Studies On The Advanced Agricultural Cooperative Team

The foundation and development of the advanced agricultural cooperative time was an important phase during the whole Agricultural Cooperative Movement, which was launched all round the country in the early days of the People's Republic of China. The movement began with the mutual aid team (an elementary form of organization in China's agricultural cooperation), then developed the elementary agricultural producers'cooperative team and the advanced agricultural producers'cooperative team successively. After the development of the elementary agricultural cooperative team for some years, the gap in land quantity and quality between rich farmers and the poor had bridged to some extent, and the payment for land decreased gradually and accumulated fund for production as well as fostering the rural leading cadres, which was the favorable factors to develop the advanced agricultural cooperative team. According to the evolution of the advance agricultural cooperative team, the whole process can be viewed as four stages: running as an experiment, aiming to play an exemplary role; the second stage was development the advanced agricultural cooperative team; the third stage was consolidating and finally was replaced by the People's Commune. In fact, it was very short to run the advance agricultural cooperative as an experiment, because of the wrong criticizing of Right Opportunism, and the thought that the advance agricultural cooperative team had more superiority than the elementary agricultural cooperative team for production and the farmers'dependence and trust to the CPC. Even to carry out the advance agricultural cooperative team lasted only one year, it was a huge victory to accomplish the difficult and complex transformation of the system of ownership of the means of production. It was too quick transformation that led to some problems. The large scale and pure public ownership in the advance agricultural cooperative team was not suitable to the level of the production forces. Over-centralized management was very difficult. And egalitarianism existed to some extent and the farmers ate in the canteen the same as everyone else. Even the input of the cooperative members declined because of the unitary production. Furthermore, the problems could not solve promptly, which became even worse in the later time of the People's Commune. The problems of the advance agricultural cooperative team and the backwardness of the Chinese agriculture bring to a profound reflextions. The western classical thought of the cooperative system and the Marxism's theory of the cooperative economy are instructive theory of the Chinese Agricultural Movement. However, the practice of the advance agricultural cooperative team deviated from the principles and the ideology thought of those two theories, which made the cooperative system change into the collective system, neglecting the characteristics of agricultural production and surpassing the low level of the production forces. Moreover, the advance agricultural cooperative team had a strong political flavor as well as an economic organization, which did not complied very well with the principles of voluntary participation and mutual benefit.