Rural collectivization
This transition was most obvious in the countryside. After land reform had been carried out, mutual aid teams allowed the communists to experiment with voluntary forms of agricultural collectivization. A campaign was launched in late 1953 to organize into small collectives, called lower-level agricultural producers’ cooperatives, averaging 20 to 30 households.
Vehement debate soon broke out within the CCP concerning how quickly to move to higher stages of cooperative production in the countryside. The debate was symptomatic of the larger tensions within the party regarding urban and rural development, Soviet influence, and the development of huge government ministries in Beijing. The strengths of Mao Zedong lay in agricultural policy, social change, and foreign relations, and in the mid-1950s he began to shift the national agenda more in the direction of his own expertise.
In July 1955 Mao, against the wishes of most of his colleagues in the CCP leadership, called for an acceleration of the transition to lower-level, and then to higher-level, agricultural producers’ cooperatives in the countryside. The key difference between these two forms concerned the middle class of peasants, farmers able to live off their own land. The advanced cooperative was particularly disadvantageous to the wealthier peasants because it invested the cooperative itself with title to the land, granting no right of withdrawal, and because wages were based on labour performed, not land contributed. Middle-level peasants came to resent landless peasants, whom the party was recruiting into the new cooperatives. Also, the advanced form, modeled on the Soviet kolkhoz, brought with it the outside political controls that were necessary to extract the agricultural surpluses required to pay for China’s capital equipment in its industrialization and to feed those moving into the cities to work in the growing industries. Many middle-level peasants actively resisted these changes and the measures for enforcing them, particularly grain rationing, compulsory purchase quotas, and stricter regulations on savings and wage rates. Nevertheless, Chinese agricultural organization in 1956 reached the approximate level of collectivization achieved in the Soviet Union: a peasant owned his house, some domestic animals, a garden plot, and his personal savings; by the end of 1956, some seven-eighths of China’s peasant households were organized into advanced cooperatives.
Urban socialist changes
Mao combined this massive transformation of the agricultural sector with a call for the “socialist transformation” of industry and commerce, in which the government would become, in effect, the major partner. In Chinese communist fashion, this change was not simply decreed from above. Rather, extreme pressures were put on private merchants and capitalists in late 1955 to “volunteer” their enterprises for transformation into “joint state-private” firms. The results were sometimes extraordinary. For example, all the capitalists in a given trade (such as textiles) would parade together to CCP headquarters to the beat of gongs and the sound of firecrackers. Once there, they would present a petition to the government, asking that the major interest in their firms be bought out at the rate that the government deemed appropriate. The government would graciously agree.
Such actions can be understood against the background of the experiences of the capitalists in the previous few years. The Five-Antis campaign of 1952 had terrorized many of them and left most deeply in debt to the government, owing purported back taxes and financial penalties. In any case, the state sector of the economy and the state controls over banking had increased to such a degree that the capitalists relied heavily on the government for the contracts and business necessary to keep from bankruptcy. After the Five-Antis campaign, the government extended the reach of its trade unions into the larger capitalist enterprises, and the “joint labour–management” committees set up under government pressure in those firms usurped much of the power that the capitalists formerly had exercised. Thus, many Chinese capitalists saw the socialist transformation of 1955–56 as an almost welcome development, because it secured their position with the government while costing them little in money or power.
Political developments
The socialist transformation of agriculture, industry, and commerce thus went relatively smoothly. Nevertheless, such changes could not take place without considerable tensions. Many peasants streamed into the cities in 1956–57 to escape the new cooperatives and to seek employment in the rapidly expanding state-run factories, where government policy kept wages rising rapidly. China’s urban population mushroomed from 77 million in 1953 to 99.5 million by 1957.
Several problems also became increasingly pressing. First, CCP leaders found that the agricultural sector was not growing fast enough to provide additional capital for its own development and to feed the workers of the cities. Until then, agricultural policy had attempted to wring large production increases out of changes in organization and land ownership, with little capital investment. By 1956–57 that policy was shown to be inadequate.
Second, Soviet assistance had been made available to China as loans, not grants. After 1956 China had to repay more each year than it borrowed in new funds. Thus, the Chinese could no longer count on Moscow for net capital accumulation in its industrialization drive.
Third, the vastly expanded governmental responsibility for managing the country’s urban firms and commerce required far more experts than before. For this, the leadership tried to resolve the increasingly severe strains that had characterized the relationship between the country’s intellectuals (including technical specialists) and the CCP.
The leadership’s policies up to that point had been ambivalent toward the intelligentsia: on the one hand it had required their services and prestige, but on the other it had suspected that many were untrustworthy, coming from urban and bourgeois backgrounds and often having close family and other personal ties with the KMT. After 1949 and particularly during the first part of the Korean War, the Central Committee launched a major campaign to reeducate teachers and scientists and to discredit Western-oriented scholarship. In 1951 the emphasis shifted from general campaigns to self-reform; in 1955 it shifted once again to an intensive thought-reform movement, following the purge of Hu Feng, until then the party’s leading spokesman on art and literature. This latter movement coincided with the denunciation of a scholarly study of the Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng), an 18th-century novel of tragic love and declining fortunes in a Chinese family. Literature without a clear class moral received blistering criticism, as did any hint that the party should not command art and literature—a theme identified with the ousted Hu Feng—and “Hu Feng elements” were exposed among intellectuals in schools, factories, and cooperatives.
The intensity of these attacks slackened in early 1956. Party leaders publicly discussed the role of intellectuals in the new tasks of national construction and adopted the line “Let a hundred flowers blossom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” Because intellectuals in China included high school graduates as well as those with college or advanced professional training, the policy affected a vast number of people. The “hundred flowers” line explicitly encouraged “free-ranging” discussion and inquiry, with the explicit assumption that this would prove the superiority of Marxism-Leninism and speed the conversion of intellectuals to communism. Their response to the party’s invitation for free discussion and criticism was gradual and cautious. Instead of embracing Marxism, moreover, many used the opportunity to translate and discuss Western works and ideas and blithely debated “reactionary” doctrines at the very moment Hungarian intellectuals were triggering a wave of anticommunist sentiment in Budapest.