Socialization was a hallmark of China’s economic strategy from the early 1950s onward, and the collective organization of agriculture was a defining characteristic of China’s rural economy under Mao Zedong. The strong organizational emphasis of farm policy reflected a belief that institutional change was the main determinant of agricultural growth. By 1953, land reform had fundamentally changed the balance of political power, as well as the profile of land ownership, land use, and farm management, in the countryside. However, it had not advanced the cause of socialization. It was, in fact, always the government’s intent that land reform would be merely the first step in a series of institutional changes eventually leading to a fully socialist collective agriculture, to be completed by 1967. The process would take place gradually and in stages, with farmers initially engaging in what were called “lower-level (semisocialist) agricultural-producer cooperatives” until the demonstrated benefits of cooperation encouraged them to voluntarily join fully socialist (“higher-level”) collectives. The underlying economic rationale was that collectivization would bring agriculture more firmly within the remit of planning and strengthen government control over grain, while the larger scale of farming and the mobilizational capacity of the collectives would enhance agricultural efficiency and generate sustained output growth. But thanks to the overwhelming response to Mao’s call for accelerated collectivization (31 July 1955), the original timetable was abandoned, and coercion was increasingly used to force peasants—including those with minimal or nonexistent experience of lower-level cooperatives—into fully socialist collectives. A mere two years later, under a more indigenous strategy of development (the “Great Leap Forward”), another massive institutional upheaval took place, as peasants were incorporated into a new and huge organizational unit (the rural people’s commune), whose remit extended to political as well as economic management. Following the human and economic catastrophe precipitated by the Great Leap, there was a temporary institutional retreat. But the imperative of collective farming soon reemerged and remained intact until decollectivization in the early 1980s. These events have generated a rich literature, much of it written before the post-1978 explosion of data and other materials from China. That so many of these early studies still merit careful reading is testament to the remarkable dedication of authors (e.g., Kenneth Walker, Nicholas Lardy, Chao Kuo-chün) who spent years locating and then immersing themselves in Chinese-language books, journals, and newspapers to an extent that seems inconceivable in the 2020s. Economic issues define the major themes of the literature (e.g., the rationale of institutional change, its impact on yields and output growth, the role of state procurement policies, the implications for urban and rural food consumption). But it has also embraced political-economy dimensions of China’s rural institutional framework, a notable example being Jean Oi’s pathbreaking 1989 study.
A study in resistance to institutional change: The lost game of Latin American land reform