The Reorganisation of the Countryside

Abstract

China has probably had a more sustained, elaborated and generally successful experience with collective agriculture than any other socialist country (with the possible exception of Hungary). From the mid-1960s until the late 1970s it provided a model for many other countries, and a laboratory in which students of socialism have been able to analyse the possibilities for rural transformation. It has subsequently gone further than any socialist country in criticising collective agriculture and reforming it in the direction of individual farming. This also has important implications for practitioners and observers of socialism outside China, many of whom now conclude that socialist agriculture is a very questionable enterprise. China has, in other words, been both a positive and a negative model of collective agriculture.

Thanks to Frances Pinter, Publishers, for permission to use some passages from my book China: Politics, Economics and Society — Innovation and Iconoclasm in a Revolutionary Socialist Country (1986).