The Collectivizationa and De-collectivization in Rural China

rom ignorance and war for centuries. Throughout the centuries some 80 to 90 percent of the Chinese population were farmers and live in one of some 900,000 villages, which have an average population of from 1,000 to 2,000 people. Villages were not self-contained, self-sufficient units. Clusters of villages centered on small market towns, which linked them to the wider economy and society by providing not only opportunities to buy and sell but also opportunities for entertainment, information, social life, and a host of specialized services. The traditional Chinese elite, often referred to in English as the gentry dispersed across the country and often lived in rural areas, where they were the dominant figures on the local scene, normally ruled villages. Although they held land, which they rented to tenant farmers, they neither possessed large estates like European nobles nor held hereditary titles. However, they traditionally interpreted central policies and national values for villagers. As in feudal relationship, the peasants and gentry live depend on each other. Gentry provided land to poor peasants and tenant, and work with rich and middle peasants to secure the order in village, for instance opening school and building basic infrastructures to maintain there social status. In Chinese history, at the beginning of very dynasty, the land relationship between landlord and poor peasants were comparably fair, that meant, peasant have parcel farmland to live on. But land tended to be concentrated on end every dynasty, then there might be a peasant uprising led to a new dynasty and retribution of land. This is the basic clue of social evolution in China before communist period.
After the Chinese Communist Party came into power in mainland, it had to keep its promise, which it made during the period of war to encourage the peasant to join the army, that it would gave peasant their own land. The first major action took place from 1940s to early 1950s. June 1950, a new Land Reform Law of new People’s Republic was promulgated and stipulated nullification of the feudal land ownership system, and institutionalization of the system of land ownership by peasants, in which the Party sent agents to every village to carry out the land reform policy. This in itself was an unprecedented show of political power and the resolution of transform an old society. The reform was successful, because the peasants supported the policy; most of them had been waiting for the reform

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