The move towards collectivisation

Moves towards agricultural co-operation: reasons for the move towards collectivisation

The Party never intended the peasantry to become established as a new class of landowners, and therefore moves towards collectivisation began rapidly.

Moves towards agricultural co-operation: Stalins experience with collectivisation

• Mao hoped that he would avoid a repeat of the disastrous situation experienced by Stalin in Russia

• Stalin had encountered so much resistance to collectivisation that he ended up eliminating the kulaks (better-off peasants) as a class

• However, in Russia, the peasants had already been in possession of the land for ten years and had become used to life under the New Economic Policy, so there was bound to be resistance to change there

Moves towards agricultural co-operation: Mao’s predictions on how long collectivisation would take

The moves towards collectivisation passed through several stages because the party improvised as they went along, depending on circumstances. Mao said that it would take about 15 years to complete.

Moves towards agricultural co-operation: MATs

• From 1951, groups of ten or so families were encouraged to unite to form Mutual Aid Teams (MATs), in which they could pool their labour, animals and equipment, while retaining their rights of private ownership

• This happened anyway at busy times of year, but it was now being formalised as a permanent arrangement and managed by the peasant associations

• While membership was voluntary, it soon became apparent that individuals who remained outside the MAT would find it hard to get hold of resources, and villagers who stayed out on their own ran the risk of persecution

Moves towards agricultural co-operation: APCs

• In 1952, successful MATs were encouraged to combine and form Agricultural Producers Co-operatives (APCs) of 40-50 families

• In APCs, land could also be pooled and could therefore be consolidated into larger units and cultivated more efficiently than in traditional strips

• Families with larger holdings were still allowed to keep back some land for their personal use, while renting the rest to the APC, which was a strong incentive for richer families to join

• Profits were shared out at the end of the year, according to resources contributed and food produced

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: Mao’s unfulfilled expectations

only 14 percent of rural households were in APCs by March 1955

Mao continued to follow a cautious approach until 1955, responding to circumstances as they arose and frequently changing tack

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: rushing into the creation of APCs

In their desire to respond to Mao's wishes for faster change, many local officials had rushed into creating APCs before they had been properly planned. Consequently, these APCs had gone into debt because they had to borrow money to buy equipment, prompting Mao to call for a slowdown in the spring of 1953.

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: return to capitalism

• once things stabilised again in 1954, peasants started buying and selling their land and food, just as they would under capitalis

• This apparent rejection of revolutionary values infuriated Mao, who then condemned the previous slowdown as a 'rash retreat, and renewed the pressure on peasants to join APCs

• However, even when better-off peasants did bow to local pressure and reluctantly joined the local APC, they often slaughtered their animals and ate them rather than handing them over, in scenes reminiscent of forced collectivisation in Russia

• When the 1954 harvest was poor, this prompted the government to requisition grain in order to get enough to feed the cities

• However, this caused so much rural protest that, in January 1955, Mao did another U-turn and announced a policy of Stop, Contract and Develop, calling for a halt to APC development for the next 18 months

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: turn to full out collectivisation

in July 1955, Mao made up his mind to go for all-out collectivisation when he announced to a Conference of Local Party Secretaries that a full-scale drive would be started immediately. This time, there was to be no turning back.

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: growth of APCs

• From 17 million households in APCs in July 1955, the figure grew to 75 million by January 1956, until, by the end of the year, only three percent of peasants were still farming as individuals

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: official vs real reason

• The official reason given for the drive to collectivisation was that it was in response to the demands of the peasantry, an illusion that Mao helped foster by publishing 'Socialist Upsurge in the Countryside, a selectively edited compilation of favourable reports on collectives written by local activists

• The real reason was more likely to have been Mao's fear that supplies to the cities would continue to be unreliable as long as peasants still owned the land

• Like Stalin, he saw the peasants as so instinctively reactionary that they needed to be forced into collectives, where the state would operate as their landlord, otherwise they would revert to capitalism at the first opportunity

• Mao summed up the situation when he said, 'the peasants want freedom, but we want socialism.'

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: HPCs

• Most of these new APCs were classed as 'higher' (HPCs), and consisted of 200-300 households

• In an HPC, peasant families no longer owned the land or the equipment, and the profits at the end of the year were shared out according to work points earned by the labour contributed

• This meant that those who contributed the most land and other assets might find themselves receiving the same rewards for their labour as those who had surrendered the least in terms of material possessions

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: ideologically

ideologically, collectivisation was a tremendous success for Mao because the state now owned the means of production of food, the land, on which 90 percent of the population worked.

This was Chinese Marxism in action.

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: politically

• Politically, it was more of a mixed blessing for Mao: the fact that it had been carried out far more quickly than imagined was a tribute to his authority within the Party, and his ability to outmanoeuvre powerful conservative opponents such as the premier, Zhou Enlai

• the actual process of carrying out the changes greatly increased the control the party exerted over local people at grass-roots level

• However, collectivisation also marked a distinct change in the relationship between the CCP and the peasantry, who now became servants of the Party, rather than loyal allies whose support had to be earned

• the speed with which the big surge towards higher-level APCs was achieved made Mao dangerously overconfident

• He no longer worried about practical obstacles that stood in the way of change, and this was soon to lead to catastrophic mistakes in the Great Leap Forward of 1958

The change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation: economic terms

• In economic terms, the impact of collectivisation was disappointing

• Over the period of the First Five-Year Plan, food production had increased by 3.8 percent per annum, but this was still insufficient to sustain the growing industrial workforce, which was growing even faster

• The basic problem was that the amount of cultivated land per head of the population was so low

• Yields per hectare were quite high, but labour productivity was low, and it would have been hard for the peasants to produce a surplus, whether collectivised or not

• The situation was worsened by the lack of state investment in agriculture and the demotivating effect created by the fact that people no longer owned their own land, so they did not directly benefit from the work they put in