Red China's Green Revolution

Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune

Joshua Eisenman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231546751
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

China's dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China's future rapid growth.

Red China's Green Revolution tells the story of the commune's origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China's economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao's collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China's Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

Assessing Commune Productivity

Many experts and most laymen, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, trace China’s sustained economic growth to the expansion of rural markets and material incentives beginning in 1979. The contentions that under the People’s Commune (from here on, the commune), excessive planning and an overly egalitarian collective remuneration system reduced agricultural productivity are well accepted. Conventional wisdom suggests that market-based incentives and investments in productive capital and technology initiated during decollectivization produced a V-shaped economic recovery. Economic collapse was narrowly avoided by life-saving rural reforms, known as the Household Responsibility System (HRS, or baochan daohu in Chinese). HRS reintroduced household-based farming, which revived the rural economy after the commune’s failure.¹

But was the commune an economic failure? Was the commune, as the conventional view suggests, unable to provide sufficient material incentives for rural workers, leading them to slack off or shirk their collective responsibilities? A lesser-known view suggests that the opposite is true. The commune, proponents of this alternate view maintain, helped modernize Chinese agriculture, increased its productivity, and laid the groundwork for the mass urbanization and industrialization that occurred after decollectivization.²

After presenting these two divergent assessments of commune economic performance, this chapter uses national-level data to evaluate which one is more accurate. Production data for grain, pigs, and edible oils, included in the “Data Presentation” section and provided along with provincial-level data in appendix A, reveal that claims that the commune failed to increase food production are largely erroneous. Considered together, these data show that after 1970, communes generated substantial increases in aggregate food production, as well as productivity per unit land and per unit labor. These trends are particularly evident in grain and pig production, which compare favorably with levels of production and life expectancy in other large agricultural countries (i.e., India, the Soviet Union, and the United States).

Simply put, the Chinese commune was not an economic failure remedied by decollectivization. During the 1970s, the commune was able to support a larger, longer-living population on a diminishing amount of arable land and to overcome high capital depreciation rates.

BOOK STRUCTURE

The chapters that follow tell the tale of the commune—why it was created, how it was transformed over the course of two decades, and how it was ultimately destroyed. They identify the three sources of commune productivity—super-optimal investment, Maoism, and organizational structure and size—and explain why and how the institution was abandoned during decollectivization.

Chapter 2 examines the origins of collective agriculture and its evolution until 1970. I argue that the commune had four distinct, yet interrelated, phases: the Great Leap Forward (GLF) Commune (1958–1961), the Rightist Commune (1962–1964), the Leftist Commune (1965–1969), and the Green Revolution Commune (1970–1979). Each of these phases was distinguished by its size, mandate, remuneration system, and strategy to promote agricultural modernization. Each also built on its predecessor, creating an institutional inertia that predisposed the commune to retain policies rarely associated with communism, including household sideline plots, cottage enterprises, and rural markets (collectively known as the Three Small Freedoms).

In chapter 3, I argue that after 1970, policies that increased household savings rates kick-started a virtuous cycle of investment that produced sustained growth in agricultural output. Using previously unexploited national- and provincial-level data, I identify three economic challenges China faced after the GLF famine—rising rates of population growth, shrinking arable land, and high capital depreciation rates—and explain the policies implemented through the commune to alleviate them. Capital investments and technological innovations made via the agricultural research and extension system increased output per unit land and labor, and freed farmers first to move into the light industrial and service sectors of the rural economy, and later to urban areas after decollectivization.

In chapter 4, I use neoclassical and classical economic growth models to identify the transitional dynamics of growth under the commune. These models clarify the patterns of productivity for each phase of the commune identified in chapters 2 and 3, and explain the relationships among relevant economic variables (i.e., technological progress, savings rates, capital investment and depreciation, and labor input) and agriculture output. This chapter demonstrates how the commune used coercive measures to increase agricultural output by underwriting super-optimal investment—that is, the extraction and investment of household resources at levels beyond what families would have saved (as opposed to consumed) had they been given the choice. The commune’s workpoint remuneration system and, to a lesser extent, redistributive policies and rural credit cooperatives helped to conceal the gradual increases in household savings rates that funded agricultural modernization.

In chapter 5, I use collective action theories to explain the importance of Maoism, the commune’s pervasive collective ideology. The commune’s collectivist ethos had five interlocking aspects: Maoism’s religiosity, the people’s militia, self-reliance, social pressure, and collective remuneration. Together, these elements constituted the institution’s essential political backbone, which allowed it to maintain higher household savings rates than members normally would have tolerated without fleeing, resisting, or resorting to slacking or shirking. Maoism helped the institution to overcome the collective action problems inherent to all rural communes—namely, brain drain, adverse selection, and moral hazard. Once extracted from households, resources were channeled into productive investments via the commune-based agricultural research and extension system described in chapter 3.

In chapter 6, I draw on organizational theories to explain how changes to the size and structure of the commune and its subunits improved its productivity. After the devastating GLF famine, the commune was substantially altered. Its size was reduced and two levels of administrative subunits were introduced: the production brigade and the production team. Exploiting two decades of detailed county-level data from Henan Province, and examining both cross-sectional and over-time variation, I find a consistent nonlinear relationship between the size of communes and their subunits and agricultural productivity. Smaller communes with smaller teams were most productive, but as commune size increased, the effect of team size was mitigated and eventually reversed such that large communes with large teams were more productive than large communes with small teams.

In chapter 7, I present a top-down political explanation for commune abandonment. This account challenges the contentions that households abandoned the commune and that it was dismantled because it was unproductive. The campaign to abandon the commune began quietly in 1977, was accelerated in 1979, and culminated in the system’s nationwide elimination by 1983. Unified by a desire to solidify its tenuous grip on power, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow reformers set out to boost rural household incomes and end Maoism. These interrelated policy goals challenged the commune’s mandate to extract household savings to underwrite investment, eliminated its collectivist ideology, and sowed discord among the institution and its subunits. Without its economic, political, and structural supports, the commune collapsed. During decollectivization, collective property and lands were distributed and the state procurement price for agricultural products was increased for the first time in nearly a decade. This distribution delivered a double consumption boost to previously deprived rural localities and won widespread political support, especially from local leaders who benefited most from the privatization of collective property.

Finally, in chapter 8, I provide a synopsis of the book and review its conclusions. I summarize the institutional changes that took place under the commune; the three sources of commune productivity examined in chapters 4, 5, and 6; and the top-down, political explanation for decollectivization offered in chapter 7.

Appendix A presents national- and provincial-level production data during the commune era for grain, pigs, and edible oil. Appendix B includes the supplemental materials for the statistical analysis conducted in chapter 6. Appendix C is a compilation of the nine essential official policy documents on the commune, most of which have not previously been translated into English. It is divided into three sections: commune creation, commune governance, and decollectivization.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: THE PEOPLE’S COMMUNE

Beginning in 1958, for more than two decades the commune was rural China’s foremost economic and political institution and the lowest level of full-time, state-supported government.³ At their peak size in 1980, communes held about 811 million members, representing 82 percent of all Chinese, or 1 out of every 5.5 people on earth. Between 1970 and 1983, the average commune included twelve production brigades, ninety production teams, three thousand households, and about fourteen thousand people. These averages disguise substantial regional disparities in commune size, and after 1961, regardless of size, all Chinese communes shared the same three-tiered administrative structure and were coercive institutions—that is, members could not leave without permission.

The household formed a fourth subunit under the commune and controlled the rural private sector. Households supplemented their collective income with private income generated from their often home-adjacent sideline plots (ziliudi) and cottage enterprises; they would either consume these crops and handicrafts or sell them to the collective or to other households at the local market (ganji). Households had the basic facilities and supplies (i.e., a small courtyard or pen and food scraps) and the experience necessary to raise a few chickens or a pig or two. They did not compete directly with the collective, but instead worked with and received material support from their teams to ensure that any resources left over from collective production would not be wasted.⁴

During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, from mid-1957 until the GLF began in late 1958, between 550,000 and 800,000 educated members of Chinese society were branded as Rightists and publically denounced.⁵ Over the next two years, the GLF’s infamous red-over-expert policies further demoralized China’s already scarce human capital. The GLF’s failure resulted in the loss of between 15 and 30 million lives, as well as the construction of vast quantities of poor-quality physical capital and infrastructure, which either depreciated quickly or collapsed.

After the GLF calamity, in 1962, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee officially promulgated the Regulations on the ...