The PRC was a Bonapartist regime, a bureaucratic dictatorship based on the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army that denied democratic rights to the worker-peasant masses. Stalin had demonstrated with his U-turn from pandering to the rich peasants to enforced collectivisation, that such regimes can change from opportunism to adventurism very quickly. This would be confirmed in China with Mao’s compulsory collectivisation of the peasantry.
Special attention is given here to the agricultural communes because many on the political left, especially certain petty-bourgeois circles and intellectuals, naively accepted the communes at face value and praised them extravagantly as a major step towards socialism, the emancipation of women, and industrialisation of China. Livio Maitan (see Section 10.5) was one such. Swept along on an impressionist tide, Maitan listed among the successes of the commune movement: “real possibilities for people at lower levels to make democratic choices.”[4]
As the 1st FYP drew to a close, disagreements arose within the Politburo over the speed and direction of economic development. Capital investment in heavy industry was seen as key to developing a modern society, and the produce from agriculture as providing the necessary funds. But little was being invested to improve agricultural productivity and it was clear that if things continued as they were, the rate of growth of heavy industry would have to slow considerably. One side argued that peasants would not produce more without material incentives, an approach which meant at least temporarily, reducing the rate of investment in heavy industry. This was in line with the promises made by the regime that collectivisation of agriculture would be delayed until there was a powerful industrial sector which would provide the tens of thousands of tractors, harvesters, and other necessary machines. However, Mao idealistically argued that the peasants could be persuaded to increase output to fund industrialisation through exhortation, mass mobilisations, and communalisation under the direction of the Party.[5]
Forced collectivisation in the USSR had been an anti-Marxist programme carried out against the wishes of the peasantry. Stalinist officials plunged into collectivisation to put an end to the threat to the regime posed by the rich peasants’ stranglehold on food production. There was no preparation and little thought on how to minimise peasant opposition and smooth the transition. Administrative incompetence linked to an undemocratic and fundamentally hostile stance toward the peasants magnified the consequences of the severe drought of the spring and summer of 1931 and resulted in the 1932-33 famine and the death from starvation of 3% of the population.
The GLF of 1958 was just such a Stalinist adventure – an attempt to fund an over-ambitious industrial programme. It aimed to overcome the limitations imposed by backwardness through the forced mobilisation of tens of millions of peasants. It was believed that this would be sufficient to overcome the technical, engineering, economic, social and political problems faced by Chinese society. This anti-Marxist voluntarism was the basis of the communes.
The GLF called for increased extraction of resources from the peasants and, as in Stalin’s case, the amount extracted by the state was based on a refusal by the centre to accept that a serious shortfall in production had occurred, and also on fear at the periphery of reporting the disastrous conditions that actually existed. The extraordinary mismanagement of the GLF and the famine that resulted was an outcome for which Mao Zedong and his associates were responsible. When the dust had settled it turned out that much the same proportion of the population had died of hunger in China 1960-62 as in the USSR between 1931-33.[6] Then, just as in 1933 Stalin had retreated and re-introduced private plots for the peasants at the expense of the collective farms, so the Chinese leaders retreated from the policies of the GLF and re-introduced private plots. In both cases private farming and hostility to the regime would make a significant contribution to capitalist restoration.
Mao launched a course of action whereby a campaigning spirit was supposed to be enough to conquer objective reality. Mao’s approach to the communes was, as the CCP itself would later put it: “a subjectivist misinterpretation of the historical dialectic … not founded on an accurate perception of material reality or on sufficient synthesis of revolutionary experience.”[7]
At the time Mao, imbued with the petty bourgeois theory of socialism in one country, expressed his perception of material reality as:
Why can’t 600 million ‘paupers’ create a prosperous and strong socialist country … by their own efforts? … Provided they take their destiny into their own hands … and energetically tackle problems instead of evading them, they can overcome any difficulty on earth.[8]
Intellectuals were expected to perform in a similar manner: the eminent writer Pa Chin was pledged to write one long novel, three medium length novels and complete a number of translations per year – and all in a manner to arouse enthusiasm for Party policies.
Let us remind ourselves of Marxist method and theory as expressed by Engels and Lenin in regard to the peasantry. It is an axiom of Marxist political economy that large-scale production is superior to small scale production. Marxists have always maintained that individual peasant farming must give way to agricultural collectives. Only as individual, scattered, small-scale peasant economy is superseded by co-operative ownership can the peasant become part of an integrated highly productive socialist economy. The superiority of large-scale farming was undoubtedly the most powerful objective argument in favour of the communes and this had been stated by Li Fuchun, Chairman of the State Planning Commission in July 1955: “Socialism cannot be built on a small peasant economy; it must have … large scale collective farming.”[9]
But this economic principle must be considered in a political context: the participation of the peasants in large-scale units or collectives must be voluntary. If the ‘political principle’ is ignored, then collectivisation can do more damage, much more damage than good to the work of socialist construction.
Engels combined these economic and political principles when he wrote:
… when we are in possession of state power we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to co-operative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the offer of social assistance for this purpose. And then of course we shall have ample means of showing to the small peasant prospective advantages that must be obvious to him ….[10]
Lenin took Engels’ strategy and applied it to the reality of the Russian Revolution. He was clear that only after re-organising the whole of industry on large-scale collective lines and on a modern technological basis would the towns be able to provide sufficient technical and social assistance to the backward and scattered rural populations to enable them to raise the productivity of agricultural and of farm labour so that in their own interests they would adopt large-scale collective mechanised agriculture.[11]
Lenin repeatedly stated very clearly that it was absolutely forbidden to use compulsive measures against the peasants; they had to be convinced by practical example.[12] He did not limit this policy to predominantly rural countries but also considered them applicable to the advanced capitalist countries.[13]
Trotsky summarised Engels’ and Lenin’s principles for collectivisation in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International:
The program for the nationalisation of the land, the collectivisation of agriculture, should be so drawn that from its very basis it should exclude the possibility of expropriation of small farmers and their compulsory collectivisation. The farmer will remain owner of his plot of land as long as he himself believes it possible or necessary.[14]
The relationship between the Chinese Communists and the peasants was supposed to be one of mutual support and co-operation; after all, the Chinese Revolution was based on the peasantry. During the civil war, and before, the Communists had secured the mass support of the peasants and had established extensive rural organisations. The Party leaders were committed to improving peasant well-being, and until at least 1957 the CCP’s economic policies were relatively restrained when procuring agricultural resources to feed industry.[15]
However, resources for investment in industry could only come from agriculture but small scale agriculture provided very little surplus. The Politburo agreed a plan to merge Higher Stage co-operatives into much larger units, and in April 1958 the name “people’s commune” was adopted for these giant complexes.
Such a proposal had many benefits in the eyes of the Politburo. In a period of transition, greater Party control was required and with a large number of small co-operatives this was difficult. By combining them into larger, more centralised units, the local cadres were better able to exert their authority. Large communes made it easier to collect taxes, to control the price paid for agricultural products, and to force the peasants to pay the high prices demanded for industrial products. The cadres would be better placed to stop the hoarding of grain, impose stricter rationing, and expropriate more produce for the state.
The communes were seen as a convenient instrument for maximising the surplus labour extracted from the peasants. By optimising the division of labour by, for example, establishing communal dining halls and nurseries to free women from the drudgery of home life to work in the fields, it was claimed that the number of working hands would be increased by one-third. Supposedly this would free large numbers of peasants to be shifted from area to area and from job to job, according to needs and requirements.
However, there was growing tension within the Politburo between Mao and those who argued for more gradual progress. Mao’s public statements became increasingly adventurist, following Stalin who, at the 17th Congress of the Russian Party, had declared the part played by objective conditions had been reduced to a minimum while the role of the Party had become decisive; that failures rested “not on ‘objective’ conditions, but on ourselves, and on ourselves alone.”[16]
In China the greater part of farming was done by extremely primitive means, most of it relying on human labour alone. But the communes were to be on a grand scale – averaging about 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) with 5,000 households. There was an obvious contradiction between such extraordinarily large farms and the low technique used to work them.
Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese peasants had a high level of productivity fine-tuned over centuries to match the given conditions including the planting of specialised crops suited to local ground and climate.[17] Productivity could be improved only by the general application of modern techniques (tractors, chemical fertilisers, electrification, etc.). Without these resources there would be no increase in productivity; however, production could be increased by lengthened working hours and increasing the number of peasants labouring in the fields. But such measures would not overcome the backwardness of the agrarian techniques; they would simply make more peasants work longer and harder.
Such an approach could only increase peasant opposition to the communes, and ran the risk of reducing their productivity. The CCP’s policy toward the communes thus had a much greater compulsory element than its policy toward the co-operatives. CCP propaganda had it that the Chinese communes were formed with the enthusiastic support of the peasant masses; the mass exodus of peasants into the towns gave the lie to that.
The first of the people’s communes was set up in Weixing, southern Hunan in April 1958. This project which combined 27 co-operatives with 43,000 people was announced as an experiment. However, had it really been an experiment, its performance would have been monitored and assessed before launching communes nationwide; that such an assessment was not made demonstrates beyond any doubt the adventurist and bureaucratic character of the programme.
At the beginning of August 1958, Mao visited the commune and, without consulting the Politburo, launched a national campaign mobilising the CCP rank and file to establish people’s communes everywhere. The communes were described as self-supporting units “for the all-round development of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, handicrafts and fishery, as well as for the all-round combination of economic, political, cultural and military affairs where industry, agriculture, trade, education and military affairs merge into one.”[18] Even in the largest communes such a perspective was nonsense. In the era of the international division of labour, commune production would only be weakened if the workforce were dissipated into unnecessary and uneconomic activities that were a drain on the main business of agricultural production.
The communes were formed on the basis of geographic proximity by amalgamating adjoining co-operatives, and so tended to be traditional marketing areas surrounding the village or market town containing the local administrative centre. The commune subsumed the functions of local government, with the result that the local CCP cadres naturally stepped into the leading roles within the communes.
Within about two months, 500 million peasants were organised into communes! How, in such a short time, could the peasants be fully appraised as to what was being proposed let alone give their informed consent? Everything was decided by decree and the commune movement as a whole was compulsory in character with Party cadres, who had full control over local economic, social and political matters, acting more to intimidate the peasants than convince them.[19] The agricultural work cycle being years, prompts the question of how in two months could a commune demonstrate its superiority over the co-operatives it replaced either as a means of increasing production or of improving living standards?
Red Flag, the monthly theoretical journal of the CCP, painted a rosy picture of the benefits to be gained from the commune system. The August 1958 issue stated: “The People’s Communes are the best form for the transition from collective ownership to ownership by the people as a whole. It contains the first shoots of communism … such as the communal kitchens, nurseries and sewing facilities to emancipate women from the household.” Unfortunately, these first shoots of communism were rooted in the very essence of capitalism – the piecework wage system.[20] Members were promised food, clothing, housing, child-birth care, education, medical treatment, weddings, funerals and even, in some places, haircuts, though nowhere was the quality mentioned.[21]
Such a picture may have convinced the Young Communist League members posted to areas where the communes were to be formed, but to believe that the vast majority of peasants were convinced to hand over their land, tools, animals and even personal property such as pots and pans in just eight weeks is ridiculous.
The weather in 1958 had been good, and the harvest of near record proportions. For their own reasons, Mao and the CCP leaders ascribed the marvellous harvest as due to the communes as a superior form of socio-economic organisation. In fact, the great increase in farm production in 1958 was not an achievement of the communes. The communes only began to spread in the early autumn of 1958. Wheat had been harvested in the middle of June, the early rice crop between July and August, while cotton, raised in the summer, was ripe for harvest by the time the communes were established. Thus the communes, at best, harvested crops planted and tended by the co-operatives.
13.3.1 Back-yard Steel Production
The continuing US trade embargo (it did not end until 1971) meant that iron and steel for construction and other purposes was in very short supply; it was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain iron and steel for anything but the most important projects. Mao, refusing to slow down the development of heavy industry, called on the communes to set up various kinds of industry, including the production of iron and steel for local use using micro-scale blast furnaces. With responsibility for the construction and operation of blast furnaces, CCP cadres were given tasks for which they had neither experience nor knowledge.[22]
Up until 1957, the strategy of the Ministry for the Metallurgical Industries had been for a network of 14 modern small and medium-sized metallurgical plants that would be quick to build, take advantage of local occurrences of raw materials, and reduce the pressure on China’s weak transport system. This strategy was assessed by western experts as having serious environmental drawbacks (smoke emissions) but would have attained the declared production targets.
During 1957 the Anti-Rightist Campaign, an integral part of which was criticism of intellectuals and experts became strident. With “politics in command”, engineers and economists who warned of likely problems resulting from Party policies were demoted or fired. Expert advice was rejected and the building and operating of micro-scale open-hearth blast furnaces became an additional burden on the communes, imposing on the peasants much back-breaking labour over and above that spent in the fields.
Some regions of China such as Sichuan and Hunan had long experience in blast furnace operation which had traditionally supplied local needs, but these were few and far between. In September 1958, Mao Zedong visited a small traditional style steelworks in Anhui and was greatly impressed, calling for a mass campaign for steel production. “Everyone, everyone, should produce iron and steel.”[23]
By the end of 1958 as many as 600,000 micro steelworks are said to have been built, involving up to 90 million people. Most of these were blast furnaces of traditional design hurriedly built and operated by inexperienced local craftspeople such as the village blacksmiths. Nothing was spared in the drive for building materials; even the stone marking the spot where Mao’s parents were buried was taken. However, traditional blast furnaces are not simple. Efficient operation required experience which could be gained only through a long apprenticeship.[24]
The planning of communes had been hurried and considerations of economic geography had been largely omitted. Thus, for example, a commune in Fukien province was expected to construct an iron smelting plant with an annual capacity of 2,000 tons but the area had neither iron ore nor limestone. This particular commune had only 1,700 hectares (about 4,000 acres) of farm land, and intensive farming of rice and vegetables was needed to feed the population of over 40,000, but the commune was instructed to set aside nearly 70 hectares of arable land for cotton to meet the clothing needs of the commune members despite never having grown cotton because the natural conditions were unfavourable.[25]
In such circumstances pots and pans were seized as a valuable source of raw material for the commune furnaces. Cadres argued that families would no longer need cooking utensils since they were to eat in mess halls. Richard Crossman, Labour Minister for Health and Social Services 1968-70, toured China at this time and witnessed the absurdities:
In a corner I spotted five old ladies sitting in a circle and asked what they were doing. ‘That,’ I was told, ‘is the ball-bearing section’. Sure enough, a thin iron rod had been cut into slices a centimetre thick, and each old lady was rounding a slice with a pestle and mortar, while a couple of boys were polishing the finished article.[26]
This was happening across China, the drive to diversify but simultaneously increase production meant the quality of products was generally quite appalling. For example, it is reported that to meet targets, coal miners were loading their trucks with rubble.
By the end of the year it was claimed that over 11 million tons of steel had been produced. Mao, safeguarded from reality by the bureaucracy he had done so much to create, was delighted. In truth, the small blast furnaces which he had urged the peasants to build were a massive failure; almost all of the steel produced was of such poor quality as to be useless. The Chinese propaganda magazines of the time were wildly enthusiastic about the mass campaign, but the photographs which accompanied the glowing reports told a very different story; in the West only the technically illiterate were convinced.
As the utter failure of the commune blast furnaces became apparent and the consequential serious imbalances were being felt across the economy, the steel target for 1959 was progressively reduced from 30 million tonnes, to 20 million, to 13 million and eventually to 12 million. An editorial in the Peking Daily (20 January 1959) instructed that where “it is too costly to carry out steel and iron production communes should quickly discontinue operations and divert their labour power to other fields of work.” The waste of human and material resources had been colossal and just at a time when they were most needed elsewhere.
Many millions of peasants had been dispatched to work on steel production at the expense of the harvest. Fortunately, the weather was good and the harvest was excellent, but the harvesting had to be undertaken mainly by old people and children with consequent delays and shortcomings. Because cadres seized produce to meet the state procurement quotas as a priority, food shortages and queues appeared in the cities despite the spectacular harvest.[27]
The bureaucracy was convinced that the grain harvest for 1958 had been exceptionally good due to communalisation so the improvement could be expected to be maintained. One consequence was that the land allocated to grain crops was substantially reduced for the 1959 harvest, and other crops such as cotton increased. This was done despite the need to feed the big increase in the non-rural workforce resulting from the huge expansion of coal mining, electricity generating, chemical, and metallurgical plants.
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Maitan, L. Party, Army and Masses in China, New Left Books, 1976, p48-49.
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Twitchett and Fairbank, Op. cit. p299 et seq.
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Bernstein, T. Stalinism, Famine, and Chinese Peasants: Grain Procurements during the Great Leap Forward, Theory and Society, 1984, 13(3) 339-377.
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Shue, V. The Fate of the Commune, Modern China, 1984, 10(3) 259-283.
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Mao Zedong, Editor’s Notes from Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, Sept. and Dec. 1955, Vol. 5.
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Twitchett and Fairbank, Op. cit. p95.
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Engels, F. The Peasant Question in France and Germany, 1894, Selected Works Marx and Engels, Vol. II, 1962, Moscow p433.
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Lenin, V. Speech Delivered at the 1st Congress of Agricultural Communes, 4 December 1919 CW 30:195.
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Lenin, V. Report on Work in the Countryside, 23 March 1919, CW 29:198-215.
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Lenin, V. Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agricultural Question. June 1920 CW 31:152-164.
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Trotsky, L. Transitional Programme, w.m.org.
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Bernstein, Stalinism … Op. cit.
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Stalin, J, (1934) Report to the 17th Party Congress on the Work of the CC of the C.P.S.U.(B.) w.m.org.
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Twitchett and Fairbank, Op. cit. p145.
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Red Flag, The Advantages of the Communes, No. 8, Sept., 1958.
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Peng Shuzi, A Criticism of the Various Views Supporting the Chinese Rural People’s Communes, Aug 1959, w.m.org.
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Dutt, G. Problems of China’s Rural Communes, The China Quarterly, No. 16, 1963, p112-136.
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Red Flag, Op. cit.
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Lippit, V. The Commune in Chinese Development, Modern China, 1977 3(2) 229-255.
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Wagner, D. Background to the Great Leap Forward in Iron and Steel, Curzon Press. 1997.
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Harris, N. The Mandate of Heaven, Quartet Books Limited 1978.
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Dutt, Op. cit.
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Crossman, R. New Statesman, 28 December 1958, p6.
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Harris, N. The Mandate of Heaven, Quartet Books Limited 1978.