People’s Commune Movement

The movement based on mobilization of masses which aimed at integrating small agricultural production cooperatives into large-scale agricultural production cooperatives in planned and proper ways. As early as 1955, in the process of socialist transformation of agriculture, Mao Zedong had the idea that the scale of agricultural production cooperatives should be enlarged.

At the Chengdu Conference held in March 1958, Mao Zedong proposed the planned and appropriate merger of small agricultural production cooperatives into large agricultural production cooperatives. The Chengdu Conference adopted the "Opinions of the CPC Central Committee on the Appropriate Merger of Small Agricultural Cooperatives into Large Cooperatives" (the Opinions were approved by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee on April 8), which held that "in order to meet the requirements of agricultural production and the revolution of cultural education and cultural transformation, where conditions permits, it is necessary to merge small agricultural cooperatives into large cooperatives in a planned and appropriate manner.”

In May 1958, the Second Session of the Eighth National Congress of the Party adopted the general line of "going all out, aiming high and achieving greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism". The peasants began to build water conservancy on a larger scale, to carry out farmland capital construction and agricultural mechanization, and to start the work of merging small and large societies according to the requirements of the Party and Mao Zedong.

In August 1958, the enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee held in Beidaihe adopted the “Resolution of Establishing People’s Communes in Rural Areas”, which was considered that it was "the basic policy that must be adopted to guide peasants in consolidating socialist construction, in building socialism ahead of time, and in gradually transiting to communism". It stipulated that the people's communes should implement the principle of uniting the government and the community and combining agriculture, industry, commerce, culture, education and militia work. It emphasized that the communes should adopt collective ownership for the time being and not rash to transform the collective ownership to ownership by the whole people, yet the transition to ownership by the whole people could be realized in three or four years, in five or six years or longer. The meeting decisions promoted the people's commune movement to a rapid climax. After the Beidaihe Conference, rural areas all over the country rushed headlong into mass action and communalization was largely achieved in just over a month without prior experimentation. By the end of the year, 740,000 agricultural cooperatives nationwide were merged into 260,000 people's communes, and more than 99% of peasants in China joined the communes.

The basic characteristics of the people's commune movement aimed at "Firstly big in size, secondly higher degree of collective ownership ", which meant "Firstly, egalitarian, secondly unrestricted allocation and use of manpower and material sources". The term “big” here refers to its original meaning, i.e., large scale. A cooperative with two hundred households was merged into a people's commune with four or five thousand or even ten or twenty thousand households. Usually, a commune corresponded to a township level administrative organization, and commune leadership both assumed economic and administrative functions. The second policy aimed to achieve a higher degree of collective ownership under the commune, all property should be given to the communes after the merger of dozens and hundreds of cooperatives with different economic conditions and different levels of wealth, no distinction was made between those which transferred more assets to the commune and those which transferred less assets. And a unified accounting and distribution system was established within the whole commune, and partially households were paid in kind instead of money, which included large-scale public canteens and free meals, which was called as the communist elements in the communes, thus a high level of egalitarianism was prevalent among the original cooperatives which were merged to the commune (within the commune these original cooperatives were renamed as brigades or squads after merger) and this egalitarianism also applied to the members of the commune.

At the same time, the private lands, livestock, and fruit trees of individual households were handed over to the communes. The people's commune was a unified system of two functions as administration and community, which was not only a production organization but also a political power organ at a certain level. The commune assumed multifold responsibilities of agricultural, forestry, animal husbandry, livestock, and fishery production, as well as managed workforce, industrial activities besides trade, education, healthcare, police and military (militias) activities. The people's commune vigorously pursued the militarization of production organization, the combat type of production activities, and the collectivization of life, organized the labor force within squads, platoons, companies, and battalions according to military ranks arrangements and adopted the policy of large corps operations which engaged in industrial and agricultural production. Such form of egalitarianism and military communism caused a stagnation in the development of productive forces and brought disastrous consequences for agricultural production.

During several meetings including the First Zhengzhou Conference held in 1958, also the Wuchang Conference, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eighth Party Central Committee, and the Second Zhengzhou Conference held in 1959 some measures were put forward so as to correct the “Left” mistakes in the people's commune movement. The main points put forward in these meetings suggested that the people's commune was an economic organization under collective ownership, that distribution according to needs should not yet replace distribution according to labor, that the people's commune should develop commodity production and commodity exchange, that the production team should be the basic accounting unit, and that a three-level ownership system based on the production team should be implemented and so forth.

In September 1962, the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee adopted a regulation as the "Sixty Articles for Agriculture", which clearly stipulated that "the basic accounting unit of the people's commune is the production team. Depending on different local conditions in rural areas, people's commune organizations could include two levels, i.e., communes and brigades, or three levels, i.e., communes, production brigades and production teams”; and the production brigades “should carry out independent accounting, bear their own profits and losses, directly organize production and organize the distribution of products and income among the members of the brigade." After the reorganization, the rural people's communes became playing an active role in rapidly restoring the national economy, organizing large-scale farmland, and constructing water conservancy infrastructure projects, and helped maintaining stable and increased agricultural production.

In 1978, after the Reform and Opening-up, the production form of rural household contract responsibility system increasingly displayed its advantages and superiority over the old production system and at the same time the disadvantages of the system of combining government and community functions in the people's communes were increasingly exposed.

In 1982, the Fifth Session of the Fifth National People's Congress amended the Chinese Constitution and abolished the system of integrating government and community (social) functions under rural people's communes and re-established the township administrative system saying: “people's commune" shall be changed into "township and nationality township" and "basic accounting unit of a people's commune" shall be changed into "rural collective economic organization."