40 Years On: Provincial Contrasts in China's Rural Economic Development

The main contrast between official discussions of China's rural economic development that took place nearly 40 years ago and those of the late 1980s is not to be found in the identification of the problems themselves, but in the policies proposed for their solution. Then, as now, stress was placed on the problems arising from the adverse man-land ratio; on the crucial importance for China's industrial development of securing adequate supplies of grain; on balancing the latter consideration with the need to supply the light industries with agricultural raw materials such as cotton; on developing the livestock sector of agriculture (particularly pigs) in the interests of consumption and of soil fertility; and on the investment requirements of agriculture, especially in the realm of water conservation and irrigation. These have been the constant factors in discussions throughout the past 40 years. The ideological foundations of rural economic policy, however, have dramatically changed in the 40 years since the Revolution: a deep commitment to central planning and large agricultural collective farms has given way to a preference for the price mechanism and small, household-based individual farms. The contrast could hardly be greater. In the early l950s Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, together with the still surviving Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, were united in their view of the need to establish a centrally planned economy which had to embrace agriculture as well as industry. Planning was equated with economic orderliness and with socialism; markets with economic anarchy and capitalism. From the early 1 950s onwards, therefore, the price mechanism was granted only a limited role. Similarly, collectivization was seen as the means of establishing socialism in the Chinese countryside. But, in addition, the Chinese leaders considered that it would probably be impossible to fit agricultural production and distribution into the national economic plan as long as the basic decisions were taken by 130 million individual, small-scale family farms. During those early post-Liberation years, therefore, many articles were published by leading Chinese officials, which argued that the continued existence of small-scale household agriculture impeded agricultural development and hence the industrialization of the nation; that it was essential to plan agriculture, from the centre, through large-scale collective farms. Thirty years later, Deng Xiaoping, and the more pragmatic members of his government, were arguing the opposite case extolling the advantages of allocation through markets and prices; and the