Email: hong_xincheng@u.nus.edu

Affiliation: National University of Singapore

Nationality: Chinese

The Retreat of Rural Collective and its Legacies in the Age of Market Economy: Evidence from a Mountain Village in Contemporary Southeast China

Abstract

In past scholarships, China's rural collective under people's commune is often considered as an economic failure, and it is on Scott's list of state projects that failed to improve human conditions. (Scott, 1998) Nevertheless, recent works claim that brigades and production teams were crucial generators of rural development and had improved agricultural productivity well before 1978. (Eisenman, 2018) This study contributes to the ongoing debate by a close examination of both continuity and discontinuity of rural collective in contemporary China based on a combination of historical and anthropological sources from a mountain village in the coastal Fujian province. The finding indicates that individual economic incentives had not been suppressed but rather mobilized under socialist collective, which equipped peasant households for emerging market opportunities since the opening reform. After de-collectivization, however, in the absence of any authentic farmers' cooperatives that support peasant farming (Hu, Zhang and Donaldson, 2023), legacies of farming collectives exacerbate long-term economic conditions of rural areas in the age of increasingly fierce market competition. [ Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press; Eisenman, J. (2018). Red China's green revolution: technological innovation, institutional change, and economic development under the commune. Columbia University Press; Hu, Z., Zhang, Q. F.,& Donaldson, J. (2023). Why do farmers' cooperatives fail in a market economy? Rediscovering Chayanov with the Chinese experience. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 50 (7), 2611-2641.]

The rural economy of the studied village during collective times remained fairly diverse. A dual agricultural system consisting of farmlands and the mountain economy complemented each other to form an ecosystem of interdependence; the variety of main agricultural products as recorded in brigade account books easily exceeded a dozen. Ironically, the village economy went through the most radical simplifications after opening reform (1979-) with over-concentration on two most profitable fruits for quick profits, sacrificing farmland and the sustainability of ecosystems. In this case, it turns out to be joint forces of every smallholder's rational calculation, instead of a determined state that pushes the village to an unsustainable situation. However, the smallholders' swift response to the reopened market is not merely a result of their regained economic autonomy but has roots in their collective experience under the brigade and production teams. Collective farming in this village, despite state interventions that climaxed during political campaigns, did not exclude individual incentives, nor did it eliminate income differences. Orchards, instead of grain fields, had been economic pillars of the village even after a belated collectivization of fruit trees through the Four Clean-ups campaign (1964-65). The values of work points differed evidently from team to team, mainly depending on the abundance of fruit harvest. Fresh memories of waxberry and olive being more profitable cash-earning products, and the spread of fruit-tree planting skills across production teams, have fueled the fruit boom and did grant smallholders a head-start in the initial stage of opening reform. When it comes to post-reform years, de-collectivization, unfortunately, removed an institutional asset that may serve the common interest of peasants in the age of re-peasantization. The demise of the collective has weakened the provision of public goods and community-based cooperation, which were both key to agricultural sustainability but had been taken for granted. Thus, the technological advantages and market access that the village gained from its collective legacies have exceedingly been utilized for short-term profits, which in turn accelerated the collapse of its reputable economic traditions, leading smallholders to quit the once promising commercial agriculture in the end.

Contrary to mainstream narratives emphasizing post-reform economic achievements against the stagnant period of inefficient farming collectives, this paper invites further scholarly reflections on the history of Chinese rural collectivization.

Bio

Hong Xincheng is PhD candidate at the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore. He is currently working on his PhD thesis, tentatively entitled "Livelihoods, Kinship Adaptations, and the Transformation of Migrants' Hometown: Local Life and Mobility from a Chinese Village in and beyond Quanzhou". Combining historical and anthropological methods during multi-site fieldwork, the thesis traces the history of internal and external migration from and to a mountain village situated at the transition area between coastal Quanzhou and its mountainous hinterland, as well as the interrelated socio-economic transformation of the village society since late-imperial China. He is the author of a book based on his master's thesis (NTU, Taipei, 2018) and several peer-reviewed journal papers. He is the participant of Xiamen University-Harvard Yenching Institute Training Program on "New Materials and New Approaches to the Study of Chinese Rural Society" (Fujian, June 2024) and Harvard Yenching Institute-NUS Joint Training Program on "Chinese Communities in Southeast Asia" (Singapore, Dec 2024), where he presented his latest research on rural South China (Fujian) and the less-explored Chinese rural settlements in Singapore history. He is also the co-investigator of the NUS Asia Research Institute research project "Reconstructing and Rediscovering Kampong Heritage through Local Chinese Temples", funded by National Heritage Board, Singapore. He has been awarded the NUS Research Scholarship, the Han Tan Juan Award, the NUS Graduate Research Support Scheme and the NUS Graduate's Teaching Award.