Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era

Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era

David Zweig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Print ISBN:
  9781563248382
  9781563248375
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315285030
• Index: Social Sciences

A comprehensive analysts of China's rural reforms, this book links local experiences to national policy, showing the dynamic tension in the reform process among state policy, local cadre power and self-interest, and the peasants' search for economic growth. Key topics covered include: the responsibility system, privatization and changing property rights, industrialization, social conflict, cadre corruption, urban-rural relations, conflict over land, rural urbanization, and the impact of globalization. The introduction skillfully integrates the themes that run throughout this work and the concluding chapter focuses on current and future problems in rural China.

Part I

Restructuring Property Rights and Decollectivization

1

Opposition to Change in Rural China

Following the second rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping in July 1977, rural China’s organizational structure and its property rights regime were transformed. Land, while nominally still collectively owned, was distributed among individual households that received legal usufruct or use rights to the farmland, with the term of control set for fifteen years or longer. The organizational or administrative structure that had supported collective land ownership and management was also readjusted. Central to this was the dismantling of the production team, which had organized all farmers’ labor, giving farmers relative autonomy in economic decision making. Although support for these reforms was extensive, opposition and differences of opinion existed as well. This chapter explores the motivations of those who resisted these changes and the problems that arose during the implementation of the policy.*

The Historical Development of the System of Responsibility

The major initial reform in the rural sector was the institution of the “responsibility system.” The Chinese used this concept to refer to any process of remuneration which created a certain level of accountability by linking the task performed and the income received. In the early 1980s, the term was applied to anything from task rates to independent farming by households on collective land (see appendix to this chapter).

The idea of instituting a responsibility system was advocated in the 1950s by the head of the Party’s Rural Work Department, Deng Zihui, to make production teams and formal work groups responsible to the Agricultural Producers Cooperatives that were developing at that time.¹ The idea reemerged in 1960 after the millennial Great Leap Forward collapsed. In some locations, particularly Anhui and Fujian provinces, groups of farmers or individual households contracted with production teams to meet an output quota for which the farmers received a set amount of work points. These points were cashed in for money at the end of the year, and any above-quota agricultural produce remained their own. First criticized at the 7000 Cadres Conference of January 1962, these policies were the target of harsh invectives during the Cultural Revolution as part of “Liu Shaoqui’s revisionist line.”²

The advocates of agrarian radicalism in China³ opposed material incentives and supported instead the evaluation system used in Dazhai, the national model brigade. Through their procedure of self-assessment and public discussion, farmers there reportedly developed strong inner-group cohesion and moral work incentives. Yet even though this policy was maintained in some localities from 1968 until 1980,⁴ it failed to motivate the Chinese farmer to work hard.⁵ Since everyone tended to get similar amounts of points, income differentials between strong and weak villagers narrowed and strong workers lost their incentive to work harder. Therefore, in 1978, when Wan Li, then first party secretary of Anhui Province, called for the establishment of a responsibility system in agriculture, he was advocating replacing Dazhai’s egalitarian method of remuneration with task rates, whereby farmers would perform a job for a predetermined number of work points. With this system, farmers who worked slowly would find that their individual incomes would suffer.⁶

Since 1978, the Chinese leadership has authorized a vast array of responsibility systems. Though complex, these systems can be clarified by recognizing that they are based on three interrelated factors: the nature of the link between work and income, the size of the work unit at which income is determined, and the type of work performed. But, as the Chinese changed their position on these three facets of the responsibility system, they called into question accepted ideological premises concerning the nature of socialist labor organization in agriculture and expanded the types of labor organization that were still deemed socialist. These challenges to accepted doctrine made certain points in the decision-making process about the responsibility system major thresholds in the policy debate. The following two sections trace the historical transitions from 1977 through 1982, and outline the major issues and debates that ensued.⁷

Remuneration Systems

The Link between Work and Income

The first threshold involved replacing the moral incentives of the Dazhai system with task rates. In August 1977, the People’s Daily advocated task rates for the first time since 1972. But haste makes waste and, as farmers worked faster, the quality of work suffered. Therefore, some locations added a quality standard to the job. If the team leader found the quality of work wanting, farmers either had to redo the work or had to accept fewer work points for their efforts.

The key threshold regarding the remuneration system concerned whether the level of output, rather than the quality of work, would determine income. From a Maoist perspective, linking income and output was the ultimate in material incentives and, therefore, was revisionist. But, in December 1978, the Third Plenum’s authorization of a bonus for work groups that surpassed the output quota broke this barrier.⁸ Income from then on was partially determined by how much one produced. In the early stages, farmers received extra work points as a bonus, but eventually they began to keep the excess produce instead. The final stage in the process was reached when the contracting unit no longer had to turn over any fixed agricultural quota to the collective (bao gan). Responsible only for meeting the state agricultural tax, the “compulsory sale” (zheng gou), and making a donation to the collective, the contracting unit was free to dispose of the remaining produce and income as it pleased.⁹

The Size of the Unit of Account

The second issue reflected the size of the work unit at which income was determined. Since 1962, the production team had been the basic accounting unit in over 90 percent of rural China.¹⁰ The team’s net income, divided by the number of work points distributed to its members each year, determined the basic work point value. The total number of work points each villager accumulated by year’s end determined his or her share of the collective’s year-end distribution. However, because the production team was too large a unit to establish effective labor accountability, in 1977–1978, some places made the “work group” (gongzuo zu) the unit of account.¹¹ Though criticized at first, the usefulness of the smaller unit of remuneration was recognized by the Third Plenum of December 1978. The next transition, which established individual responsibility under team administration for a strip of land, was not a major point of conflict. Once the link between income and output was accepted, individual accountability under unified team management differed only marginally from collective farming.

However, because the household reflected traditional family farming, its establishment became the major threshold in deciding the unit’s appropriate size. The Third Plenum had rejected “household quotas” (bao chan dao hu), but when the two documents on agriculture put forth at that plenum were authorized by the Fourth Plenum nine months later, the absolute prohibition on household quotas had been deleted. Single households in remote poor areas became an acceptable unit of account. This decision opened the door on household contracts, and from this point on their use expanded steadily.

The Type of Work

Because of the initial opposition to linking income and agricultural output, the first jobs placed under the responsibility system were field construction tasks, such as digging ditches, or parts of the planting process, such as transplanting rice or harvesting grain. But, in early 1978, quotas were established for sideline work, such as fishing, forestry, and animal husbandry. Although this policy linked output and income, sideline work involved fewer people than cereal production and seemed ideologically less sensitive. Similarly, in late 1977 and early 1978, output quotas for the entire production process were first established for economic crops, such as cotton, rapeseed, and hemp, because such crops were secondary to grains and vegetables.

The major threshold for this issue was linking output and income for cereal production, but a breakthrough eventually occurred in dry field cultivation. And, although potential conflicts in the irrigation process complicated the use of output quotas for paddy fields, the findings of investigative groups sent in the summer of 1980 to Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi provinces, and reports from Zhao Ziyang’s travels to Hunan, Hubei, and Shandong provinces, convinced the leadership in Beijing by the spring of 1981 to accept officially individual and household quotas for paddy fields.¹²

Support for and Opposition to the Responsibility System

Reforms precipitate a redistribution of economic resources, political authority, and political power, and always result in winners and losers. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find that interviews in China and press reports showed that differences of opinion concerning the responsibility system existed at all levels of the political and bureaucratic system. These divisions existed among national elites, among intellectuals, between wealthier provinces and the party’s center, between rich and poor regions, between rural bureaucrats and farmers, and among farmers in different localities. The different attitudes this chapter presents were based primarily on the differential effects of the new reforms on the political and economic interests of the political elites who make policy, and on the different sectors of Chinese rural society that implement policy. Nonetheless, some persons who opposed the responsibility system were truly concerned about the changes it might bring to the basic egalitarianism in the Chinese countryside.

The Forces of Reform

Why was the responsibility system successful? How was it that rural bureaucrats, who in most localities opposed the policies, were unable to stem the tide of rural reform? The pressure for change came from two levels. Reformers in the party were pushing these changes consistently after 1977, with the first experiments occurring in Anhui and Sichuan provinces. In 1977, Wan Li, a first vice premier of China and the member of the Party Secretariat responsible for agriculture, was then first party secretary of Anhui Province; Zhao Ziyang was running Sichuan Province. Closely aligned with Deng Xiaoping, both were advocating and experimenting with these reforms long before they became national policy. Also, these policies were extremely popular with villagers in poorer areas who carried them out in spite of local opposition. In fact, they were probably the most popular policies in the poorer areas since land reform. Press reports from 1979 to 1980 described how villagers sometimes confronted county and commune officials with faits accomplis which cadres could overturn only at the price of a great deal of conflict. In such localities, pressure from above meshed with support from below, squeezing the middle-level bureaucrats who opposed the policy. Unlike other movements for change in the countryside, where the center’s goals were anathema to villager interests, the responsibility system relied on an unofficial coalition between central reformers and villagers from the poor areas. Caught in this vise, middle level cadres could do little but accept the changes. They stalled, but after the reform faction gained control in Beijing and the Party Secretariat authorized Central Document No. 75 in September 1980, the pressures on local officials increased greatly.

The rural reform movement went faster than anyone expected. In early 1980, Yao Yilin suggested that 10 percent of rural China would ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Publication Acknowledgments
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Tables and Figures
• Introduction: Scholarly Debates and Rural Development as the Countryside Moves into the Twenty-First Century
• Part I: Restructuring Property Rights and Decollectivization
• Part II: Conflicts, Norms, and the Search for New Institutions
• Part III: Markets, Hierarchy, and the Restructuring of Urban-Rural Relations
• Part IV: Industrialization and Internationalization: Rural China Turns Outward
• Part V: Reviewing the Record
• Index