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China RURAL SOCIETY
Collectivization and Class Status
The first major action to alter village society was the land
reform of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which the party sent
work teams to every village to carry out its land reform policy.
This in itself was an unprecedented display of administrative and
political power. The land reform had several related goals. The
work teams were to redistribute some (though not all) land from the
wealthier families or land-owning trusts to the poorest segments of
the population and so to effect a more equitable distribution of
the basic means of production; to overthrow the village elites, who
might be expected to oppose the party and its programs; to recruit
new village leaders from among those who demonstrated the most
commitment to the party's goals; and to teach everyone to think in
terms of class status rather than kinship group or patron-client
ties. In pursuit of the last goal, the party work teams convened
extensive series of meetings, and they classified all the village
families either as landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, or
poor peasants. These labels, based on family landholdings and
overall economic position roughly between 1945 and 1950, became a
permanent and hereditary part of every family's identity and, as
late as 1980, still affected, for example, such things as chances
for admission to the armed forces, colleges, universities, and
local administrative posts and even marriage prospects.
The collectivization of agriculture was essentially completed
with the establishment of the people's communes in 1958. Communes
were large, embracing scores of villages. They were intended to be
multipurpose organizations, combining economic and local
administrative functions
(see Agricultural Policies
, ch. 6). Under
the commune system the household remained the basic unit of
consumption, and some differences in standards of living remained,
although they were not as marked as they had been before land
reform. Under such a system, however, upward mobility required
becoming a team or commune cadre or obtaining a scarce technical
position such as a truck driver's.
Data as of July 1987
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