16. Changes in Agriculture

What did Mao want to achieve when he became leader of China in 1949?

• the establishment of a communist system, in the way that it was ruled, the way the economy was run and in the way people lived their lives

• the modernisation of China’s economy

What was the logical first step towards communism?

• the countryside

• modernisation required the movement of the population from the country to the town and sufficient food to feed urban workers, but there still needed to be enough food produced on farms to feed everyone

What issues did Mao want to avoid with collectivisation?

• he did not want to make the same mistakes made in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when collectivisation led to peasant resistance and millions had starved to death

• so he argued for modest reform, stressing that richer peasants should be treated with moderation and attacks should be reserved for larger landlords

What were the 4 stages of Changing Agriculture?

• 1950 - Agrarian Reform and landlord attacks

• 1951-55 - Mutual Aid Teams

• 1953-56 - Agricultural Producers Co-operatives

• 1958-62 - Collectivization

What was the Agrarian Land Reform?

• The property of large landlords was taken away from them and given to the peasants.

• The property of enemies of the state, for example, Chiang Kai-shek and foreign nationals, was confiscated.

How did the Agrarian Reform Law end up working?

• Although officially this was a moderate policy, putting the reform into action was left in the hands of the angry local communities. Villages held ‘struggle meetings’ where they denounced rich landlords and violence followed.

• It is estimated that up to a million landlords were executed, thousands were beaten up and thousands more sent to special camps, where they were ‘re-educated’ to accept communist ideas.

• Thus, the Agrarian Reform Law brought about the destruction of the old elite and won over to communism vast numbers of peasants who benefited from the removal of the landlords.

What were mutual aid teams?

• once the landlord class had been removed, the peasants were encouraged to share their equipment, animals and work in mutual aid teams

• consisting of ten or fewer households

• the land was still owned indivually by the peasants

• by the end of 1952, 40% of peasants belonged to mutual aid teams

What were APCs?

• Agricultural producers co-operatives (APCs).

• The land was still owned by the peasants but needed to be managed centrally because an APC was a large unit that included the animals, equipment and labour of 3–5 mutual aid teams (30–50 households).

• The formation of APCs was encouraged by Mao from 1953, because he believed it would be the most effective way of increasing production of food.

• The APCs also created a demand for machinery, which boosted industry as well as allowing much greater production of food in the countryside.

How did APC’s end up working out?

• The creation of APCs was most successful in areas where mutual aid teams already existed.

• However, in some areas, richer peasants took the opportunity to buy up large sections of the land and hired labour to work on it. This recovery of capitalism undermined the purpose of the APCs and led to interference by communist officials, who began to force peasants into APCs.

• The result was peasant resistance similar to that in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Richer peasants killed their animals and burned their crops rather than hand them over to the APC.

• In January 1955, Mao called for a temporary halt to the APCs. However, by the summer he decided that the party needed to push ahead with APCs and move to the next stage with the introduction of collectives or communes.

What were collectives?

• Collectives were farms made up of 2,000–3,000 households.

• All the land, animals and equipment belonged to the collective and there was no private ownership.

• One reason why Mao was so anxious to push forward with the programme was because he believed that the peasants were harming his effort to industrialise China by overeating instead of sending their extra food to the towns. In the collectives, the produce would not be the property of the peasants and the party would be able to direct it to the towns.

• By the end of 1958, about 700 million people had been placed in the collective farms. These farms were run by more than 26,000 communes that were established across China

Why was forced collectivization a failure and what did it lead to?

• Mao claimed that collectivisation was wanted by the peasants, but this was merely propaganda. Collectivisation was forced on the peasants and they reacted by reducing production.

• At the same time, Mao also interfered with traditional farming methods. The result was a huge decline in production and consequently a wide-scale famine.

What factors contributed to the Great Famine?

• No incentives – the peasants no longer had any reason to produce more food than would meet their immediate needs, because they could not sell extra produce for a profit.

• The Four Noes Campaign (also known as the Four Pests Campaign) – Mao launched a campaign to get rid of sparrows, flies, mosquitoes and rats because they were pests that ate the crops and grain. Peasants were encouraged to make as much noise as possible to drive sparrows and other wild birds off the land. However, without any birds, the insects and caterpillars multiplied and ate even more crops and grain.

• Political pressures – Mao believed the poor scientific claims of Soviet scientists who said they had developed methods that would increase the crop by up to 16 times more than by using traditional methods. They were wrong, but peasants who tried to use traditional farming methods were denounced by communist officials as enemies of the state.

• Fear – communist officials did not dare speak out about the failure of production, and in order to impress Mao they lied about production.

• Natural causes – there was a drought in the north which reduced the harvest and flooding in the south which damaged the crops.

What were the effects of the Great Famine?

• The famine caused 50 million deaths in China.

• Parents sold their children and husbands sold their wives in order to buy food. Some even resorted to cannibalism.

• The worst hit area was Tibet, where over 1 million people died: a quarter of the population. The people of Tibet had resisted the drive for communism and as punishment, the CCP deliberately chose to extend famine to the region. They forced the Tibetan peasants to abandon their traditional crop of barley and keeping yaks, and forced them to grow wheat and corn. The soil was not suitable for these crops, and so production failed and starvation resulted.