The Collectivizationa and De-collectivization in Rural China

ould not design any reasonable incentive mechanism to encourage peasants to work hard and produce according to reasonable natural condition, such as soil, irrigation and farm year. The way left for brigade and team cadres was to punish peasants by struggling against them or maltreatment. But the brigade and team cadres also belonged to members of production teams, they and their families lived in the same community with their subordinates as well, so punishing peasants could also make themselves in trouble. Moreover, under the property rights structure of the commune system, the rest of output was not belong to the commune, brigade or even production team, but to the governments of higher level. This made the supervisors’ effort unrelated to any reward. As a result, even the supervisor himself has not enough incentive to work and shirk himself sometimes. In a word, under such conditions of poor supervision, in which all the work was distributed equally among all members at the lowest level--production team, shirking became every member’s rational choice and further weakening the efficiency of the system (Lin,1990).
De-collectivization
To

prevent peasants from slow down, shrinking and escaping in work, and assure the system could keep on moving, the party collected all productive equipments and forbid members in people’s commune engaging in private production and business on the one hand, and at same time deprived peasants’ right of migrating from countryside to city or between districts by means of household registration on the other hand. Nevertheless, such policies had no effect on improving incentive of peasants, but they formed at least political press on very member of people’s commune, because it turned out that everyone’s only routine is to stay in the commune and finish one’s task. Without the right to leave or get better than others, peasants commonly chose to work with little effort, e.g. a passive method, to evade production tasks assigned by leader. Little accumulation and shirking made countryside widely fall into poverty , rare rural region had good conditions to develop industry or to improve commerce, infrastructures went worse, productivity sank quickly. The most serious crisis for agricultural collectivization happened between 1959 and 1961. GNP decreased from 213.8 billion Yuan in 1958 to 180.0 billion Yuan in 1962, with an average annual reduction of 15.1% in gross industrial production value and an average annual reduction of 19.3% in gross agricultural production value from 1958 to 1960. Owing to the serious shortage of food, a great famine took place in the whole country and at least 30 million residents died (Tan, 2000). Discontent with such system broke out, in some areas, peasants didn’t want to relied so heavily on orders from above and made so little allowance for local conditions or local initiative. The severe crisis forced the Party to adjust their policies. From 1961 on, commune functions were reduced to administration and co-ordination, production team was confirmed as the basic unit of accounting, certain production decision making was delegated to production teams, which were allowed to retain some income to overcome problems of egalitarianism; households again allowed to have small private plots and sidelines for planting vegetables, and a limited opening markets for transaction between urban and rural areas. However, these adjustments didn’t mean to ch

《The Collectivizationa and De-collectivization in Rural China(第5页)》