Transformation Of Farmers: Agricultural Co-operative Movement In China

As an important land reform in modern China, the agriculture cooperative movement owns its unique position in the history of China's land system change. It is a significant adjustment of the production relations after the policy of reducing rent and interest rates and land reform carried out by the Communist Party of China in the vast rural areas, which have changed the situation of the private land ownership small-scale peasant economy for thousands of years, fulfilled the historic move of the ownership means of production and management system in rural areas, and become an important segment of the economical system change in China's contemporary rural society. The collective management system of the people's commune and the household contract responsibility system would be necessities, if there are not the socialist transform for the agriculture characterized by agricultural cooperation, which have turned thousands of the small-scale farmer economies into the socialist economy under collective ownership. It can be said that, now and next time, the collective ownership of rural land following the agriculture cooperation is the very basis of the land system of Chinese rural area, and it is in this basis that the discussing about the rural issues is significant.Although there were the simple co operations in the traditional rural society of China, the really cooperative movement originated from the advanced capitalist country. The earliest cooperative was not the agricultural cooperative opened by the peasants, but the consumers' cooperatives and credit cooperatives organized by the workers. For example, the Rochdale cooperative, which is regarded as the example of the early cooperatives by later generations, was a consumers' cooperative run by thirteen textile workers in the Rochdale, Lancashire, England. After China opened its doors and the cultural communication between China and the West strengthened ceaselessly, the western thought about the cooperation was introduced into China as an antidote, and spread among the intellectuals at the earliest. The following Nanjing national government actively supported the agriculture cooperative movement in rural areas, and issued a series of regulations to standard the development of the cooperatives. As the famous scholar, Liang shuming and Yan yangchu have ever opened the cooperatives in Shandong and Hebei, and made some achievements.The agriculture cooperative movement in Baode led by the Communist Party of China, experienced three different steps: mutual-aid team, primary and advanced agricultural cooperative. The mutual-aid team, which started from Mao Zedong's call"Organize " in 1943 and end at the end of 1955, has been existed for a long time. But the mutual-aid team did not perform a dominating situation any more, because the primary agricultural cooperative was started to be regarded as the emphasis from the winter of 1951. The mutual-aid team, characterized with socialism rudiments, is a labor organization based on the individual small-scale peasant ownership system. The primary agricultural cooperative is the second step of the agriculture cooperative movement, which started from the winter of 1951 and ended on the October, 1955. Based on the mutual-aid team, the land, farm animals, farming implements were all required to hand in and allocated by the primary agricultural cooperative, and all productive labor were planned, and the fruit of labor was shared in proportion of labor and land. So the primary agricultural cooperative was a labor organization characterized with semi-socialism. The advanced agricultural cooperative is the third step of the agriculture cooperative movement, which started from the winter of 1955 and ended on the September, 1958. During the period of the advanced agricultural cooperative, the collectivization of capital goods with the land as the main point was realized, the dividend on land shares was cancelled, and the principle of distribution in socialist society of"from each according to his ability"and"to each according to his work"was carried out.This paper studies the characters of every historical stage that the agriculture cooperative movement in Baode experienced, pays attention to the application of case studies to reveal the historical truth, and analyzes the problems occurred in the course of the agriculture cooperative movement. To restore the historical actuality vividly as more as possible and compensate for the archives, this paper uses a large amount of oral materials collected during field research, and chooses the oral materials made by twelve persons concerned as the appendix attached to the text.The appearance of the agriculture cooperative movement in China has its historical inevitability, and has played a very active role in the specific historical stage, and improved the agriculture development. But as the choice of the cooperative road in China departs from the primal essence, its decline is inevitable.