El procés de col.lectivització

HUANG, S.-m. (1998). The Spiral Road. Change in a Chinese Village trough the eyes of a Communist Party Leader. Boulder, Westview Press. Pàg. 53-54.

"Despite the problems at the village and national levels, the years immediately after the Liberation I remember as relatively good years. Living conditions were still harsh, of course. I remember that I had to work in the field with my parents whenever I was not in school. I took care of the family cow, hauled water from a well for irrigation, and weeded the rice paddy. Sometimes I went after school with other children to collect straw and grass in the hills for my mother to use as cooking fuel. There were constant shortages of certain consumer goods, such as matches, kerosene oil, and clothes. But people could see the tangible progress being made within a relatively short time. Landlord abuses were eliminated. Former landlords and rich peasants suffered from their downfall, but they were only a small fraction of the village population. A new social order was established. The production level in our village first returned to and then surpassed its pre-Liberation level. Everyone was optimistic that the next day, next month, and next year would be even better. Those few years were probably the high point of the Chinese Communist Party. It proved that it could deliver prosperity to the peasants. Chairman Mao became a demi-god, beyond any living human's challenge.
"Riding high on this positive national mood, the Communist Party easily implemented its mutual aid team campaign in 1953. The concept of the mutual aid team was that the small peasants, about ten families in a group, would pool their land and farm equipment for cooperative management. But the peasants still owned title to their land. Return from their joint farm would be divided according to the amount of land, equipment, and labor each family contributed during the growing season. In a sense they joined the team as shareholding partners in a firm. This scheme seemed to work well and rural people achieved a prosperity they had not anticipated. In this campaign, Hopping Toad Wu and his brother Wu Ming initiated the first mutual aid team in our village. At that point Hopping Toad was elevated to the post of deputy director of the xiang (rural township) and his brother Wu Ming became the mayor of Lin Village.
"A year later, in 1954, a new campaign was launched to organize peasants into Elementary Agricultural Producers' Cooperatives. This was different from the mutual aid team in that it was much larger, about the size of two or three mutual aid teams pooled together to form an elementary cooperative. This new cooperative was to elect a committee, mostly poor peasants, to manage the farm work. This type of farm cooperative allowed the small peasants to pool their resources together for better management. They committed their land into the cooperative and received payment from the cooperative on the basis of their contribution in land and labor. During this campaign, the Wu brothers again took the lead in forming the first elementary cooperative in our village.
"Two years later, in 1956, before the peasants realized what they had gotten into, these Elementary Cooperatives were combined into Advanced Agricultural Producers' Cooperatives, as the national government instructed. The advanced cooperative was quite different from the elementary cooperative in many important ways. First, it was much larger, with as many as three hundred families in each advanced cooperative. In this area all the neighboring villages, including Lin Village, Hilltop Village, and Mudhole Village, were lumped into one single advanced cooperative. Wu Liang was appointed the director of the cooperative, and his brother became the deputy director. The second major difference between the elementary and the advanced cooperative was that in the latter the peasants forfeited all claims to their land. They were ordered to join the advanced cooperative and contribute their land into the collective. All return from the cooperative was to be divided according to the members' labor, without regard for how much land they owned after Land Reform. Peasants were turned into merely farmhands. In a single stroke the government took away all land owned privately by peasants."