![]() Instead of allocating income based on a household’s contributions, the HAPCs allocated income based on workpoints, which were determined, in theory, by the amount of labor a cooperative member had performed. The HAPCs instituted a few key measures that would persist in the People’s Communes for decades thereafter. The HAPCs were usually the size of a village and contained between five hundred and one thousand members. Accordingly, the state established Higher-Level Producer Cooperatives (HAPCs) in 1956, and by the end of the year, over 90 percent of China’s 500 million farmers had joined 746,000 HAPCs. Moreover, Mao also argued that collectivization, and the consequent rural modernization, would hasten the breakdown of “traditional” and “feudal” belief systems and relationships in the countryside. Key CCP leaders, especially Mao Zedong, sought further collectivization, as they believed that collectivization would lead to greater agricultural production and efficiency, as larger collectives could undertake larger infrastructural and environmental projects (such as irrigation works and land reclamation) and take advantage of economies of scale. The APCs coordinated labor for agricultural work and infrastructure projects, and the APCs distributed income to each household based on how much land, labor, and other resources that household contributed to the collective. Some Mutual Aid Teams also formed, or were consolidated into, Agricultural Producer Cooperatives (APCs), larger institutions at the village or subvillage level that pooled resources and collectively managed land. These Mutual Aid Teams helped farming families coordinate the sharing of labor, farming technology, and other resources. With state coordination, many families-up to 68 million by 1954-joined Mutual Aid Teams. Rural collectivization began soon after the CCP announced its 1953 "general line for the transition to socialism." Over the next six years, collectivization took several incrementally progressing forms: mutual aid groups, primitive cooperatives, and people's communes. During the Civil War era and continuing into the early years of the People's Republic of China, the CCP implemented wide-ranging land reforms, attempted to identify and classify the rural population, and redistributed land from the landlords to the middle peasants and poor peasants to revolutionize the social structure of China. Farmers generally went through cycles of busyness during harvest season and relative idleness during off seasons. Many farms were relatively small, family-operated enterprises. Before 1949, landlords owned almost half of the land in rural China and leased it out to tenant farmers. įormer United States First Lady Pat Nixon at a people's commune in Beijing during Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China History Precedents and Collectivization in the Early PRC īefore the people’s communes were established, the Chinese Communist Party had experimented with and promoted other, smaller forms of collectivized agriculture. They ranged in number from 50,000 to 90,000. The communes did not, however, meet many of their long-term goals, such as facilitating the construction of socialism in the rural areas, liberating women from housework, and creating sustainable agriculture practices in the countryside. The scale of the commune and its ability to extract income from the rural population enabled commune administrations to invest in large-scale mechanization, infrastructure, and industrial projects. ![]() The people's commune was commonly known for collectivizing living and working practices, especially during the Great Leap Forward. The communes had governmental, political, and economic functions during the Cultural Revolution. Communes, the largest collective units, were divided in turn into production brigades and production teams. The people's commune ( Chinese: 人民公社 pinyin: rénmín gōngshè) was the highest of three administrative levels in rural areas of the People's Republic of China during the period from 1958 to 1983, until they were replaced by townships. A collective meal as pictured in The 10th Anniversary Photo Collection of the PRC 1949-1959
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