文档介绍：Why Did It Go So High?
Political Mobilization and Agricultural Collectivisation in China
In the summer of 1953 Mao announced that the “Party’s General Line for the
Transition Period” was to plish a socialist transformation of agriculture, capitalist
industry merce, and handicraft industry over a “ fairly long period of time”. This
“fairly long period of time” was defined in various other statements as being “10-15
years or more.” In reality, collectivisation was achieved at a much higher speed.
Between summer of 1955 and the spring of 1956, the number of collectivized peasants
households rose from million ( percent of the total) to million (
percent)1. This period is known as the “High Tide of Socialism in the Countryside”.
Apart from its speed, the other remarkable aspect of the High Tide was the
relatively low level of resistance to it. This is particularly so when contrasted to the
Soviet Union’s case, where Stalin had to wage a war bat tidal waves of peasant
opposition to his How to explain the pliance of the peasantry when
collectivisation came to China? Why did the High Tide go so high and so fast? Why did
Chinese peasants, still in the honeymoon of equalized land ownership after Land Reform,
do so little to resist? This paper explores political answers to this conundrum.
1 State Statistical Bureau, Statistical Materials on Agricultural Cooperativization and the Distribution of
the Product in Cooperatives during 1955 (Beijing: Statistical pany, 1957) The
“collectivized households” here mean the households that joined the co-operatives. Among the
million households that joined the cooperatives, percent are collectives.
2 See Chapters 3 and 5 of . Davies The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture
1929-1930 , (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980). In measuring opposition and
the ‘costs’ of collectivisation, livestock los