From Commune to Capitalism. Zhun Xu

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ countries started to tackle the agrarian question by choosing noncapitalist paths in the revolutionary phase. Most of them at least tried to guarantee peasants’ access to land, and many had redistributive land reforms or even encouraged collectivization to build socialism. However, these countries started to move to the capitalist path in the second phase. Former small-producer states like Egypt removed their protection of peasants; former socialist states like Soviet Union saw massive privatization and the emergence of capitalist agriculture.

      How does this shed light on the agrarian changes in China? It is clear that the change in agrarian relations that we observed in China mirrored the general history of other developing countries. China had land reform and collectivization in the first phase and dismantled the collectives in the second phase. Although collective ownership of land is still preserved in legal terms, China has recreated small-producer agriculture through decollectivization. The rural economy is gradually becoming more oriented toward the market, and there is a clear tendency of further movement along the capitalist path.¹³ Let us now look at how this change took place.

      When the CCP first started the revolution in the 1920s, China was an extremely backward country marked by low productivity and a highly unequal distribution of land. It was widely accepted that 20 percent of the population owned more than 60 percent of the land. Between 50 percent and 70 percent of peasants’ annual output went to the landlord as rent.¹⁴ Unlike his peers, Mao did not see the peasants as passive—he saw in them the possibility of a dramatic revolutionary tide. He convinced his comrades of the importance of the peasant question, and the CCP finally took power because of the peasants’ support. After the revolution, the CCP carried out extensive land reform nationwide and peasants became small landowners. However, the small plots and still existing pre-capitalist social relationships, not only just barely provided for peasants and their families but resulted in many farmers losing their land or ending up deep in debt because of illness, natural disaster, and other shocks inherent in the general backwardness of Chinese agriculture.

      The CCP leaders agreed on the need to eliminate pre-capitalist relations, but they disagreed on the best solution going forward. Liu Shaoqi, then the second most powerful figure in the CCP, advocated for a capitalist-oriented solution. Liu once made the comment that small cooperatives cannot develop into socialist collectives and that the decline of cooperatives was good because it implied peasants were now better-off and could rely on themselves. Liu even quoted the example of Saint-Simon to argue that one can still be a socialist while being a capitalist.¹⁵

      In the early 1950s, collectivization was not yet on the agenda, but in some places peasants spontaneously organized themselves into small cooperatives. Provincial leaders in Shanxi Province reported to Liu, suggesting that peasants should be further mobilized to build collectives; otherwise the rich peasants and exploitation would revive.

      However, Liu was very much opposed to the idea of collectivization without a strong national industrial base and mechanization, calling such an idea “dangerous and utopian.”¹⁶ He even explained his vision of rural development: “now the countryside has class division, that is the basis of future revolution; in the future we can directly appropriate it [the new rich part of the peasantry].”¹⁷

      At the same time, some other leaders preferred a more populist solution.¹⁸ Deng Zihui, then the head of the rural work department of the CCP, was one of the outspoken members of this faction. Deng had a pessimistic view of peasants’ “socialist consciousness” and argued that peasants preferred family farming to collective labor. He clearly disagreed with the capitalist solution, but he was skeptical about the socialist solution because of the lack of an industrial base and experience.¹⁹

      In spring 1955, the relationship between the CCP and the peasants grew intense. Some peasants even commented that “the communists were worse than the nationalists.”²⁰ At least two reasons were behind this attitude. First, new collectives were rapidly organized without sufficient mobilization and the middle peasants were afraid that their precious means of production would become publicly owned. Second, the state’s grain procurement quota was so high that peasants did not have much left for their own consumption.

      Deng Zihui believed that although the problem with grain procurement was significant, the fundamental problem was collectivization. He then pushed forward a policy of “contraction” in Zhejiang Province that aimed to dramatically reduce the number of collectives and the level of grain procurement. Within less than two months, the number of collectives had dropped sharply, by 30 percent.²¹

      Unlike the previous two factions, Mao and his allies aimed to transform the agrarian relations by developing rural collectives. In an influential report, Mao laid out his arguments for collectivization.²² First, as a response to Liu Shaoqi, he argued that agricultural collectivization served as the basis of mechanization, not the other way around. His rationale was that the mobilized and collectivized peasants could better resist natural disasters and manage their labor power and establish better conditions for the adoption of new technology and crop varieties. Collectivization would also increase peasants’ purchasing power and thus increase demand for national industrial products. Mao also pointed out that the CCP would lose its political base among the poor peasants if they again suffered from the development of capitalism. He criticized Deng Zihui for overlooking the strong incentives of the poor peasants to work collectively owing to their lack of means of production. No single peasant family could afford or economically use a tractor, but a collective might be able to do both. Moreover, Mao critically examined the issue of “lack of experience,” arguing that the peasants could only gain experience in building collectives by doing it themselves. Finally, the Soviet Union, the socialist state role model at that time, also gave important support to Mao’s claim. Drawing on the Soviet Union’s achievements after collectivization, Mao argued that collectivization was crucial for socialist industrialization and the development of agriculture itself. Mao further argued that the CCP could do a better job than the Soviet leadership by learning the lessons of its mistakes.

      On the surface, these were merely different views on the sequence and pace of rural development, but they had profound political economy implications. Like Liu, many CCP leaders thought socialism and collectivization would come in the distant future, and they did not want to develop it until they felt its historical necessity. Implicitly, they were assuming the countryside had to go through a capitalist transformation before it became socialist.²³ Other people, like Deng Zihui, wanted neither capitalism nor socialism and preferred to stabilize the petty-producer economy.

      These pro-capitalist and populist views actually gained significant support from the new Chinese elites. In the early 1960s, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, most of the central leaders supported decollectivization.²⁴ It was estimated that 20 percent of the rural population adopted varieties of private household farming.²⁵

      This time, the pro-capitalist and pro-populist factions seemed to march hand-in-hand. Liu Shaoqi was very pessimistic and predicted that grain output under collectives would decrease for a long time.²⁶ Deng Xiaoping, who became national leader after Mao’s death, was also in favor of decollectivization; he claimed that it should be officially encouraged nationwide, while collective agriculture must be “pushed back enough.”²⁷ Deng also made the famous claim that “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or yellow [usually “white” in English quotations of Deng], as long as it catches mice.” In other words, it did not matter what method is used as long as it works.²⁸ The whole reform package implemented by these leaders was later called sanziyibao, which promoted private household farming.²⁹

      Mao defended the rural collectives. First, he argued, grain production under the collectives began to recover in 1962, which was much sooner than the pessimistic expectations. Second, Mao pointed out the growing polarization in several poor provinces that had adopted decollectivization, with some peasants becoming landless and others becoming usurers. It was in this context that Mao later СКАЧАТЬ