Agriculture

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Party cadres stirred up hostility in the 'speak bitterness campaign'. The campaign encouraged peasants to turn on their landlords - executing them on the spot or subjecting them to a 'trial', following which they lost their civil rights, land, animals, and household goods, which were distributed among the poor peasants of the area.

Ownership of land remained private, but landlords held only as much as the poorest peasants.

From 1954, the cadres tried to encourage peasants to create higher level Agriculture Producers' Co-operatives (APCs). The APC plan was suspended for 18 months but in the summer of 1955, a new drive began and the first higher level APCs were established that year. In these, land was pooled and no longer privately owned. Rich peasants were excluded and profits were distributed only according to levels of work.

The great leap forward was launched in 1958. It involved the setting up of 70,000 communes each divided into 750,000 brigades, with each brigade representing around 200 families. Private farming was to cease and all aspects of production were to be centrally directed by the party.

Mao decided on collectivisation because agriculture output grew by 5% in 1957, but Mao felt this was not enough. From January to April 1958, Mao toured China, visiting the more enterprising APCs, and concluded that efficiency could be best achieved by amalgamating co-operatives into much larger communes.

Co-operative projects for irrigation and flood control, electricity schemes and road building were encouraged and each commune was to contain a number of small factories, providing work for women and children, and for men during slack times of the farming year.

Communal farming failed to work. By tradition, most peasants in China were subsistence farmers and neither they, nor the officials trying to lead them, had the knowledge to farm on a large communal scale. Some peasants, because too involved in industrial enterprises, neglected agriculture. Others, influenced by the propaganda, left the field fallow because they thought that grain was plentiful, or neglected pig breeding, poultry raising and vegetable growing because an emphasis was placed on the production of grain.

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