In the socialist scheme of things, communes are considered ideal forms of organization for agriculture. They are supposed to increase productivity and equality, reduce inefficiencies of small-scale individual farming, and bring modern benefits to the countryside more rapidly through rural industrialization.
These objectives are attained largely through the economies of scale of communes; that is, it is presumed that things done on a large scale are more efficient and cost-effective than when done on a small scale. Thus, using tractors, harvesters, trucks, and other agricultural machinery makes sense when large tracts of land can be planted with the same crops and plowed at one time. Similarly, small-scale industries may be based on the communal unit of 30,000 to 70,000 people, since, in such a large work unit, some people can take care of agricultural needs for the entire commune, leaving others to work in commune-based industries.
Because of its size, a commune may also support other types of organizations that smaller work units would find impossible to support, both financially and otherwise. A commune, for example, can support a hospital, a high school, an agricultural-research organization, and, if the commune is wealthy enough, even a "sports palace" and a cultural center for movies and entertainment.
During the Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, peasants were-much against their will-forced into these larger agricultural and administrative units. They were particularly distressed that their remaining private plots were taken away from them. Communal kitchens, run by women, were to prepare food for everyone while workers went about their other productive work. Peasants were told that they had to eat in the communal mess halls rather than in the privacy of their own homes.
When the combination of bad policies and bad weather led to a severe famine, widespread peasant resistance forced the government to retreat from the Great Leap Forward policy and abandon the communes. But a modified commune system remained intact in much of China until the late 1970s, when the government ordered communes to be dissolved. A commune's collective property was then distributed to the peasants belonging to it, and a system of contract responsibility was launched. Today, with the exception of a few communes that refused to be dissolved, agricultural production is no longer collectivized. Individual households are again, as before 1953, engaged in small-scale agricultural production on private plots of land.