Page 297 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1598 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Agricultural Cooperatives in the People’s Republic of China

The formation of agricultural cooperatives was a major ist, collective economic organization formed on a vol-
change effected by the new Communist government in untary and mutually beneficial basis, with the guid-
China in the 1950s.The following text (from the Model ance and help of the Communist Party and the
Regulations for an Agricultural Producers’ Cooperative) People’s Government.
setting forth government policy states the general prin-
Article 2. The agricultural producers’ cooperative, in
ciples for collectives and also membership criteria.
accordance with socialist principles, converts the chief
means of production owned privately by its members
Model Regulations
into the collective property of the cooperative. The
(Adopted on June 30th, 1956 by the First National members are organized for collective work, and the
People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China cooperative applies the principle of “from each accord-
at its third session) ing to his ability, to each according to his work,” giving
equal pay for equal work, irrespective of sex or age.
General Principles
Membership
Article 1. An agricultural producers’ cooperative (the
term as used in this document means the agricultural Article 7.All working peasants who have reached the
producers’ cooperative of advanced type) is a social- age of 16 and other working people able to take part

to have inherited the mantle of Marxist world revolu- scale, it now seems that the Chinese model was much
tionary leadership from an increasingly ossified Soviet more specific to China’s particular historical experience
Union.This was especially evident in Third World peas- than relevant to peasant societies elsewhere.
ant societies, where the Chinese Communists vigorously There is also the overriding reality that since 1949 the
promoted their experience with peasant-based revolution percentage of peasants in the world’s total population has
as a way to break free from capitalist imperialism and continued to drop, until it is now well under 50 percent.
achieve rapid modernization. Lin Biao’s short essay With the poor and downtrodden of the twenty-first cen-
“Long Live the Victory of People’s War!” (1965), suc- tury more likely to live in urban shanty towns than on the
cinctly expressed this ambition. land, how relevant is a rural-based revolutionary strategy?
However, Maoism and the Chinese model have had lit- Similarly, the model of radical egalitarianism that
tle real impact on political evolution in the Third World. appealed to young Western radicals in the sixties and sev-
The Naxallites in Bengal failed in attempts to import enties has been almost completely discredited by the rev-
Maoist-style revolution into India. The most successful elations of Cultural Revolution atrocities and post-Mao
practitioners of “people’s war,” the Vietnamese Commu- China’s cozy relations with the international capitalist
nists, depended on the Soviet Union for most of their mil- order.
itary hardware, and in any event harbored a deep historic Has the revolution left any legacy? Perhaps just the
distrust of Chinese. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia Maoist insistence that oppression and exploitation
came the closest to being followers, but their ruthlessness inevitably arouses resistance.The Chinese revolution was
exceeded anything in the Chinese experience, and their one of the great examples of such resistance, and it may
failure was more absolute. In Africa, Marxist movements yet be the inspiration for more.
leaned towards the Soviet Union.To be sure, there were
Ralph C. Croizier
some echoes of Maoism in Peru’s Shining Path in the
1980s, and more recently rural insurrectionists in Nepal See also Mao Zedong; Revolutions, Communist; Sun
have proclaimed themselves Maoists. But on a global Yat-sen