State farms in China under the Mao Era

[Traveller]

I red a lot about the Peoples Communes of the Mao Era. I suppose the communes were more likely kind of kolkhozlike agricultural cooperatives than sovhozlike state farms. Where can I find informations about statefarms?Were they similar to Communes or were they different? I would like to know mainly about concrete economic measures.(For example percantages of state farms and P.C.-s in the whole agriculture)

[Traveller]

Any idea?

[Tim Cornelis]

Not entirely related, but interesting nonetheless:

rStFovpAY54

[Traveller]

Not entirely related, but interesting nonetheless:

rStFovpAY54


Thanks,but I already seen it.

[khad]

I red a lot about the Peoples Communes of the Mao Era. I suppose the communes were more likely kind of kolkhozlike agricultural cooperatives than sovhozlike state farms. Where can I find informations about statefarms?Were they similar to Communes or were they different? I would like to know mainly about concrete economic measures.(For example percantages of state farms and P.C.-s in the whole agriculture)
Well, to talk about China's state farms is kind of meaningless, because the system was woefully underdeveloped - something like <1% of total cultivated land in the 50s and 4% by 1980. Typically they were located in remote regions like Xinjiang and were little more than land reclamation projects.

Now, for the communes, they were certainly less developed than the kolkhoz system, at least by the standards of the 1960s onwards. One of the chief reforms of the Khrushchev era was to turn kolkhoz employees into salaried employees and place their pensions under the state system (up till then welfare benefits were left up to the whims of the individual collective). This in essence transformed Soviet collective farms into operations that were quite similar to the state farms.

By contrast the way that remuneration was carried out in the Chinese collective did little to overcome the inherently insular orientation of the peasantry under subsistence agriculture. Workers accumulated work points, which were then scaled to the total productiveness of the harvest. If the harvest failed to meet the quota, these work points would become worthless or even negative, so quite literally entire villages worked without pay. This would go some way to explain how the Dengist reforms were so easily carried out and popular since the peasantry was already familiar with the concept of piece-work and didn't really have much of a welfare structure in place. In the FSU during the 1990s many of the state farms successfully resisted being broken up into smallholdings because there was a sense of safety in numbers during troubled times.

[Traveller]

Now, for the communes, they were certainly less developed than the kolkhoz system, at least by the standards of the 1960s onwards. One of the chief reforms of the Khrushchev era was to turn kolkhoz employees into salaried employees and place their pensions under the state system (up till then welfare benefits were left up to the whims of the individual collective). This in essence transformed Soviet collective farms into operations that were quite similar to the state farms.

I've never heard about this.

So,it means that in the time of Hruschev the whole of the soviet agriculture was controlled directly by the state?Did any serious difference remain?If that is the case,its seem that Soviet Union had the biggest percantage of state farms in the entire world of history?(It is good to mention that in the GDR - maybe the most developed country of among the deformed workers states - had only less than 7%!)

[khad]

I've never heard about this.

So,it means that in the time of Hruschev the whole of the soviet agriculture was controlled directly by the state?Did any serious difference remain?If that is the case,its seem that Soviet Union had the biggest percantage of state farms in the entire world of history?(It is good to mention that in the GDR - maybe the most developed country of among the deformed workers states - had only less than 7%!)
Well, according to standard Soviet economic planning theories, the collective was a transitional form that was to be ideally eliminated. Thus the gap between kolkhoz and sovkhoz was narrowed and the only major difference was the amount of access to direct investment by the state.

Also, depending on the level of oversight, there were various ways to game the system. A common one was with kolkhoz members taking jobs in towns and paying others to cover their work quota on the farm (while collecting full benefits).

[commieathighnoon]

The kolkhoz it should be noted differed according to the quality of the land it made use of, the agricultural products in which it specialized, and other factors.

On paper it was a large farm established organized on cooperative lines with the individual peasant households being the worker-owners of the farm. In practice, organizationally it was somewhat below the level of a real cooperative; it was something like a sharecropping cooperative--each household retained its 'private plot' and in addition there was 'kolkhoz' land. The kolkhoz land was used to produce fodder, and various inputs for small scale production, as well as to pool labor for various needs that couldn't be met practically on an individual or family scale. Secondly, the private plot specialized in easily marketed agricultural products which could be easily raised with minimal land and individual or family labor being the only labor inputs. Grain and other mass-produced products were raised on the collective land (less fruits and the like). Productivity was low and very resistant to any reforms (a microcosm of the Soviet economy writ large). Farmer income and benefits remained below the levels achieved by industrial workers throughout the Soviet era until its end.

The 'cooperative' theory of the kolkhoz was undermined in practice on several respects. It was dependent on the state for most capital (machine tractor stations, etc.) and its management was appointed from the technical specialists and political cadres, and in practice was beholden to the party-state for their career and income prospects. Thus it was more responsive to quota-fulfillment than production-for-sale, and was very risk-averse, even for a cooperative. Furthermore, the actual structure as elaborated above meant the kolkhoz was practically a compromise between peasant subsistence/opportunistically-for-sale household farming and large-scale mechanized farming, and households put more care to invest labor into their private plots than the kolkhoz's collective production. Nonetheless, kolkhozes could sell on a semi-free market all surplus over the state procurement quota at fixed prices (though it remained reliant, of course, on the state monopoly on transport and retail trade), and private plots sold much their produce on the secondary market in what amounted to farmers' markets, subject to minimal constraints.

[khad]

Risk-adverse? Might as well start talking about rational choice theory next. Because that sounds like a standard textbook answer, I should mention some caveats.

1) Sovkhoz farmers also had their private plots. They also specialized in potatoes, melons, and other goods not as readily produced by collective or state fields.

2) Machine-tractor stations were a feature of the Stalin period; they were integrated under Khrushchev and in retrospect the process could have been handled much better since it created a shock for soviet agriculture that took years to recover. You should use a better example.

3) The move to shift kolkhozniks to guaranteed salaries and government pensions was intended to narrow the wage gap between rural and urban workers. Even though the wage gap persisted, this situation was much improved over the earlier period. Furthermore, legal reforms of the 60s and 70s made it easier for rural workers to change their residency status.

4) Low productivity, blah blah blah. This conclusion is reached by aggregate statistics indicating that Soviet fields produced half the amount of wheat per hectare compared to those in the US. However, productivity per unit of land is nowhere near an accurate gauge of comparative efficiency. Conditions of soil and climate, as well as irrigation and other factors are significant intervening variables. The idea that state farms are inherently unproductive is belied by the fact that Soviet cotton yields, for example, were generally higher than those in the USA. It's also a fact that Eastern European states such as the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary produced nearly twice as much wheat per hectare compared to the US. This is primarily due to climate and infrastructure. Agriculture in Eastern Europe was generally quite productive, but aggregate statistics in the USSR were dragged down by massive (and failed) land reclamation projects in remote Eastern regions. Labor productivity per worker, however, was much lower than that of the US due to the latter's advantage in mechanization, though it was higher than that of a number of european states.

[commieathighnoon]

Almost everyone had some level of private plot, even if amounted to what we would call in the U.S. a "victory garden" on the family dacha--I know even university professors during the Brezhnev era which raised their own crops in small plots (much smaller than the kolkhozniks and even sovkhozniks though).