People's commune
The communes did not, however, meet many of their long-term goals, such as facilitating the construction of full Communism in the rural areas, fully liberating women from housework, and creating sustainable agriculture practices in the countryside.
Some Mutual Aid Teams also formed, or were consolidated into, Agricultural Producer Cooperatives (APCs), larger institutions at the village or subvillage level that pooled resources and collectively managed land.
[6]: 110–111 Apart from the large-scale communization during the Great Leap Forward, Higher-level Agricultural Producers' Collectives (HAPCs) were generally the dominant form of rural collectivization in China.
Party propaganda outlets publicized an enormous collective in Xushui, Hebei as a "commune," in which "peasant" households had given way to communal living, and people did not have to worry about money or food.
[13] Under the influence of Robert Owen, Friedrich Engels used this term to refer to the basic unit of organization in a Communist society, and it was seen by Karl Marx as a form of proletariat governance.
Influenced by both Marx and Engels, Mao envisioned the People's Communes to be the basic unit of Chinese society made up of and ruled by the working class.
As the CCP Politburo declared at the 1958 Beidahe Conference, the communes were meant to bring together all key occupations and professions into one unit and, by merging them, bring about "socialist construction":[14] "The establishment of people's communes with all-round management of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, side occupations, and fishery, where industry (the worker), agriculture (the peasant), exchange (the trader), culture and education (the student), and military affairs (the militiaman) merge into one, is the fundamental policy to guide the peasant to accelerate socialist construction, complete the building of socialism ahead of time, and carry out the gradual transition to communism.
These debates, and the communes themselves, were oriented toward a question facing the Chinese economy in the 1950s: how could the PRC grow its industrial base when most of the population remained tied to agricultural work and small-scale sideline production for subsistence?
The CCP leadership then made major reforms to the commune structure after the Great Leap and again in the decades that followed in order to make them more stable, productive, and efficient.
[8][29]: 46 According to academic Lin Chun, China's collectivization proceeded smoothly because, unlike the Soviet experience, a network of state institutions already existed in the countryside.
[31] In the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, as Mao Zedong retreated from guiding the economic course of the PRC, other members of the leadership enacted additional reforms to the commune.
In the early stages of the Great Leap Forward, the communes supplied some goods and services for free, such that food in the communal dining halls would be available for whoever wanted it rather than allocated based on workpoints or one's own household possessions.
"[35] As Mao saw it, a spirit of militarized organization, sacrifice, dedication, and selflessness would enable the Chinese people to overcome production bottlenecks through sheer effort.
[36] The height of militarized fervor subsided after the Great Leap Forward, but the "people's militias" continued to shape commune life and organization thereafter, especially during the Cultural Revolution.
[37] During the Great Leap Forward, the process of bringing people into the communes, or communization, successfully uprooted traditional ways of farming and living but often failed to replace them with viable or productive alternatives.
When, for a variety of structural and environmental factors (see also: Great Leap Forward), a larger famine set in, this shift from agricultural work to unproductive industrial labor only worsened conditions in the communes.
[40] Communes were supposed to rationalize the working lives of rural residents, for example by spacing out new residential areas evenly rather than adhering to traditional village boundaries.
[41] But, in the frenzied and militarized atmosphere of the Great Leap Forward, rural residents were organized into "production armies" and might spend most of their time walking around between work sites, as they were tasked with too many different non-agricultural projects at once.
Some issues that arose for commune members included: overwork on non-agricultural projects (at the expense of subsistence-oriented farming), inefficient or counterproductive infrastructure projects (such as the backyard furnaces), lack of food at the communal dining halls, negligent educational and childcare services which created additional housework burdens for women, excessive and obligatory political study sessions, and confusing incentive structures for production.
Scholars such as Joshua Eisenman write that this lack of massive resistance indicates that the commune system, with its post-Great Leap Forward adjustments, ended up serving the basic purposes of, first, feeding the countryside, and, second, extracting enough income from rural residents to fund modernizing projects and free up labor.
[44] Restrictions on individuals' mobility, however, would have made it extremely difficult for potential dissidents to coordinate resistance to the communes at a regional or provincial level, and the Anti-Rightist Movement had severely undermined people's willingness to openly criticize the party.
[48] For a number of years after the establishment of the people's communes, healthcare stations were developed as fee-for-service hospitals to cover several large production brigades.
During the Great Leap Forward, the CPC central leadership also pushed cities to create communes of their own, modeled on the one set up in Zhengzhou, Henan.
According to official statistics from 1960, the urban communes created: 53,000 public canteens, 50,000 nurseries, and 55,000 service centers that provided for other daily needs (such as laundry, repairing, and cleaning).
[53] The boundaries between workers and managers were loosened and the welfare benefits associated with a work unit (danwei) were extended to migrants and women through a large employment program.
Ultimately, although the communes were economically unsustainable and socially disruptive, some city residents lamented their closure, as they had provided jobs or amenities that the existing, more limited welfare system did not.
With the adjustments made to the communes after the Great Leap, however, they did contribute to the PRC's relatively substantial growth in agricultural productivity over the remaining years before decollectivization.
The experiences associated with communization and the Great Leap Forward created lasting traumas for whole communities and especially the women who were responsible for taking on additional labor and were often the first in a family to go hungry.
[65] Destruction of gravesites made it difficult for families to continue forms of ancestor worship that they had been practicing for centuries, even after the Great Leap ended.
[68] During the years between the end of the Great Leap Forward and decollectivization in the early 1980s, the PRC's agricultural productivity, rural school enrollment, infant mortality rates, and life expectancy all improved.
