local archival mate-rials, and many augmented this detailed view with more or less extensive oral histories This combination of sources allows them to present a finely grained view of local institutions, such as rural canteens and daycare On the other hand, they tend to be rather less critical of the perspectives con-tained in the sources themselves, presenting without additional commen-tary the somewhat stylized view of construction and technology during the Maoist period, or the unqualified success of the Bixi Road This observation itself is not necessarily a criticism It is perhaps a bit too simple to dismiss

as ideological extremism historical concerns over the reemergence of rich peasants, or movements such as the deep plowing campaign Scholarship that speaks, as many of these chapters do, in the voice of the original sources, is particularly able to recapture the considerations that went into the formation of these iconic policies

In some cases, the perspectives in this volume present entirely new directions

of inquiry Issues such as informal rural debt have been studied extensively in

the periods before 1949 and since the 1980s, but not in between.34 Revealing the importance of how and why rural cadres encouraged debt adds an important facet to our understanding of their plans for rural reconstruction The most striking departure is found in Chapters 11 and 12 on the flow of grain between provinces.35 Together, these two chapters outline dramatic changes: the ability after 1986 of provincial governments to negotiate grain prices, and especially the historic shift in the mid-1990s when the movement of grain from north

to south first exceeded in caloric terms the traditional flow in the opposite direction Like the others, these two chapters are valuable for their attention to detail, in this case on the realities of the trade, for example the fact that corn produced in the vast new farmlands of northern Heilongjiang works better as animal feed than the produce of the traditionally fertile south

Needless to say, the fourteen articles included in this volume, limited in number and scope of investigation, do not do justice to the rich and multifac-eted scholarship that the Chinese researchers have developed in the past de-cades in understanding agriculture and social change in Maoist and post-Mao China Nevertheless, we hope that readers will find the new evidence and per-spectives presented in these studies a useful resource for understanding some

of the most drastic experiments, pitfalls, and breakthroughs that the hundreds

of millions in rural China have experienced since 1949

Ho, Samuel 1995 “Rural Non-Agricultural Development in Post-Reform China: Growth,

Development Patterns, and Issues,” Pacific Affairs, 68.3: 360–391.

Huang, Philip C.C 1990 The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 Stanford: Stanford University Press.

34 Walter H Mallory, “Rural Coöperative Credit in China” The Quarterly Journal of ics, 45, 3 (1931): pp 484–498; Li Zhou and Hiroki Takeuchi, “Informal Lenders and Rural Finance in China: A Report from the Field,” Modern China, 36, 3 (2010): pp 302–328.

Econom-35 On provincial trade, see also Thomas Lyons, “Grain in Fujian: Intraprovincial Patterns of

Production and Trade,” China Quarterly, 129 (1992): pp 184–215.

Lin Yifu 2008 Zhidu, jishu yu Zhongguo nongye fazhan (Institution, technology, and

agricultural development in China) Shanghai: Gezhi chubanshe

Lyons, Thomas 1992 “Grain in Fujian: Intraprovincial Patterns of Production and

Trade,” China Quarterly 129: 184–215.

MacFarquhar, Roderick 1983 The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Vol 2, The Great Leap Forward 1958–1960 New York: Columbia University Press.

Mallory, Walter H 1931 “Rural Coöperative Credit in China.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 45 (3): 484–498.

Oi, Jean C 1989 State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 1999 Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform

Berkeley: University of California Press

Pang Xianzhi and Jin Congji 2011 Mao Zedong zhuan (The biography of Mao Zedong)

Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe

Parish, William and Martin King Whyte 1978 Village and Family in Contemporary China Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Pempel, T.J 1999 “The Developmental Regime in a Changing Worlds Economy,” in

Mer-edith Woo-Cumings (ed.) The Developmental State in Historical Perspective (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1999): 137–181

Perkins, Dwight and Shahid Yusuf 1984 Rural Development in China Baltimore: The

Johns Hopkins University Press

Putterman, Louis 1987 “The Incentive Problem and the Demise of Team Farming in

China,” Journal of Development Economics, 26 (1): 103–127.

——— 1993 Continuity and Change in China’s Rural Development: Collective and Reform Eras in Perspective Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Riskin, Carl 1987 China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development Since 1949

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press

Selden, Mark 1988 The Political Economy of Chinese Socialism Armonk, NY: M.E

Sharpe

Shirk, Susan 1993 The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China Berkeley:

University of California Press

Shue, Vivienne 1980 Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development Toward Socialism, 1949–1956 Berkeley: University of California Press.

Siu, Helen F 1989 Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution

New Haven: Yale University Press

Stone, Bruce 1988 “Developments in Agricultural Technology.” China Quarterly, 116:

767–822

Unger, Jonathan 2002 The Transformation of Rural China Armonk, N.Y.: M.E Sharpe Walder, Andrew 2015 China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press

Yang, Dali 1996 Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Yang, Dali, Huayu Xu and Ran Tao 2014 “A Tragedy of the Nomenklatura? Career incentives, political loyalty and political radicalism during China’s Great Leap

Forward.” Journal of Contemporary China, 23 (89): 864–883.

Yang, Martin C 1945 A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province, New York: Columbia

University Press

Zhou, Kate Xiaohong 1996 How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People

Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press

Zhou, Li and Hiroki Takeuchi 2010 “Informal Lenders and Rural Finance in China:

A Report from the Field.” Modern China, 36 (3): 302–328.

Zweig, David 1989 Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968–1981 Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press

Political Programs in Practice

∵

The Origins and Development of China’s “Three Rural Issues”1

to deepen rural reforms, resolve to reform the household registration system, reform the current land contracting system, reform the current income distribution system, and reform the political authorities vested in town governments, particularly in fiscal matters

Keywords

“three rurals” theory – productivity factors – agriculture – rural areas – rural citizens

1 This essay was first presented as an academic report at the Institute of Contemporary China Studies Third Annual National History Academic Symposium on September 16, 2003 This written format was compiled from an audio recording of that report, which the author has edited and approved.

2 Lu Xueyi ( 陆 学 艺 ) was a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Lu passed away in 2013 in Beijing at the age of 80.

and the first to shake off the fetters of the planned economy These reformsled

to a great liberation of agricultural productivity and great increases in tural yields for many years consecutively In 1984 grain production hit its peak

agricul-of 800 billion jin (400 billion kilograms), which initially resolved the problems

of insufficient food and physical security for the populace Peasants in those years became their own masters and received tangible benefits from the re-forms Their lives were improved to a great degree, and the urban-rural gap was further closed At the time it was proposed that the second stage of rural reforms be implemented

Beginning in 1985, however, there were changes to China’s urban-rural egy Income in the national economy began flowing more toward cities, the focus of work began shifting toward cities, and the level of energy expended

strat-on rural reforms began to decline In 1985, agricultural productistrat-on fell, with grain production down seven percent From this point forward rural China’s development was at times bearish and at times bullish, and rural development again took yet another turn In the late 1980s, some Chinese academics who were summarizing the experiences and lessons of socialist modernization di-

vided China’s rural issues (each beginning with the Character nong, which is

alternatively used to indicate agriculture or rural areas) into issues of

agricul-ture [nongye], rural areas [nongcun], and rural citizens [nongmin, i.e peasants

or farmers] on the basis of China’s unique national conditions They analyzed both the relationship between these three issues as well as the problems to be solved within each of the issues; thereupon they proposed the analysis frame-

work of the “three rural issues” [san nong wenti], which they established as

the theoretical framework for understanding China’s true conditions and the analysis of China’s practical issues After more than ten years of practical im-plementation and propagation, this framework has now become a consensus within both political and academic spheres in China

The “three rural issues” are unique to China; they are the product of China’s Reform and Opening The development track of countries which have already successfully modernized indicates that when a country or region endeavors to modernize itself, it generally must begin by accumulating capital through agri-culture in rural areas, then move on to primitive accumulation of capital, then

to the production of agricultural products and rurally-produced industrial raw materials, and finally move on to the large scale construction of factories and development of enterprises and industry During this time, a great amount of

rural labor will enter factories, which are generally constructed on major fic arteries Once there is an agglomeration of factories, commerce and the service industry will begin to develop, and cities will begin to rise At this point

traf-a ltraf-arge portion of the traf-agriculturtraf-al popultraf-ation will trtraf-ansform into city dwellers, and so industrialization and urbanization go hand in hand with this process Once industrialization and urbanization reach a certain point, they will begin

to nurture agriculture; they arm agriculture with modernized agricultural terials (farm equipment, fertilizers, and pesticides), thereby bringing about the modernization of agriculture At this time rural citizens will become the mi-nority Under the effects of the market (and sometimes government interven-tion), the prices of agricultural products will rise, and rural incomes gradually rise near to (and sometimes greater than) urban income levels Once urban industry is developed and the state treasury is amply stocked, rural areas will

ma-be repaid, this time with infrastructure such as roads, irrigation works, ity, telecommunications, and so on This process leads to the modernization of rural areas, which in turn causes urban-rural integration So other developed countries never linked together the “three rural issues” during the course of their development Rather they considered only rural production, rural area, and rural citizen issues separately, and conducted focused research in each area At the most some merged rural, rural citizen or rural area, and rural pro-duction issues together for joint research

electric-China’s unique course of Reform and Opening gave rise to a unique rural relationship and a unique urban-rural development path This path in turn led to China’s unique theory of the “three rural” issues The construction and use of this theory is highly significant to understanding China’s fundamen-tal national conditions and to guiding the implementation of socialist mod-ernization For a relatively long time, we have placed great emphasis on the resolution of China’s agricultural issues and have striven to solve production problems in both grain and major agricultural products, in order to ensure effective supply However, following the first bumper cropharvest of Reform and Opening in 1984, such problems as difficulty selling grain and cotton have emerged in rural areas Thereafter another series of problems presented them-selves, such as the issuance of deferred payment slips (some of which were never repaid) by governments in lieu of cash for grain purchases, heavy bur-dens on rural citizens, increased number of clashes between rural cadres and rural citizens, social instability in the countryside, widening of the urban-rural gap, and so on The emergence of these diverse problems led some academics and some people working in government departments performing real work

urban-to realize that rural work should not be centered on only agricultural issues but must also include resolution of rural citizen and rural area issues, and that

treatises on agricultural, rural citizen, and rural area issues, all three of which were studied and analyzed jointly The “three rural” issues theory is now a con-sensus around China; it has been widely cited in documents, the media, and all manner of written work In October 1998, the “ccp Central Resolutions on Several Major Issues in Agricultural and Rural Work” 中 共 中 央 关 于 农 业 和

农 村 工 作 若 干 重 大 问 题 的 决 定 were issued, reading: “The issues of ture, rural areas, and rural citizens are major issues affecting the big picture of Reform and Opening as well as modernization Without stability in rural areas, there can be no nationwide stability Without moderate prosperity for rural citizens, there can be no agricultural modernization, and thus there can be no modernization of the entire national economy If we can maintain stability in rural areas, we will be able to take the initiative in controlling the big picture.”The “three rural issues” theory is also highly significant for studying the problems of other countries In 1998, I accepted an invitation from Waseda University to visit Japan At an academic conference there, I conducted com-parative analysis on the countrysides of China and Japan on the basis of the

agricul-“three rural issues” theory; this opportunity enabled me to elucidate a number

of issues Japan’s path to modernization is fundamentally similar to that of veloped countries in North America and Europe However, Japan is a country with a large population and small landmass Further, since the 1960s, the Japa-nese government has been importing agricultural products on a large scale in

de-an effort to greatly increase exports of industrial products de-and develop markets for said products, ignoring the costs to domestic agriculture Therefore, since the 1970s, most or all of the foodstuff, cotton, and other raw materials used in Japanese industry have been imported At present over 50 percent of Japan’s foodstuffs, agricultural raw materials, and industrial raw materials are import-ed; thus Japan’s food prices are the highest in the entire world Importation

of such a large quantity of foodstuffs has inevitably exerted a certain degree

of influence on the quality of life for Japanese citizens It is thus evident that Japan, a major economic powerhouse, has problems in the area of agriculture

If we analyze Japan on the basis of the “three rurals” theory, we see that Japan has solved its rural citizen issues and has fundamentally solved its rural area is-sues, but its agricultural issues remain unsolved China is exactly the opposite Since the advent of Reform and Opening, China’s agricultural policy has been

“Driven firstly by policy, secondlyby science.” As a result of reforms and velopment, we enjoyed several consecutive years of bumper crop harvests In

de-1996, Chinese grain production exceeded 1 trillion jin (500 billion kilograms), and Chinese cotton production exceeded 84 million dan [Chinese unit of mea-

sure equivalent to 50 kilograms] Since that time, China has reversed its vious long-standing shortages of grain and other major agricultural products and has now achieved year-to-year stability and agricultural surpluses China, which contains nearly 10 percent of total arable land in the world, feeds over 21 percent of the total global population Furthermore, since 1997, China’s annual net exports of agricultural products have held steady at around usd $5 billion

pre-So if we use the “three rurals” theory to analyze contemporary China, we can see that agricultural issues have been fundamentally solved, but rural citizen and rural area issues remain unsolved

Why do I hold that China has already fundamentally solved its agricultural issues but has yet to solve its rural area and rural citizen issues? I will discuss just this question in this section

From a historical perspective, the issues of supply of grain and other tural products from the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries have never been well resolvedfollowing the implementation of traditional collec-tive economic systems in rural areas These issues have long been a thorn in the side of socialist countries

agricul-Before the People’s Republic of China implemented collectivization, and indeed during the early years of China’s collectivization (prior to 1958), China was a net exporter of grains and agricultural products Beginning in 1961, how-ever, Chinese citizens have been eating imported grains, and China became a net importer of grain, cotton, and other major agricultural products

In 1959, the Chinese state put forward the notion that agriculture was the foundation of the national economy, and that grain was the foundation of that foundation Thereafter, the state consistently placed primary emphasis on the development of agriculture within national economic work, casting enormous amounts of labor and financial resources into that field However, shortages of grain and agricultural products were not thoroughly solved until the dissolution

of people’s communes Problems of insufficient food for the citizenry weighed heavily on the hearts of the first generation of leadership, from Chairman Mao

to the economic architects Chen Yun and Li Xiannian One could say that in his late years, Chairman Mao was a physiocrat in economic matters He was the

grain in your hand there can be no panic in your heart.” At one point Li nian personally oversaw the allocation and transport of grain convoys.

Xian-Experience confirms that it was not that our party or government didn’t place emphasis on agriculture, nor was it that our land was insufficient or that our rural citizens didn’t know how to plant crops Rather it was the people’s commune system of collective labor, unified management, and equal distribu-tion that failed us

In the wake of the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the munist Party of China, rural areas took the lead in implementing reforms In ru-ral areas the household contract responsibility system was implemented, and rural citizens obtained autonomy in their business operations Rural citizens benefited from this system, which provided them with great work incentive

Com-in agricultural production There were bumper crop harvests Com-in consecutive years, and by the mid-1980s, problems of insufficient supply of grain, cotton, and other major agricultural products had fundamentally been resolved Such fundamental resolution initially resolved problems of insufficient food and warmth Of course, agricultural development hasn’t been an unbroken chain

of good news over these past 20 years There have been some bumps on the road, but the overall trend has been continuous progress and development As

of 1996, China’s agricultural issues, i.e issues of guaranteeing effective tural supply, have been fundamentally resolved

agricul-From the beginning of Reform and Opening to 1996, the general course of China’s agricultural development has been abumper crop harvest and major upgrade to agriculture about once every six years In 1978, total grain produc-

tion was 609.5 billion jin, 317 kilograms per capita There were bumper crop

harvests every year following the implementation of the household contract responsibility system in rural areas Total grain production in 1984 was 814.6

billion jin; this was the first year in which grain surpluses led to difficulty in

selling grain In 1985, the state grain monopoly was abolished In its place, the state implemented the contract system for grain purchasing This new policy suppressed grain prices and led to a decrease in grain production productivity among rural citizens; grain production fell seven percent in this year, leading

to renewed vacillation on the grain issue Policies were adjusted again in 1986, and in 1990 there was a second bumper crop harvest; total grain production hit

892.5 billion jin, just shy of 900 billion jin The bumper crop grain harvest in

this year was widely unexpected Many in Beijing did not believe the numbers,