Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The first stage in agrarian reform had been the “elimination of landlordism” in 1950-1952. Previous to the Land Reform Law of June 1950, 10 percent of families owned 53 percent of the farm land, while 32 percent owned 78 percent of the land. This left over two-thirds of such families (58 percent) with only 22 percent of the land. The landlords were eliminated with great brutality in a series of spectacular public trials in which landlords were accused of every crime in the book. At least three million were executed and several times that number were imprisoned, according to the official figures, but the total of both groups may have been much higher. The land thus obtained was distributed to poor peasant families, with each obtaining about one-third of an acre.

The second stage in the agrarian reform (1955) sought to establish cooperative farming. Peasants, by pooling their lands and labor, could obtain income for both and combine resources for capital. This argument was persuasive; most peasant holdings were too small to work effectively, since abundant fertilizers, new crops and methods, specialized tools, and efficient land management could not be used on the average peasant farm of half an acre. To permit such improvements in farm practices, the peasants were forced into cooperatives. By the end of 1956, 83 percent of the peasants, or 125 million families, had joined into 750 thousand cooperatives.

The third stage of agrarian reform, coinciding with the Second Five Year Plan (1958-1962), merged 750,000 cooperatives into about 26,000 agrarian communes of 5,000 families each. These became units of local government as well as economic enterprise, including capital accumulation and investment. The commune was to remedy lack of capital by mobilizing underemployed labor and directing it, like income, into agriculture, social service, and industry. Payments for land were to end, to be diverted instead to crafts and tools, or public services such as communal kitchens, mess halls, nurseries, or dormitories, thus releasing labor, especially females, to crafts and industries, even to rural iron foundries. In the first year of this “Great Leap Forward,” 90 million women were released from some domestic duties and freed for outside work. Craft centers were set up to use this labor where goods were made for the commune or outside sales. Lack of experience or proper tools resulted in many failures, especially when labor was diverted from essential farm work.

This “Great Leap Forward” was part of a decentralization of economic life under which the central government would control only certain activities and inter-provincial transfers of goods and funds, leaving the production and intra-provincial distribution of consumers’ goods to local authorities. The abolition of rents, which previously took half of agricultural production and provided much capital accumulation, reduced such accumulation and allowed peasants to increase their consumption. The combination of such increased consumption with the increased investment (largely from foreign and central government sources) made the First Five Year Plan a great success. But the administrative collapse of “The Great Leap Forward,” combined with the cancellation of Soviet aid in 1960 and three poor harvests in a row, made a fiasco of the Second Five Year Plan of 1958-1962, and forced postponement of the Third Five Year Plan to 1966-1970. This last was also a fiasco because of Mao Tse-tung’s “Great Cultural Revolution” which sacrificed prosperity for the sake of ideological purity.

The basic problem of China remains, as it does for all non-Western countries (except, perhaps, Japan), the problem of how to increase agricultural outputs sufficiently to allow both rising standards of living and the capital accumulation which will allow increased industrial growth and more government services, including defense. As far as these aims go, the years 1958-1961 and from 1966 on were disasters. Officially the agricultural disasters of 1958-1962 were attributed to unfavorable climate conditions, including unprecedented droughts, floods, storms, and insect pests, but the reversal of the “Great Leap’s” plans and priorities in 1960-1961 shows that the Chinese themselves recognized the organizational element as contributing to their farming problems. It is undoubtedly true that adverse climate also contributed to the difficulties, and it may well be true that such climate conditions in the nineteenth century might have resulted in far greater want and famine than did actually occur in 1958-1962, for the Communist government was not involved in corruption, self-enrichment, and calculated inefficiency as earlier Chinese governments were, and had both greater power and greater desire to operate a fair rationing system, but the fact remains that in China, as in other Communist states, including the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the inability of a communized agricultural system to produce sufficient food surpluses to support a thoroughly communized industrial system at a high rate of expansion is now confirmed. On the other hand, the need for all these Communist regimes to purchase grain from the bulging agricultural surpluses of the Western countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, and even Europe, confirms the fact that there is something in the Western pattern of living (but not necessarily in its economic organization) which does provide a bountiful agricultural system.

The details of the Chinese agricultural fiasco are not yet clear. It would appear that the Chinese diet (in which at least three-quarters of food is carbohydrates, and statistically recorded as “grain” even when it may be potatoes) requires a basic survival diet of at least 2,000 calories a day, with at least 1,500 calories from “grain.” For a population of 700 million this requires a minimum crop of 180 million metric tons of “grain” a year, a figure that leaves nothing for reserves or for the inevitable inefficiencies of maldistribution through the inadequate Chinese transportation system. Moreover, this crop must increase each year to provide for the annual population increase of 2 percent (which gave 14 million more mouths in 1962).

The official estimates for the 1958 grain crop were originally set at over 300 million tons, but in 1959 and later, this was revised to less than 250 million tons. It was probably less than 200 million. The crop for 1959 was even less (perhaps 190 million tons), while that for 1960 may have been 150 million tons. These three adverse years undoubtedly used up all China’s grain reserves, and the Chinese purchases of grain in the world’s markets, beginning with about 10 million tons in 1901, may have been to rebuild some reserves rather than to provide a minimal increase for the average hungry Chinaman. It seems clear that the “average diet” of urban Chinese over these three harsh years may have fallen as low as 1,400 calories a day, at least 600 below the level that permits steady effective work.

The impact of the Chinese food crisis of 1958-1962 extended into all aspects of Chinese life and policy, including foreign affairs. This process was intensified from the fact that the “Great Leap Forward,” from the beginning, involved much more than the reorganization of China’s agriculture. It also included a considerable decentralization of economic management of China as a whole, from centralized technical experts to local party and working leaders; there was a considerable increase in the influence of the Communist Party in contrast to the state bureaucracy, and there was the general shift from emphasis on heavy industrial investment to more short-range economic objectives. It seems likely that there was also a change in economic accounting from emphasis on output to emphasis on the profits accumulation of individual enterprises.