The people's commune () 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. Communes, the largest collective units, were divided in turn into production brigades and production teams. The people's commune collectivized living and working practices. Many individual homes were abolished in favour of communal residences, with many houses taken apart and demolished. Regardless of age or relationship, many men and women lived separately, and often, multiple families were placed in the same communal homes. One's land, tools, resources were pooled together, with working hours and farming practices completely dictated by the CCP.
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 communes did not, however, meet many of their long-term goals, such as facilitating the construction of full Communism in the rural areas, fully liberating women from housework, and creating sustainable agriculture practices in the countryside. They also had governmental, political, and economic functions during the Cultural Revolution. They ranged in number from 50,000 to 90,000.
History
Precedents and Collectivization in the Early PRC Before the people's communes were established, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had experimented with and promoted other, smaller forms of collectivized agriculture. Before 1949, landlords owned almost half of the land in rural China and leased it out to tenant farmers. Many farms were relatively small, family-operated enterprises. Farmers generally went through cycles of busyness during harvest season and relative idleness during off seasons.Joshua Eisenman, Red China's Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune, (Columbia University Press, 2018), 32. 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. After the completion of the Land Reform, individual families owned the land they farmed, paid taxes as households, and sold grain at prices set by the state.
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.
With state coordination, many families—up to 68 million by 1954—joined Mutual Aid Teams. These Mutual Aid Teams helped farming families coordinate the sharing of labor, farming technology, and other resources. 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.
During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives. In the complex system of beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives, farmers received a share of the harvest based on a combination of how much labor and how much land they contributed to the cooperative.
By June 1956, over 60% of rural households had been collectivized into higher-level agricultural producers' cooperatives, a structure that was similar to Soviet collective farmering via kolkhozy. In these cooperatives, tens of households pooled land and draft animals. Adult members of the cooperative were credited with work points based on how much labor they had provided at which tasks. At the end of the year, the collective deducted taxes and fixed-price sales to the state, and the cooperative retained seed for the next year as well as some investment and welfare funds. The collective then distributed to the households the remainder of the harvest and some of the money received from sales to the state. The distribution was based partly on work points accrued by the adult members of a household, and partly at a standard rate by age and sex. These cooperatives also lent small amounts of land back to households individually on which the households could grow crops to consume directly or sell at market. Apart from the large-scale communization during the Great Leap Forward, Higher-level Agricultural Producers' Collectives (HAPCs) were generally the dominant form of rural collectivization in China. These cooperatives also created new administrative and economic issues, but the CCP proceeded with the collectivizing process.Eisenman, 34.
In 1958, in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao Zedong shifted course from emphasizing economic growth toward emphasizing the rapid establishment of communism. Achieving communism, for Mao, also required economic growth but had to, at the same time, involve further collectivization and the elimination of old (or feudal) ways of living. Party propaganda outlets publicized an enormous collective in Xushui, Hebei as a "commune," in which "peasant" households had given way to communal living, and people did not have to worry about money or food. Mao visited Xushui and similar larger, purportedly very productive units in Henan province and declared, "People's communes are good." Mao and his allies in the CCP leadership continued to promote the communes both in propaganda and party meetings, and the construction of communes quickly became party line and a central pillar of the Great Leap Forward.Edward Friedman et al., Chinese Village, Socialist State (Yale University Press, 1991), 217–218.
As the Great Leap Forward got underway, the state consolidated HAPCs into about 26,000 communes, each containing on average 4,500 hectares of land, 24,000 people, and 5,200 households.Eisenman, Red China's Green Revolution, 35–37. The sizes of different communes varied widely across different regions but they were consistently much larger than HAPCs had been, and the communes encompassed on average about thirty HAPCs and up to one hundred.Eisenman, 37. The communes were supposed to be instrumental to the PRC's goal of "surpassing Britain and catching up to the US" in steel production.
Ideological and economic motivations Over the summer of 1958, agricultural producers' collectives were merged into much larger collectives which comprised tens of thousands of people, typically encompassing a market town and its surrounding villages. CCP leadership called these giant administrative and economic regions "People's Communes" (人民公社), in line with the socialist and communist idea of the "commune." This term “commune” traces back to Western Europe, originally referring to autonomous cities or towns. Under the influence of Robert Owen, Friedrich Engels used this term to refer to the basic unit of organization in a Communist society, and it was seen by Karl Marx as a form of proletariat governance. Influenced by both Marx and Engels, Mao envisioned the People's Communes to be the basic unit of Chinese society made up of and ruled by the working class.
For Mao, these communes were to be characterized by their size and publicity. He wrote, "They're called people's communes, first, because they're big and, second because they're public. Lots of people, a vast area of land, large scale of production, and all their undertakings are done in a big way. They integrate government administration with commune management to establish public mess halls, and private plots are eliminated."In addition to this, the CCP's communes were defined by three main factors, especially during the Great Leap Forward: first, an emphasis on industrialization and productivity; second, a militarization of society, in which commune members were mobilized through military-style campaigns and exhorted to act with rigid discipline, devotion, and selflessness; and third, an ideal of self-reliance or local autonomy, such that each commune would be able to produce most of the supplies and technology that it needed to function.See Chapter 6 and Chapter 9 of Riskin, China's Political Economy. China hoped that people's communes would mobilize peasant labor to overcome the lack of industrialization in rural China.
This emphasis on efficient, independent, organized production and industrialization was driven by the CCP's desire to demonstrate the PRC's superiority over foreign powers. In their earlier years of rule in 1955–56, the CCP was determined to “surpass Britain and catch up with the United States.”Bo Yibo, Ruogan zhongdao juece yu shijian de huiyi [Reflections on Some Major Policy-making Decisions and Events] (Beijing: Zhongyang Dangxiao Chubanshe, 1991), p. 692 By 1958, this competitive mindset was also applied to the Soviet Union. Mao was optimistic that the PRC would reach the true Communist society before the Soviet Union did, by increasing their productivity through a change in their production system. The People's Communes were a means to this end; the Central Committee of the CCP stating in the 'Resolution on Setting up the People's Communes in the Countryside' that China "should actively apply the method of the People’s Communes in search of a practical way to make the transition to communism now."Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected Documents of Importance since the Founding of the PRC] (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian Chubanshe, 1995), vol. 11, p. 450.
As the CCP Politburo declared at the 1958 Beidahe Conference, the communes were meant to bring together all key occupations and professions into one unit and, by merging them, bring about "socialist construction":"The establishment of people's communes with all-round management of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, side occupations, and fishery, where industry (the worker), agriculture (the peasant), exchange (the trader), culture and education (the student), and military affairs (the militiaman) merge into one, is the fundamental policy to guide the peasant to accelerate socialist construction, complete the building of socialism ahead of time, and carry out the gradual transition to communism."Carl Riskin, China's Political Economy: The Quest for Development since 1949, Economies of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 124.By "socialist construction," the resolution referred to the process in which the PRC was supposed to build up its industry under the vanguard Communist Party and, through the process of industrialization, accumulate enough capital and power to advance toward full communism. This meant the completion of two transitions. First, the transition from collective ownership to ownership by the whole people. Second, from distribution according to ability or labor to distribution according to need, with the self-rule of the proletariat (see also: Primary stage of socialism).Jinlin sheng dang‘an’guan [Jilin Provincial Archive], 1/1-14/71, pp. 6–11.
In October 1958, Mao stated that if people's communes were run well, "there is a thorough road for women's liberation. The People's communes are carrying out a wage system and a supply system under which wages are paid to each individual, not to the family head. This makes women and young people happy, and it's a way of smashing the patriarchal system, and the ideology of bourgeois right."