Family Farming Takes Root After China’s Mean Season of Communes

Wu Fengqi remembers living on a people’s farm commune and being so poor he had neither a table to eat from nor a bed to sleep on. Today he has his own family farm, and he’s rich by Chinese standards.

Thus it is that the 50-year-old Wu scoffs at the idea being tossed around in Beijing, China’s capital, that tiny family farms in some areas should gradually give way to more efficient, large-scale cooperative ventures.

“The peasants won’t support group farming,” he said. “They would resist.”

Nine years ago, Wu’s production brigade secretly defied the commune and government policy by dividing up its land and letting each farmer be responsible for growing his own share.

Production took off, and Fengyang County, in central China’s agricultural heartland of Anhui province, became a national pioneer in the family contract system that has revolutionized the Chinese countryside. Again leading the nation, by 1982 all 45 communes in Fengyang, each with about 10,000 people, had been broken up.

Serious Doubts

Today, as the first decade of China’s agricultural reform closes, the system is praised for lifting tens of millions out of poverty. But serious doubts have arisen about the future ability of family farmers to feed this country of 1 billion people.

For example, farmers paid artificially low prices for state-bought grain are planting more lucrative vegetables and fruit, leading to three straight discouraging grain harvests after a record 407-million-ton crop in 1984.

Land under cultivation has decreased, and irrigation systems, once kept up by communal labor, have fallen into disrepair.

Some experts maintain that the family farmer, on his average 1.5 acres of land, has outlived his usefulness.

Rural residents, millions of whom now are finding jobs in small factories in the countryside, are being encouraged to cede their land to professionals or groups who can carry out mechanized farming on larger tracts. Some areas are experimenting with allowing farmers to lease land to more ambitious tillers of the soil.

Bad Memories

In Fengyang, however, “the conditions are not ripe for large-scale group farming,” said a local official, Deng Zeyuan. Few factory jobs are available in an area where 500,000 of 580,000 people are farmers, he said, and group farming still brings up memories of the “leftist mistakes” and “extreme poverty” of the past.

Under the newly devised cooperative system, farmers may voluntarily form a cooperative, and the state is now encouraging this in some areas.

Rural residents who find jobs in factories can turn over their land to other farmers, but because the land all belongs to the state, normally they would not be paid for use of it.

A few areas, however, are experimenting in allowing farmers to lease land and receive benefits from future crops. Although the state owns the land, it has assured farmers that it will not evict them against their will to form larger farm groups.

Farmer Wu doesn’t like the concept and wants to continue as he is because he and others in Fengyang have come so far along.

Food for Half a Year

He said he earned 30 fen (8 cents) a day working on the commune, and “even though we worked a whole year we only had food for half a year.”

Begging, common in Anhui for centuries, continued after the Communist takeover in 1949, and during the hard times, people starved, he said.

In 1979, in the first year of the family contract system in his village, Wu claimed, he and his eight children produced more than the entire 98-member work brigade turned out in the past. Last year his extended family earned 17,000 yuan ($4,600) from grain and other crops, before expenses.

Wu said 17 of the 19 households in the village now have brick homes, and their former mud homes are used as cowsheds. About half have television sets, and many have tape recorders and electric fans.