Paradoxes of Post-Mao Rural Reform: Initial Steps Toward A New Chinese Countryside, 1976–1981 by Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun (review)

In five chapters and a long conclusion, Teiwes and Sun argue that the initial steps of the post-Mao rural reform between 1976 and 1981, which broke the ice of the Maoist agricultural collectivization in China, did not result from a power or policy struggle between Hua Guofeng's alleged neo-Maoists and Deng Xiaoping's reform coalition as scholars have previously thought. Instead, these decollectivizing steps, that included mainly the forms of baochan daozu (contracting production quotas to groups of peasants), of baochan daohu (contracting production quotas to households), and of baogan daohu (contracting production and tax responsibilities to households), were first taken by a number of local officials to solve the problems of hunger and low productivity in their parts of the Chinese countryside and later, in 1981, under the circumstances full of divergent opinions about decollectivization, adopted by the Party Center as measures for lessening the financial burden of the state which, in meeting the increasing demands for funds for the post-Mao modernization drive, could hardly continue its subsidies to the poverty-stricken peasantry. Benefitting from these relaxation policies that returned economic autonomy to rural individual households, the peasants with their rising incentives to work became robust in production activities and henceforth soon advanced China's agricultural production to a higher level.

This book importantly advances our understanding of the dynamics of China's rural reform at the state level. While scholars have all recognized the adoption of household farming as the mainstay of Chinese agriculture, their interpretations of the dynamics of agricultural changes remains inadequate, unessential, or debatable at best, a phenomenon that Teiwes and Sun term an "overarching paradox." The primary problem of previous scholarship lies in the fact that none of the scholars has so meticulously and analytically examined so many political leaders at the center and provinces as Teiwes and Sun have done and have thus been able to explicitly distinguish the political leaders' opinions and changeovers on rural reform. Scholars, such as political scientists Dali Yang and David Zweig and economists Ronald Coase and Ning Wang, have all valued the support given to the peasants from top leaders Wan Li and Zhao Ziyang, but few have noted that Wan and Zhao differed in their attitudes towards decollectivization, with one embracing baogan daohu while the other only going so far only to approval of baochan daozu for the sake of preserving the spirit of collectivization. Above all, previous scholarship has failed in explaining why the state finally adopted the policy of privatization of the rural economy. In the eyes of Teiwes and Sun, to attribute this adoption to the ideological triumph of Deng and his reform coalition misses the point, because Deng only lent his limited support to the school of baochan daohu by May 1980, and his protégé Zhao tried carefully not to step out of the bounds of collectivization. Deng and his colleagues finally made the household responsibility system (jiating lianchan chengbao zerenzhi), the official name of baogan daohu, the state policy upon their fiscal consideration, that, in the eyes of Teiwes and Sun, was the real dynamic of rural reform. Since the state could hardly afford to give the peasants money, it gave them policy instead so that the latter could save themselves on their own unrestrained efforts without increasing the financial burden of the state. Therefore, the agricultural economic reform was in fact a pro-state policy, not pro-peasant. In three decades after the founding of the PRC, Teiwes and Sun point out, the Communist Party had shifted its focus from the peasant revolution to an urban-based development, deeming it necessary for the Party to allocate its resources primarily to the modern sector.

The book also makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the power transition...