In the annals of Chinese history, 1953 seems an unlikely choice as a year of great significance. But that autumn the Chinese Communist Party launched a mass campaign to build agricultural producers' cooperatives, signalling the beginning of the end for the private landholding system that had endured for millennia. The move to collective farming in Shanxi, the subject of Xiaojia Hou's excellent book, provided a model that was followed throughout the Chinese countryside. In just a few short years peasants were forced to hand over their landholdings, setting the stage for the disaster of utopian communes and the Great Leap Forward. Scholars have followed the Party line and seen the move to collective farming in 1953 as the logical next step following successful experiments with mutual aid teams. Hou's focus on Shanxi, the vanguard of collective farming, demonstrates that collectivization was doomed from the start. Her close attention to how cadres doctored and exaggerated agricultural investigations makes this impeccably researched book a must read for scholars interested in the interactions of peasants and the Party in the countryside. Hou also provides one of the finest studies of cadres from the provincial level to the village level. Drawing on a diverse set of archival reports, oral history collections and a deep engagement with Chinese language scholarship, Hou brings to life an intermediary realm typically left out of top down and bottom up studies of rural China.
While the bulk of Hou's attention is on the early years of the PRC, she is well aware that the Party's many years of exile in the countryside provided the foundation for its collectivization policies. She traces the extended interaction of the Party and its peasants, noting how Mao and other Party leaders, despite claims of authority based on rural investigations, never truly understood the countryside. Early attempts at land redistribution hurt production, while Party leaders who correctly noted the importance of rich peasants to agricultural production were silenced. Land reform, still widely praised by Chinese scholars, only made things worse. Faced with falling agricultural outputs, Mao embraced collective farming as the only way forward towards socialism in the countryside. But as Hou makes clear, the move to collectivization after 1949 was not just about Mao and other elite Party figures. Shanxi's provincial leaders, promoting collective farming in hopes of gaining national recognition, took the lead by calling for an investigation into widespread apathy towards mutual aid teams. A first report overemphasized rural prosperity, but did admit to a litany of serious problems in the countryside. Weaving together archival materials from various administrative levels, Hou follows this report as it filtered upwards through the Shanxi bureaucracy, noting how its findings were altered and exaggerated until reality was totally eclipsed by ideological concerns. Emboldened by falsified reports, Shanxi's leaders moved further and began experimenting by expanding mutual aid teams into larger agricultural producers' cooperatives. These collective farms were heralded as a wild success, but Party reports conveniently ignored how massive loans kept the collectives solvent.
Farmers in Shanxi used the collectives for their own purposes, but the arrival of the Three-Anti Movement in the countryside politicized the move to collective farming. Now, forming larger collective farms became a political statement and local cadres punished farmers attempting to retain private landholdings. The result was a disaster for the local economy from 1952 to 1953, with famines breaking out throughout the province. Shanxi's experiments with collective farming had proven a failure. But local cadres remained committed to collectivization, which represented socialism in the countryside. And Mao could not be swayed. In 1953, struggling to meet grain quotas, the Party moved decisively, nationalizing the grain market and proclaiming Shanxi's agricultural producers' cooperatives as the national model. Private land ownership was no longer to be tolerated, and a 1955 “high tide” of collectivization led directly to the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
As Hou makes clear, Mao Zedong deserves much of the blame for collectivization and the famines of the Leap. But by bringing Shanxi's bureaucratic system to life, Hou reveals how the provincial network of cadres pushed collectivization to the forefront of the Party's national agenda. Mao is rightly at the centre of this book: his vision of China's unique path to socialism was based on an unyielding faith in collective farming. But the move away from private farming also owed much to the Shanxi cadres who fabricated data in order to improve their career prospects. They were never punished. Scholars of the early PRC must take note of Hou's archival discoveries: wildly inaccurate reports were not a function of Great Leap Forward hysteria, but baked into the PRC's bureaucratic system from the start.
