The purpose of this research is to examine the social and economic transformation of the Chinese peasant in the early 1950s. The plan of the research will be to set forth the circumstances in which the Chinese peasantry was reorganized into collective units, and then to discuss the character of the collectivization movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) vis a vis similar movements in other modern communist nations.
Following the victory of the Communist rebels in China in 1949, the government of China was reconstituted as the People's Republic of China under the leadership of Mao Tse tung. The rural peasantry scattered throughout the many Chinese provinces appears to have been an important element of the Communist victory, hence a key to the structure of post revolutionary society. Indeed, the long term connection of Mao with the peasantry has been noted by a number of commentators. Initially an urban revolutionary, Mao "grasped the peasants' revolutionary possibilities" (Solomon, 1971, p. 191) in the mid 1920s. Solomon quotes Mao's view of the central role of the peasantry in revolutionary theory:
Formerly I had not fully realized the degree of class struggle among the peasantry, but after the May 30 [1925] Incident, and during the great wave of political activity which followed it, the Hunanese peasantry became very militant. I left my home, where I had been resting, and began a rural organizational campaign. In a few months we had formed more than twenty peasant unions (Solomon, 1971, p. 192).
Mao's intent appears to have been to help peasants challenge the power of the bourgeois landlords and thereby complete a communist revolution in the mid 1920s. But his view of the peasantry must be seen with reference to the uses to which Chinese political activists sought to put peasants. In this regard, Rice explains Mao's activities as propagandist and head of the Peasant Movement Training Institute of...