The Collectivizationa and De-collectivization in Rural China

isagreement as to the speed of collectivization, preliminary collectivization was launched since 1952. China's peasantry saw Chairman Mao and the Communist Party as heroic much more than Russia's peasantry had seen Stalin and the Bolsheviks as heroes, and through 1956 the peasantry cooperated with the Party. There was none of the resistance and warfare that had accompanied the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union.
The collectivization of agriculture was basically completed with the establishment of the people's communes in 1958. The People’s Commune system was defined as a unity of politics and production, in which all members of the commune jointly owned property. Essentially, the commune system was based on private contract of its members and the principle of voluntaries and mutual benefit, however, it turned out yet as coercive institutional arrangement, which was made by government with political power. In the movement to achieve the People’ s Commune, peasants had no choice whether or not to join.
Communes were designed as large, embracing scores of villages created by combining some 20 or 30 advanced producers' cooperatives of 20,000 to 30,000 members on average, in some cases the membership varied from as few as 6,000 to over 40,000. It was instituted as an organization with functions of the lowest level of local government and the highest level of organization in agricultural production. Communes consisted of three organizational levels: the central commune administration; the production brigade , and the production team, which generally consisted of around thirty families. This kind of institution was an organization of hierarchies, in which the commune acted as political unit and top manager, the brigades played role of co-coordinators between the commune and the basic production teams. The production team was basic units of production and accounting. Since the people’s commune system was a tool established to extract resources from agriculture sector for industrialization, as a result, it neglected peasants’ incent

ive completely. In order to let the people’s commune system run, the central government designed an relative effective mechanism to encourage managers in each hierarchy to work enthusiastically, yet, in each level, the managers were treated differently and there was a clear difference in aspects of identity and welfare between the managers of the commune and of the brigades or production teams.
The commune was defined as administrative organ and executed the central government’s orders, and paid from central government’s budget, therefore the managers in the level of commune were “state cadres” , that means they were formal governmental officials and got wage monthly. These state cadres could be promoted and became officials of governmental divisions in higher level. Brigades and production teams were collective economic organizations, their running expenses came from production teams’ tribute. Managers in brigades level were called “collective cadres” . They were remunerated in their own production teams according to their labor quotas. Their wage was paid in the form of products instead of money. Managers in production teams were“team cadres”, they were also members of the production team. They worked as peasant like their workmates, and were paid in products according to labor quotas. Team cadres could be promoted to collective cadres. Collective an

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