[A-List] CHINA: Growing grassroots initiatives to re-collectivise farming

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

   The tide changes


   CHINA: Growing grassroots initiatives to re-collectivise farming

Eva Cheng

Since Beijing started to dismantle China’s rural communes in 1979, a
process that was completed in 1984, only one village is widely known to
have taken the bold step to revert back to collective production. Nanjie
Village in Henan province made that move in 1986. Now more Chinese
villages are following Nanjie’s lead, including Xiaogang Village of
Anhui province — once the most important showcase in Beijing’s
propaganda justifying rural de-collectivisation.

Long plagued by poor farming output and resulting starvation, 18
families of Xiaogang Village — risking imprisonment and possibly their
lives — made a secret pact in 1978 to shift to family-based cultivation
and distribution. Communal cultivation was the order of the day in China
at that time and violation could attract severe penalty.

Within a year, the villagers’ average income reportedly surged by 19
times and many neighbouring villages followed suit to de-collectivise.
The villagers did not know that their move coincided with Beijing’s
dramatic policy shift to de-collectivisation. Rather than being
punished, Xiaogang has since been hailed as the “cradle of China’s rural
reform”.

However, according to the January 18 edition of the Hong Kong-based
daily Ming Pao, a local newsletter of the Nanjie Village revealed that a
delegation of 13 from Xiaogang Village recently visited Nanjie seeking
to learn from its experience in collectivisation. There are now 106
households in Xiaogang and the delegation included four Xiaogang farmers
who took part in the secret 1978 pact. Xiaogang has been burnt in recent
years by a sagging economy, dragged down by inefficient household-based
farming. Leaving no doubt that the delegation is seeking to steer
Xiaogang back to collective farming, it wrote a message in the visitor’s
book in Nanjie that it wants to learn the best way to strengthen the
collective economy as a means to achieve “collective prosperity”.

Part of China’s commune system, centering around collective cultivation,
was the collectivised provision of education, health care and
agricultural infrastructure. All of these have fallen apart, with
serious social consequences. The social disintegration in China’s
countryside has become so pronounced that Beijing last year named the
rural crisis as the country’s number one problem.

Petty household farming aside, sections of Chinese farming is becoming
increasingly capitalist in nature, backed by the rising concentration of
land-use rights. All land in China is owned by the state, but rural
households were granted the right to use a tiny allocated plot for a
small rent. Unviable subsistence cultivation on tiny plots has driven
many farmers to sell their land-use rights to local virtual landlords.
The latter then use the accumulated land holdings for bigger scale
capitalist farming or industrial production.

According to the January 18 Ming Pao, production cooperatives have
popped up in many places recently, such as Xiaofengshan Village of
Shanxi province, Tugudong Village (near Luoyang city) and Lankao county
(near Kaifeng city) of Henan province, Yutai county of Shandong province
and Sipinglishu county of Jilin province. Collective farming has also
been reported in Huaxi Village in Zhejiang province.

On their own, these local initiatives in collective cultivation do not
constitute a return to socialist production, because the broader
centrally planned economic organisation under a working people’s
government is no longer present. But given socialised communal farming
and organising was only dismantled in China relatively recently, the
benefit of socialised farming is still in many people’s living memory.
Such recent initiatives are clearly a rejection of atomised capitalist
cultivation and a recognition of some of the benefits of socialised
production.

From Green Left Weekly, January 25, 2006.