China Reaps Prosperity From Rural Revolution

The most stunning agricultural turnabout of the 20th Century has quietly taken place in China since the beginning of the 1980s. With 800 million of its 1 billion people engaged in farming--one out of every three agriculturalists on the planet--China has almost totally decollectivized its agriculture, creating a nation of small family farmers. It is a change fraught with consequences, both for China and for the global contest between authoritarianism and democracy.

This is not the first postwar revolution in China’s countryside. Mao Tse-tung relied on peasant grievances against the landlord to recruit the rank-and-file of his revolutionary army, just as revolutionaries had done earlier in Mexico and Russia. After the communist victory in 1949, individual tracts were initially distributed to the Chinese peasants, but were swallowed up by collectivization starting in 1953. That process culminated in the Great Leap Forward and the giant communes of the late 1950s, and ultimately in the disastrous harvests and widespread famine of 1958-1961. A slow recovery began, with establishment of smaller collective units, and allocation of garden plots on which individual families could grow crops to eat or market on their own account. These plots occupied only 5% of the farmland but soon provided a minimum of 15% to 20% of total household income.

In 1978 the communist leadership laid down the broad policy that has resulted in the abolition of collective agriculture. The new “household responsibility” system began to sweep the country in 1981, and by 1986 virtually all of China’s agriculture had been decollectivized.

In just-completed interviews with peasant households in Sichuan province, the country’s most populous, we found every family to be farming an individual plot obtained from the division of all the collective land. The only requirement in return for the right to use the land is to supply the state, at a fixed low price, an agreed-on quota of grain, which typically occupies one-sixth of the peasants’ land. While the state technically still owns the land, the position of the peasants is distinctly owner-like. Apart from the quota requirement, they are free to plant whatever crops they choose and to consume them, sell them to the state at a higher non-quota price, or sell them on the free market.

Despite the fact that most plots are under one acre, those interviewed were fully self-sufficient in food. Both rice and wheat yields averaged a 50% increase above those previously obtained by the collective (national data are comparable). Every household also had developed profitable agricultural sidelines--usually raising hogs and some combination of chickens, ducks, rabbits and fish--and many had diversified their mix of crops even while growing more grain.

One striking observation relates to efficiency of labor. On the collective, these families had spent from 250 to 320 days a year in the fields, earning under 25 cents a day. Now, with the increased incentives of owner-like rights, the farmers spend an average of only 60 days a year on the crops and still produce far more. The enormous amount of time freed from this “competitive featherbedding”--possibly 100 billion person-days a year countrywide--is now used for the agricultural sidelines and for non-agricultural work.

The physical and economic consequences are manifest. Ample rice has replaced thin rice porridge as standard fare. Meat consumption has roughly quadrupled and cash incomes have usually more than quadrupled. New brick houses are springing up everywhere, generating extensive private-sector construction work, and black-and-white television sets are becoming common household fixtures.

Ultimately, the social and political consequences may be at least as significant. The 1960s image of robot-like, gray-clad figures shuffling off to the communal dining hall has been replaced with voluble, colorfully clad and increasingly independent-minded farmers, who seem unafraid to criticize specific government action affecting their daily lives. The process of democratization in China still has far to go, but it is not coincidental that in both Poland and Yugoslavia, the two communist societies that have become culturally and politically the most open, agriculture has long been dominated by independent-minded family farmers rather than regimented collectives.

There may be major indirect effects as well. Other communist societies may see China’s rural prosperity as a goad to decollectivization, and they, too, may risk the long-term political consequences. Some non-communist societies where peasants are dominated by landlords and plantation owners, rather than by an oppressive state, may also learn from China that a productive and prosperous agriculture requires the peasants to have the empowerment of ownership or an owner-like interest in the land. Like the Chinese, they are likely to find for democracy.