China: Great Dragon Rising - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 296

Chapter 11

China: Great Dragon Rising

“The comrades must be helped to
preserve the style of plain living and
hard struggle. ”

M AO Z EDONG (1949)

“To get rich is glorious. ”

D ENG X IAO - PING (1980)

These contradictory quotes illustrate the political and

which pooled tools, labor, and land, although theoreti-
cally retaining individual land ownership. The third stage
was the fully socialized cooperative, modeled after the
Soviet collective farm in which all members collectively
owned the land. By 1957, there were close to 800,000
cooperative farms, each averaging 160 families, or 600 to
700 persons.
Large industry was seen as the foundation of social-
ist society . Plans were made for the building of hundreds
of industrial projects, many with Soviet assistance. Spec-
tacular advances were made in both industrial and agri-
cultural production, and by 1962, the national income
had increased by fifty percent.

economic transition that China has made in the latter
half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first
century . A grim situation faced the new government in
1949. The economy was severely disrupted; 40 percent
of the arable land was flooded; and industrial and food
production was well below pre-war levels. This chapter
will tell you about China' s rollercoaster ride from the
strains of rural-based communism to the relative pros-
perity experienced under the current policy of market
socialism.

Agrarian and
Industrial Revolution

GREAT LEAP FORW ARD
The Great Leap Forward was announced in 1958. Coop-
eratives were reorganized into people' s communes .
There were 26,000 of these, embracing 98 percent of the
farm population. Each comprised about 30 cooperatives,
totaling approximately 5,000 households or 25,000 peo-
ple. Communes took on the responsibilities of villages,
collecting taxes and operating schools, banks, and health
clinics. The commune was seen as “the morning sun
above the broad horizon of East Asia.” However, unreal-
istic goals, lack of expertise, ill-founded programs, and

In 1950, the government abolished the “land owner-
ship of feudal exploitation” and redistributed land to
landless peasants. T Two years later, 300 million peasants
owned a sixth of an acre apiece and thousands of land-
lords had been eliminated. The following year wit-
nessed collectivization , which put an end to individual
land ownership.
Collectivization involved several stages. Farmers first
were organized into mutual-aid teams, pooling their tools
and helping one another during planting and harvest sea-
sons. The second stage involved producers' cooperatives,

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