A Commentary Of Agricultural Cooperative Movement During The Early Days Of The Founding Of The Republic

In the early days of the People?s Republic of China (PRC), the Commu- nist Party of China (CPC) led her peasants to launch an agricultural coopera- tive movement after the agrarian reform, which changed individual peasant own- ership into socialistic collective ownership. Having made great achievements, the movement brought about some unexpected failures. It can help us draw its lessons and experience for our socialistic agriculture with Chinese characteristics to understand and analyze the above failures. So this paper tries to make an analysis and reflection of its achievements and failures after relating the whole process of the campaign. The thesis consists of three parts. The first part makes a historical retrospection on the whole process of the agricultural cooperative movement. According to the evolution of the CPC atti- tudes towards the agricultural cooperative movement and three main forms of a- gncultural cooperative movement, the whole process can be viewed as three stages: the first stage is the beginning of the movement, which is a local move- ment to develop mutual aid team largely, which aimed to help peasants regain and expand reproduction; the second stage is a period in which the agricultural cooperative movement was launched throughout the country, which is a nation- wide movement to develop elementary agricultural producers?cooperative in which agricultural cooperative became an important means to resolve the contra- dictions between agriculture and industry caused by industrialization; the thrnl stage is the climax of the movement, which is a movement developing elemen- tary and advanced agricultural producers?cooperative promptly. In the last stage the movement was over basically. The second part acknowledges the suc- cess of the movement, summing up its achievements from the standpoint of the founding of the new agricultural system, of the consolidating of political power and industrialization. In the last part, the paper makes a detailed analysis of the failures of the campaign from vanous angles, especially makes a tentative study on it with the- ory. Based on the full analysis, it holds that there may be some faults in the movement and these faults were as follows: the movements was launched earlier than planned and got struck in the pattern of the Soviet Union collective farm and was unfolded too hastily and promptly. And furthermore, it also expounds why the movement brought about some failures from the aspect of defects in the agricultural cooperative movement led by CPC. As a result, some experience and lessons are drawn in a bid to provide the constrnction of our nation?s agri- cultural modernization with useful and helpful suggestions. This paper finally makes a full evaluation about the historic influence of the agricultural cooperative movement and especially points out its historic de- fects.