If the lady (Kate Xiao Zhou) knows her subject, and I believe she does, then all the progress made by China in the past thirty to forty years is directly attributable to the desire of the peasant to earn enough money to feed his family and less to do with Deng Xiaoping and the CCP opening up the Middle Kingdom.
Hunger is the greatest motivator. In other words, you don't need Tony Robbins to tell you that you will starve to death if you don't come up with a way to feed yourself.
The part of this story that amazes me the most is the fact that the farmers are NOT ORGANIZED and this is the key to their success. How does one stop - control - something, a movement, that has no recognizable structure and is leaderless?
If Deng deserves recognition for anything, it is for being intelligent enough to know that he could not stop the millions of farmers and their movement. Thus he made no attempt to harness them.
Power of the People. Indeed.
How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People
Kate Xiao Zhou
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996, 265pp.
I recommend this book, without reservation. It is a remarkably lucid and interesting description of the process of rural reform in China. It is a book worth reading by both the specialist on China and one that knows relatively little about China but wants to learn something about why that country embarked upon its successful reforms at the end of the 1970s.
The author makes the persuasive case that it was the farmers that were responsible for the reform process that began in 1978, and it is they that have been the primary force behind the enormous success of the reforms. Briefly, she argues that the failure of the communes--the system imposed on agriculture and farmers by Mao Tze-tung in 1958--to expand food production at a rate greater than population growth was due to the unorganized resistance of farm people.
Farmers were given the land in the late 1940s and early 1950s in recognition of their support for the Communist Party. But they never received titles and, by 1958, all their productive property and all the land had been socialized, without any compensation. The immediate incidence of the great famine that cost at least 30 million lives got the communes off to a bad start. During the famine period there were a number of reform efforts to overcome the worst incentive defects of the commune system, including lending land to the farmers and giving discretion to the brigades. But those experiments lasted only a few years.
Under the communes every aspect of the lives of the farmers was controlled. The farmers were told when to go to work and what to do, nonfarm work of any kind was severely limited, rural markets were greatly restricted and, due to controls on migration, the farmers were no more free than serfs. A mixture of egalitarianism and poorly designed payments methods meant that there was very little relation between labor productivity and reward. Real incomes hardly increased at all during the commune period. The state took over most of the functions that had traditionally been the province of the family.
Read the complete review here
D. Gale JohnsonUniversity of Chicago
Comments