A Research On The Evolution Of The Party's Rural Land Policy

Agriculture is the foundation of the national economy. And the land, the essential means of production, is the most reliable living security that the peasants can rely on. Therefore, in such a country as China with the peasants making up the overwhelming majority of its population, the land policy in rural areas is crucial to the success of the Party's cause, which is the basic experience the Party has drawn from its practices over a long period of time. This basic experience was effective not only during the period of China's New-Democratic Revolution, but remains so during its socialist modernization drive.Guided by Marxism and taking an attitude of seeking truth from facts, the author attempts, in this dissertation, to make a rational interpretation of the historical data of the Party's rural land policy through wide collection and systematic sorting with the employment of the method of the combination of historical and structural analyses, normalized and positive researches as well as macro and micro researches, clarify the basic veins of the evolution of the Party's rural land policy from the angle of the ownership and managerial rights of the land, analyze the basic features of the Party's rural land policy in different historical periods, and sum up the Party's basic experience of making the rural land policy, in the hope of predicting its trend of development.With the Party's propositions of the rural land policy at its early days as the starting point, and the ownership and managerial rights as a clue, the evolution of the Party's rural land policy is divided into three phases. The first phase begins from 1921 to 1953, characterized by the completion of land reform in rural areas, with the land policy of "individual ownership of the land and independent management by every household"; the second phase begins from 1953, the starting point of the agricultural cooperative movement, to 1978 with the land policy of"collective ownership of the land and collective management"; the third stage begins from 1978, the third plenary of the 11th session of the CPC, until today, with the land policy of "collective ownership of the land and contract management by every household". However, the rural land policy in every phase is the evolution of several specific policies. For example, the land policy of "individual ownership of the land and independent management by every household" experienced the evolvement from the following four sub phases, i.e. " restriction on the landlord's land and the peasant's payment of land rent", "the peasants' ownership of the land", "the landlord's reduction of rent and interest and the peasant's paying of land rent and interest" and "land to the tiller"; and also, the policy of "collective ownership of the land and collective management" is the development from the mutual-aid agricultural production group with the "individual ownership of the land and mutual aid in management" into the elementary agricultural producers' cooperative with the "individual ownership of the land and united management" , then further into the advanced agricultural producers' cooperative with the "collective ownership of the land and collective united management" and finally into the people's commune with "the laboring masses' ownership of the land and' collective united management", characterized by "enlarging the commune's scale with the ownership of labor products by the whole people and averaging the products and labor forces by means of transfer without any payment". Besides, the land policy of "collective ownership of the land and contract management by every household" is established by the gradual evolvement, under the principle of adhering to the nature of collective ownership and the progressive alteration of the managerial rights of the land, from "enlarging the independent management rights of the production team" into conditionally "fixing the output quotas and responsibility for each household" and further into the popularity of it...