The land reform gave birth to hundreds of millions of small land property owners. However, the scattered small peasants gradually realized that it was difficult for any individual family to increase agricultural production. The “Three-Donkey-Legs Poor Cooperative” (三条驴腿穷棒子社) was hailed as a model of peasant cooperation and self-reliance. In October 1952, twenty-three households in Xipu Village, Hebei Province, set up a primary agricultural production cooperative, with only 230 mu (Chinese acre) of land and a “three-leg donkey” as their common property. The “three donkey legs” referred to the three-fourths of the shares given to the twenty-three households. The peasants worked hard together to fetch firewood from the mountains in exchange for carts, oxen, mules, sheep, and small farm tools. They recognized the power of unity, so their membership grew to more than eighty households. In 1956, Xipu and other villages formed the first advanced cooperative, that is, Jianming Agricultural, Forestry, and Animal Husbandry Production Cooperative. In Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside (1957), Mao Zedong highly praised the Three-Donkey-Legs Poor Cooperative as “the image of the whole country.”

However, the Communist Party leadership realized that only by organizing cooperatives could it extract surplus value from thousands of small peasants and lay the foundation for national industrialization. In the official discourse, the Communist Party’s general line and task in the transitional period to socialism was gradually to realize the socialist industrialization of the country and the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce.

In February 1953, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) formally adopted the Resolution on Mutual Aid and Cooperation in Agricultural Production, and the operation of primary agricultural production cooperatives began on a general trial basis throughout the country. Afterward, the CPC Central Committee put forward a plan to develop agricultural production cooperatives from more than 14,000 to 35,800 from winter 1953 to spring 1954. By the end of 1954, the number of agricultural cooperatives had grown to 100,000. The proportion of peasant households participating in mutual aid groups rose from 10.7 percent in 1950 to 39.9 percent and 58.3 percent in 1952 and 1954, respectively. The share of the cooperative economy in the national economy also rose from 1.5 percent in 1952 to 2.5 percent in 1953 and 4.8 percent in 1954.¹

In December 1953, the CPC Central Committee adopted the Decision on the Development of Agricultural Production Cooperatives, which called for the full promotion of agricultural production cooperation, supply and marketing cooperation, and credit cooperation as three forms of socialist transformation of the small peasant economy to be carried out simultaneously. By the end of 1955, the number of primary agricultural production cooperatives had grown to 670,000. By the end of 1956, the number of peasants participating in cooperatives had soared to 96.3 percent of all peasants, 87.8 percent of whom were in advanced cooperatives with full collective ownership. In March 1958, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee adopted the Opinion on Appropriately Merging Small Agricultural Cooperatives into Large Cooperatives. The Opinion states: “To meet the needs of agricultural production and the cultural revolution, it is necessary to systematically and appropriately merge small agricultural cooperatives into large cooperatives where conditions exist.”

In April 1958, twenty-seven small agricultural cooperatives in four townships of Suiping County, Henan Province, with about 6,500 households and 30,000 people, decided to merge to form a large cooperative, which was renamed the “Chaya Mountain Large Cooperative” (嵖岈山大社). The collective later changed its name to the “Chaya Satellite Collective Farm.” In May of the same year, in terms of farm management and distribution form, the scale of the Cooperative was recognized as higher than the Soviet Union’s collective farm and the Paris Commune, so it was renamed to Chaya Satellite People’s Commune. On July 1, 1958, in the third issue of Red Flag Magazine, there was an article titled, “A Brand-New Society, A Brand-New People,” which proposed “to turn a cooperative into both an agricultural and industrial cooperative grassroots organizational unit, and practically a People’s Commune combining agriculture and industry.” This was the first time the term “People’s Commune” was mentioned in the official press. Later, on September 1, 1958, the seventh issue of Red Flag Magazine published “A Brief Introduction to the Chaya Satellite People’s Commune in Suiping County, Henan Province.”

In 1956, Qiliying (七里营) in Xinxiang County, Henan Province, was designated as a pilot project for agricultural cooperatization, and in July 1958, the twenty-six advanced cooperatives in Qiliying were merged to form the Qiliying Large Cooperative. It was suggested to call it a communist commune because Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had repeatedly spoken of the “Paris Commune.” Echoing the articles about communes in the Red Flag Magazine, local people thought that “People’s Commune” was a good name for it. On August 1, 1958, Qiliying Large Cooperative adopted the name of “Qiliying People’s Commune” for the first time in administrative documents. On August 6, Mao Zedong visited Qiliying People’s Commune and said: “It seems that ‘People’s Commune’ is a good name, including workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, and merchants, as well as managing production, life, and power.” He also summarized the characteristics of “People’s Commune” as “one, it is big (in terms of scale), two, it is public (in terms of public ownership).”

On August 29, 1958, the CPC Central Committee adopted the Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Establishment of People’s Communes in Rural Areas. There emerged a people’s communalization movement boom. There were more than 740,000 agricultural production cooperatives nationwide that were reorganized into more than 26,000 People’s Communes, with 120 million households—or more than 99 percent of the country’s total rural population—participating in the communes.² China adopted a military-style organization and collectivization of labor and life. Many irrigation and mechanization projects aimed at increasing agricultural production were carried out during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962).

In the next few years, adjustments were made to handle the problems of extreme surplus extraction, exaggeration of results, vanity of high yields, hunger, and disasters. In 1961, the Regulations on the Work of Rural People’s Communes were implemented, establishing a three-tiered ownership and responsibility system. The three levels were the commune, the production brigade, and the production team, with the team as the basic unit. Commune members participated in collective production work and were paid according to the work-points they gained. Members could also cultivate a small plot of land for subsistence farming and run a small number of family sideline businesses. The number of People’s Communes soon increased from about 24,000 to 74,000 because the scale of a commune was downsized and it also allowed peasants to have relatively reasonable autonomy over family consumption. Later, during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the People’s Communes would become the main rural political organization, with an estimated 74,000–92,000 People’s Communes in the countryside.

In August 1963, Dazhai (大寨) Village in Xiyang County, Shanxi Province, suffered a once in a century flood. Relying on the strength of the collective to rebuild their homes, it completed the grain requisition task of 120,000 kilograms ordered from the central government: an average of 1,500 kilograms per household, and 200 kilograms per capita of rations for a villager. In the same year, the peasants transitioned from the basic accounting unit of the production team to the production brigade.³ It meant a village was upgraded to a higher level of production unit. In 1964, a nationwide “Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture Campaign” was launched.

In 1966, there was a shift of leadership in the CPC. Mao Zedong issued the “May 7 Instruction,” calling for “all walks of life throughout the country to become ‘one big school’ ‘learning from the world,'” “to learn politics, military affairs, and culture, and to engage in agricultural and sideline production.” The “big school” can be interpreted as a metaphor for the People’s Commune.⁴ Mao had high praise for the Dazhai experience of mass mobilization and self-reliance, and Chen Yonggui—the CPC secretary of Dazhai village—was promoted to be a member of the CPC Politburo from 1969 to 1977 and vice premier of China from 1975 to 1980.

The Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture Campaign lasted for nearly sixteen years. Mechanized agriculture was promoted to increase grain production. Between 1957 and 1980, the total area of land undergoing mechanized cultivation increased by over 15 times, accounting for 42 percent of the total cultivated land. In 1957, there were 544 small hydropower stations for agricultural use nationwide; between 1957 and 1980, the number increased to 79,775, a more than 140-fold increase. The average annual growth rate of grain output between 1962 and 1980 was 4.3 percent. This was higher than both the 3.58 percent increase in the quasi-collectivization period of 1953–1957 and the 1.86 percent increase under the decentralized system of operation of 1981–2001.⁵

Over two decades, forty million educated youth were sent to the countryside in three waves (1968–1969, 1970–1973, 1974–1976), in part to deal with the problem of insufficient employment in the cities.⁶ Alongside millions of local peasants, the urban youth sent to People’s Communes contributed their labor power to agricultural production, mechanization, and village industrialization.

However, with the Reform of 1978, the Central Government gradually affirmed various forms of household contract responsibility systems that were emerging in the countryside. The system meant that a village committee has land ownership over arable land, housing land, and collective construction land. Meanwhile, a peasant household has the right to a land contract and the right of land management, as well as the right to access land for housing.

In 1983, the State Council issued the “Circular on the Establishment of Township Governments Separated from Communes” and, by 1985, more than 92,000 townships had been established out of 56,000 People’s Communes, and more than 820,000 village committees had been established out of more than 540,000 production brigades, thus practically abolishing the People’s Commune as a political institution.⁷ It meant that in rural areas the establishment of the township government played an administrative role, meanwhile, villagers’ collectives acted as the grassroots self-governance organization of peasant households and had ownership over land property. In other words, the People’s Commune, which practiced a system of integrating administrative units with economic entities and a militia, was dissolved.

The Government’s Return to Collectivism

The People’s Commune system officially lasted twenty-five years in rural China, and the actual nationwide implementation lasted about seventeen years. This unique form of political and economic organization of peasants, integrated into the state administrative structure, has mostly ceased to exist in the past forty years after the Reform policy was launched.

After adopting the open-door Reform policy, China implemented speedy urbanization and export-oriented industrialization. In parallel, there were also changes in the rural land policies. Since 1983, China has adopted the household responsibility system, which allows an individual peasant household to have the right to land use. Now, in China, there are more than 1.5 billion mu of household contracted farmland, involving nearly 200 million peasant households. The first round of land contracting was from 1983 to 1997, and the second round was began in 1997 and extends to 2027. According to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CPC in 2017, the second round of land contracting will be extended for another thirty years, from 2027 to 2058.⁸

Under the Household Responsibility System, while the village collective by constitution has land ownership, its power of mass mobilizing in terms of control over common property has been weakened. There are complexities and tensions over land rights, both on paper and in reality. In 1993, the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council stated that, according to the principle of “great stability and small adjustment,” there would be no land redistribution within villages even though there are changes in the population. Yet, the village collective can make small adjustments to land relocation in specific contexts, with the consent of more than two-thirds of the villagers and with the approval of the township government and the county government.

Yang Decai, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, pointed out that the stoppage of land redistribution within villages has led to a gradual increase in the number of new landless population, such as new family members born after 1995, divorced women, and women married to people in other villages. His research found that new landless peasants in some villages accounted for nearly one quarter of the total population in the villages.⁹

Another question is the phenomenon of private land use transfers, which is prone to conflicts and disputes. Early in 1988, the National People’s Congress amended the constitution with provisions that the right of land use can be legally transferred. In 2016, the State Council issued a document on the separation of rural land rights: land ownership, contracting rights, and operation rights. It implies that rural land is owned by the village collective, and it cannot be sold or illegally transferred. Peasant households can transfer the land operation rights in the form of subcontracting, leasing, swapping, and cooperation. Land transfer in rural areas across the country has accelerated steeply. According to the China Rural Policy and Reform Statistics Annual Report, as of 2022, the total area of land with operation rights transferred was 576 million mu, accounting for 36.73 percent of the national area of household contracted arable land; the number of peasant households who conducted transfer of land operation rights was about 76.8 million, accounting for 34.8 percent of the total number of peasant households.¹⁰

Over the past two decades, in the face of rural exodus, land conflicts, and even the disintegration of local communities, the central government has allocated a lot of funds to the improvement of infrastructure through the rural revitalization and the poverty alleviation schemes. In recent years, the official policy has once again emphasized the importance of the collective economy.

As the local situation is often much more complex than what the official policies can cover, we find that there are still many forms of village ownership and operation of social property in diverse forms. There are even some exceptional cases with collectively organized forms of production remaining outside the Household Responsibility System. In such cases, production on the land is the responsibility of the village collective rather than of individual households. This more closely resembles the earlier People’s Communes and is the focus of the discussion below.

It is worth pointing out how contemporary official policy is once again emphasizing collective production. Over the past decade, the term “collective economy” has frequently appeared in official documents. In 2017, the report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the CPC stated that the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy should “deepen the reform of the collective property rights system in rural areas, safeguard the property rights and interests of peasants, and strengthen the collective economy.” In February 2022, the “Central Document No. 1—Stages of Reform of Rural Collective Property Rights System” was promulgated. It stated that about 960,000 organizations at the township, village, and team levels were registered with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and received the Certificate of Registration of Rural Collective Economic Organizations. The rural collective economic organizations had a total membership of nine hundred million, while rural collective assets amounted to RMB 7.7 trillion, and collective land and other resources amounted to 6.55 billion mu (or about 1 billion acres).¹¹

In June 2024, the Law of the PRC on Rural Collective Economic Organizations was adopted at the tenth meeting of the Standing Committee of the Fourteenth National People’s Congress. The law reaffirms collective ownership of land, confirming that it is not a private good for sale or transfer. It formally legalizes the creation of rural economy collective organizations based on collective ownership of land resources, and states that “property collectively owned by members of rural collective economic organizations is protected by law, and no organization or individual may appropriate, misappropriate, retain, loot, privately divide or destroy it.”¹²

What the term “collective” on paper means may vary according to specific, real-world contexts. Moreover, how different “rural economic collective organizations” actually operate and function requires extensive research. However, the government’s pro-collective policies over the past ten years indicate that it is trying to address the problems of privatization of land resources, marketization, monetization, social polarization, and the risk of disintegration of rural societies since the Reform of 1979.

Three Collective Communities in Rural China

In what follows, we examine three rural communities in different parts of China. We have visited them to try to learn on the ground how the community members or the local cadres live and think. The three communities have some features in common. Zhoujiazhuang and Yakou call themselves a People’s Commune and a commune, respectively, and Zhanqi a village collective. They all operate within that tradition. Further, beyond retaining collective land ownership, they also practice economic planning and commune management, while looking after the social welfare of all members.

Zhoujiazhuang (Zhou Clan) Township in Jinzhou City, Hebei province, is three hours’ drive south of Beijing. Zhoujiazhuang is the only township in the country to implement a township-level accounting management system, and it is well known as “the Last People’s Commune” in China, though nominally, it is a cooperative. Since the establishment of the cooperative in 1954, Zhoujiazhuang has persisted in the collective cultivation of land, rather than allocating land on a household basis. This involves employing work-points and year-end dividend management. The commune has ten production brigades, with about three thousand households and an overall population of twelve thousand.¹³

Yakou (Cliff Edge) Village Commune in Zhongshan City, Guangdong province, is in the south, at the Pearl River Delta. Only one hour’s drive from Macau and Hong Kong, it is along a well-developed transportation network corridor, having access to the Beijing-Zhuhai Expressway, the Guangzhou-Zhuhai Intercity Light Railway, and the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Highway. Yakou does not call itself a People’s Commune, but simply a commune. In the years since 1978, the village’s land has not been allocated to households and is still farmed by production teams based on work-points. There are eight village groups and thirteen production teams, with around 850 households and a population of 3,500.

Zhanqi (Battle Flag) Village, in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, is in southwest China. It is situated in an environmentally rich region that is home to wild pandas and is referred to as the “Heavenly World” because of its fertile soil. The township is home to the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, a still-functioning project over two thousand years old, and is a World Heritage Site. Zhanqi Village has an arable land area of 5,430 mu and has jurisdiction over sixteen village groups, around 4,500 people. Since 2000, the village has eliminated its Household Responsibility System in favor of collective management of land resources for community building. In February 2018, CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping visited the village to inspect the work of rural revitalization. He praised the project, saying: “The Battle Flag is fluttering, true to its name.” Since then, Zhanqi Village has been promoted as one of the best examples of rural revitalization due to its defense of the collective economy.

The three communities have worked hard to maintain communal governance. The challenges they face include those of collectively controlling and managing common resources, land property, allocation of labor power, producing surplus food, and managing revenue for social distribution. However, with the advantages that come from collective mobilization of resources, they have been well positioned to strategize their development goals and tackle problems of food sovereignty, pollution, poverty, unemployment, and equity. The communities have revived communal traditions and practices, and they have realized the need to build local sufficiency, local networks, and local governance for collective survival and welfare.

Next, we will examine how they struggle for food sovereignty at the grassroots level by centering agriculture, reorganizing the labor force, and turning toward agroecological agriculture. We will also see how they deal with polluting industries, and turn to seeking revenue from land rent, ecotourism, and educational programs to deal with public expenditures and improvement of livelihood, like housing, road construction, local job opportunities, and medical insurance.

Food Sovereignty at the Community Level

In early March 2025, we visited Yakou Village Commune. It has a unique landscape, with 1,700 mu of paddy fields as well as 20,000 mu of fishponds, all of it surrounded by the highways and high-rise buildings of south China’s hyper-developed coastal areas.

As our visit occurred during the spring sowing season, tractors were plowing the fields and rice seedlings were sprouting. Amidst the mechanized labor, peasants were working together in the fields. At around 11 am, we chatted with a group of elderly women who had finished the task of weeding and clearing the corners of fields. They were cleaning their hoes and washing their hands. They told us that they still practiced the work-point system. They worked from 8 am until 11 am, broke to have lunch at home, then resumed work at 1 pm to 4 pm. In busy periods, they could earn eighty work-points each day.

The work-points would be calculated at the year’s end to determine their monetary value, depending on the income of the production team. We were told that each work-point was roughly equivalent to RMB 12. Previously, when the women were young, they would work in restaurants or factories. Now they can still work the land, if that is their choice. The commune accepts anyone who chooses to work, so employment is guaranteed. One woman said, “I am over 60 years old, but there is no retirement for a peasant!” She grinned, proud of her peasant status. She then got on her electric scooter and headed for home on the country road.

Why did Yakou Village decide to hold on to the commune system? Longtime village leader Uncle Man responded to our question with a determined voice. “I am a communist,” he said. Uncle Man, whose full name is Lu Hanman, was the CPC village secretary in Yakou Village for thirty-seven years—until 2011, when he retired at the age of 73. Called the “barefoot village secretary” because he always worked in the fields with bare feet, he has insisted on protecting farming for food, and managed to obtain permission from the authorities to reclaim 40,000 mu of delta land in 2002 for agriculture. He argues that collectivized farming protects “the weak” and guarantees local food security.

When the pressure to implement the Household Responsibility System came to the village in 1979, the villagers under Uncle Man’s leadership reached a consensus not to divide up the land use among individual households. The reason was practical. From the early 1980s to 2006 (when the agricultural tariffs were formally abolished), each laborer was required to pay agricultural tax in the form of more than 600 kilograms of grain per year, as well as meat, egg products, and edible oil. The practical problem was that there was a serious labor shortage in the village. As Yakou Village is close to Hong Kong and Macao, many young people have left the village or migrated to work, do business, or run factories. Most of the people left behind are the elderly, women, and children. That meant that if Yakou Village had adopted the Household Responsibility System, it would have been difficult for households without young and strong members to pay the agricultural tariffs. In 1979, after discussions, they decided to continue with collective agricultural production through the work-point system. This not only solved the tax issue but also maintained the village’s self-sufficiency through collective grain production. To this day, Yakou calls itself the Yakou Village Commune.

The solution was to implement “One village, two systems”: those who are young and strong can go to the city to work, while those who stay behind participate in agricultural production. The village committee organizes them into thirteen production teams, collectively growing rice and distributing it according to their work. They are able to maintain the dignity of laborers with a decent income. In 2010, for example, the net income from rice cultivation was RMB 2.51 million, and the total income from land leasing business was RMB 15 million, while the total income distributed to agricultural laborers amounted to RMB 6 million, or RMB 17,000 per capita per year.

Additionally, Yakou has been very careful to protect the natural environment. Today, they do not accept polluting industries, even if they are highly profitable. In the mid-1970s, the village had a machinery industry. Later, between 1979 and 1981, they introduced ten foreign-funded factories to carry out the processing of imported materials with more than two thousand workers. The capital, equipment, and technology all belonged to outsiders. Foreign businesspeople used local cheap land, labor, and energy to engage in production, process the products, and export them to the international market. However, the wealth earned largely remained in the hands of the foreign businesses, while industrial waste, wastewater, exhaust gas, and garbage polluted the land and the groundwater, resulting in the gradual disappearance of certain local species, the withering of grass and trees, and the undermining of the living environment.

Therefore, Yakou gave up industrial development in the mid-1980s, preferring to sacrifice profit for the sake of protecting the environment. Since then, Yakou has gradually moved toward ecological transformation, while ecological paddy landscapes and healthy farm products form the basis of new ecological tourism projects.

In the case of Zhoujiazhuang, the People’s Commune system has remained intact up to the present. The role of the local leader Lei Jinhe, like Lu Manhan in Yakou Village, was paramount. At the time the Reform was being implemented, Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune Party Secretary Lei Jinhe, a veteran Communist militant since the Anti-Japanese War of the 1940s, wanted to maintain the People’s Commune system, considering it superior. On November 30, 1980, Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune, with ten production brigades, held a referendum, in which the majority of the community’s 3,055 households voted not to divide the farmland and other collective property.

A document in the Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune Museum shows that 274 households of the first production brigade signed and put their red fingerprints on the petition letter refusing to divide up the farmland. This document, now in a local museum, has not been propagated by mainstream media like the fingerprint contract of eighteen peasants in Xiaogang Village, Fengyang County, Anhui Province, who were hailed as the pioneers for dividing up farmland and cultivating it by individual households. To keep a low profile, Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune changed its name to a “Cooperative” in 1984, but it has retained the form and substance of People’s Commune and its socialist collective economic system.¹⁴

The undivided farmland is worked by ten production brigades. Every year, the brigades assess the amount of staple foods, including wheat, millet, and other food items, that are required by the brigade households. Sufficient land is set aside to cultivate for the needs of the commune members. The remaining land is put into various agricultural projects, such as growing fruits and vegetables, cultivating seeds for wheat producers, harvesting timber, or running a dairy farm.

We have visited Zhoujiazhuang over ten times since 2011. Agriculture remains a core concern for this de facto People’s Commune. They are currently undergoing a transition to green agriculture and the use of organic fertilizers. They have also registered the “Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune” brand name for agricultural products such as flour, millet, powdered milk, and sweet potato vermicelli. In 2024, even though the price of agricultural products plummeted nationwide, Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune was able to weather this situation and retain members’ incomes because they had applied the principle of “retaining accumulation in years of abundance and subsidizing in years of arrears.” Overall, their prioritization of agriculture has served as a bedrock for maintaining self-sufficiency and local food sovereignty.

By contrast, Zhanqi Village in south China adopted the Household Responsibility System in 1978. In the mid-1990s, its five collective enterprises closed one after another. In 1994, Zhanqi Village adopted the shareholding system to restructure its machine and brick factory, spicy bean sauce factory, brewery, flour mill, and composite fertilizer factory. These five enterprises became subordinate entities under a joint-stock cooperative society with a Board of Directors and Supervisory Board. This arrangement did not work well. Yang Mingxue, a member of the Discipline Inspection Committee of Zhanqi Village, described the problems as follows: “Enterprise managers were much less motivated in the absence of [individual] ownership incentives. Long-term management also led to a lack of separation between public and private interests and the loss of a large number of collective assets. Facing the background of an increasingly competitive market environment, enterprise efficiency declined.”

In response, Gao Demin, co-general secretary of the CPC in Zhanqi Village, led a group of cadres in 2003 to visit Huaxi Village, Nanjie Village, and Liuzhuang Village, which were regarded as advanced collective economic villages in the New Era. There he learned that the economic strength of the village collective economy did not generally stem from the subdivision of land management but from the land resources being integrated under the village collective with unified management and operation.¹⁵

Upon returning from this research trip, the cadres lobbied each villager, one after another, asking them to donate a plot of roughly two hundred square meters to the collective, in return for the collective paying all their agricultural tariffs. Secretary Gao explained to the villagers that this was beneficial to both the village collective and the individual peasants. He argued that large-scale planting was conducive to improving agricultural production, villagers could reduce their work burden, and it would be easier to obtain investment from local or foreign enterprises.

Since then, the land under collective management has grown. By 2003, they had amassed around 100 mu of land under collective management. Then, in 2006, under the government policy of promoting a new socialist countryside, they got funding to acquire 500 mu of cultivated land. Recently, they have begun cooperating with other villages in agricultural activities.

Today, the registered population of Zhanqi Village is more than 4,400 people. They have around 2,000 mu dedicated to grain production. In the Spring Festival in 2025, the village committee gave each villager a bonus food package: “One bag of rice (5 kilograms), 2 packs of noodles (kilograms), a bottle of edible oil (900 milliliters), 1 packet of dumplings, and 2 boxes of sauce.” Rice has always come first, the people of Zhanqi Village emphasize that they are very proud of producing rice by themselves.

In December 2024, we interviewed Gao Demin, who was deeply concerned about food security, even though there was no immediate problem of hunger or climate crisis. He said:

Zhanqi Village implements food storage, which fills our rice bowls with our self-grown food. That way, when we have staple food in our hands, we don’t panic. For a human being, the priority is to survive; we don’t necessarily need a mobile phone, we don’t necessarily need to live in a multistorey building, but we cannot not consume food. Even though China has achieved urbanization, the countryside must be preserved. The main role of rural society is to be able to solve the food problem.

Currently, Zhanqi Village has cooperated with neighboring villages to build a 10,000-mu modern grain production park (special economic zone designated by local governments to attract foreign investors), develop high-quality farmland, and cover the agricultural industry chain, such as the formation of nursery, planting, drying, and storage, and even e-commerce sales to enhance value-added agricultural/industrial products, as well as ecotourism, education programs, and research activities. Recently, the village has built a grain drying and storage center, which can dry 90 tons of grain per day and store up to 600 tons. It serves not only the Zhanqi area but also the surrounding villages and communities.¹⁶ Gao remarked, “I just want everyone to have an awareness of the danger of a food crisis. I took the lead and paid the first RMB 1,000 for the food storage center, that’s over 200 kgs of rice.”

Since 2012, Zhanqi Village has also addressed the problem of industrial pollution. They took the initiative to give up “scattered and chaotic” enterprises, closing or relocating five polluting enterprises: a compound fertilizer factory (moved), a brick factory (closed), a gravel factory (moved), a prefabrication factory (closed), and a foundry (moved). These closures paved the way for a transition to agroecology and for ecotourism.

Land Revenues for Public Welfare

Each of the three rural communities discussed above relies on the land economy, based on land rent, in a diversified way. They have collective ownership of land and collective control of land use, while agriculture remains a key activity. However, income from agricultural production is low, so the communities need other revenues to cover social welfare expenses. Hence, they increase revenue through various other forms of land use, such as building factories for industry, creating storage spaces for logistics, developing commercial complexes or training centers, or leasing and even selling land.

Both Yakou Village Commune and Zhanqi Village tried heavy industries but sensibly gave them up later, finding the industries to be too polluting. Zhoujiazhuang ran valve factories quite successfully for some years. However, since 2011, the factories have been closed in the face of competition from small factories in neighboring towns. To keep up its revenue, Zhoujiazhuang turned to several other modes of land use. The old valve factories were turned into a modern industrial park for lease to enterprises; it built storage facilities for lease to logistics companies; it leased one brigade’s land to an agricultural corporation from Hong Kong that grows vegetables; it turned another brigade’s land into an orchard for ecotourism.

The commune’s farmland was then redistributed among the production brigades. To deal with the growing population and to avoid turning more farmland into residential plots, Zhoujiazhuang allocated a zone in 2015 to build high-rise residential blocks with units for commune members to buy and own. The ground floor units are for commercial businesses, which the commune does not sell but leases. Ecotourism under the catchphrase “The Last People’s Commune in China” has generated much income. Zhoujiazhuang also organizes “Red Education” training programs that have brought in handsome sums.

As early as 1982, Zhoujiazhuang began a unified plan providing free housing for each household. Each household is entitled to a residential plot of about two hundred square meters to build a two-story house with a single gated private entrance. There is also public expenditure for improving infrastructure. All power facilities have been renovated to a high standard; all the streets and alleys have been cemented; all streetlamps have been renewed; all drinking water pipes have been replaced; all latrines have been renovated; and all households have been provided with natural gas. Further, the government has accredited each of the ten production teams as a “beautiful village” in Hebei Province.

This People’s Commune is proud of the social welfare it provides to all members, including a per capita living allowance of RMB 500, an electricity subsidy of RMB 100, free installation of running water, and free medical insurance. In 2024, the total amount spent on social welfare was more than RMB 45 million. The medical insurance premium was increased to RMB 400 per person per year, and medical expenses, which amounted to nearly RMB 6 million, were paid in full by the commune.

In addition to the new rural social pension provided by the state, the Zhoujiazhuang commune grants a monthly allowance to those over 60 who have no children. The commune also pays for their living expenses, sends someone to care for them when they are sick, and pays for their medical and funeral expenses. Additionally, the commune pays for living expenses for disabled people who have lost the ability to work. Those disabled due to work injuries are given a subsidy of RMB 3,000 per year. Zhoujiazhuang has kindergartens, elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. There is a health center in the township and a health clinic for each production brigade. In addition, the commune takes charge of weddings and funerals to promote a modest standard for such rituals, thereby avoiding the risk of wealth comparison and extravagant spending.

If Zhoujiazhuang has amassed land rent by leasing land for logistics, agriculture, industries, and commercial businesses, a similar situation prevails in Zhanqi Village. Since the 2000s, Zhanqi Village has begun separating collective ownership and asset management rights: the village recovered all collective property rights through the liquidation of capital, fixed assets, and intangible assets of the local enterprises. For example, from 2003 to 2005, the village reformed the bean curd factory, brick factory, composite fertilizer factory, flour mill, and brewery. It paid RMB 4.2 million to the five enterprise managers and employees, which accounted for 20 percent of the shares. In this way, the village once again became the sole proprietor.

In 2011, Zhanqi Village completed the registration of the membership of the collective economic organizations, concentrated all arable land, re-established the right to issue certificates of communal membership with rights of land use, and assessed the value of the operating assets of the collective economy. It compared these assets with the headcount and distributed shares to each member. In the process of liquidation, the land was divided into three categories: agricultural land, which was valued at RMB 2,150 per mu; construction land, valued at RMB 46,000 per mu (the price of state-owned land acquisition); and other unutilized lands (such as barren land, roads, etc.), valued at RMB 2,150 per mu. They also registered a new company, Chengdu Jifeng Investment Management, to deal with collective assets and liquidation programs. The villagers designed a mechanism of benefit distribution: 50 percent goes to public accumulation and reproduction, 30 percent goes to public services and welfare undertakings, such as social management, and 20 percent goes to the villagers’ share of dividends.

How does Zhanqi Village evaluate its experience of adopting the land economy? The leadership generally contends that “it is best to adopt a lease-based approach for collective public assets,” since that clarifies the relationship between investor, owner, and operator, and emphasizes that the operator is the “cattle herder.” In their current arrangement, the village collective is the sole landowner and uses land rent for securing communal livelihood.

In 2007, Zhanqi Village began comprehensive collective land management, making use of 208 mu of collective construction land to get an investment of RMB 98 million from the Chengdu Small City Investment Company. It received gross land revenue of RMB 130 million from this project. After using RMB 115 million to pay off the loan and interests, the village put the remaining RMB 15 million into residential community buildings and infrastructure construction.

In recent years, the village has benefited from ecotourism and educational programs. It built a complex where eighteen different rural arts and handicrafts are practiced, including wine making, edible oil extraction, bean paste and cotton shoe manufacture, and other traditional skills and arts. The Tianfu Agricultural Museum has been established. A 500-meter “snack street” offers regional food from all over Sichuan province. The Tianfu Zhanqi Hotel was built to accommodate the area’s booming tourism. Moreover, the Sichuan Zhanqi Rural Revitalization Training Institute can accommodate two thousand people for training and learning about the experiences of rural revitalization.

In 2015, Zhanqi Village developed a “collective economic organization with members identification approach,” identifying 1,704 people as members of the collective economic organization. They sold the right of land use of 13,447 mu of unused collective construction land at a price of RMB 525,000 per mu to Sichuan Maigao Tourism Company (with usage rights lasting forty years). The village thus obtained a revenue of RMB 7.06 million.

In 2024, the collective assets of Zhanqi Village amounted to RMB 119.68 million, and the collective economic income was RMB 7.3 million. There were eleven catering units, eleven lodging units, and eight productive enterprises, with a total output value of about RMB 300 million, offering employment to more than 1,200 people and paying taxes of more than RMB 3 million. They organized training programs for the Communist Party and government that yielded more than RMB 1.5 million. They also organized an educational “handcraft garden,” which engaged primary and secondary school students in over than 600 classes with more than 30,000 people, and earned an income of more than RMB 400,000.¹⁷

In the case of Yakou Village, its location within the development zone of Southern China makes it susceptible to pressures not just to lease land, but also to sell it. In 2002, Yakou completed its land reclamation project. According to Uncle Man, there was a risk that assets would be controlled by a minority of village leaders who might pursue immediate returns. Hence, Uncle Man thought it would be a better strategy to implement a shareholding system so that individual members have a say in the collective assets. That was even before the government began its policy to promote shareholding among villagers. With this in mind, the commune put 20,000 mu of reclaimed land into a shareholding scheme. Each village member was given a share of 5.5 mu, and the Yakou Villagers’ Land Share Foundation was set up. This organization unified management, while collecting rent and paying annual dividends to each shareholder. Villagers who do not participate in collective production and run their businesses can also get a share.

In 2006, Yakou Village implemented a second shareholding scheme. Two years later, about 92 percent of shareholders voted to sell 11,700 mu of land at RMB 50,000 per mu to the Zhongshan City Land Reserve Center in one go. The price of RMB 540 million would cover the cost of social security and health insurance for the whole village, and each villager would get RMB 142,000 in cash. Villagers were shocked when, a few years later, they saw that the same piece of land was listed for sale at a starting bid price of RMB 500,000 per mu. They saw how the market price of land rocketed when arable land was officially and nominally converted to construction land during the real estate boom. Thus, in 2022, when a piece of land of 5,600 mu was proposed to be sold for RMB 360,000, the proposal failed to receive a two-thirds majority approval from the villagers, thanks to the exercise of the villagers’ rights as shareholders.

The Challenge of Collectivism

China has practiced small peasant farming and village governance for thousands of years. Its dynasties were often overthrown by peasant uprisings whose main grievances were land concentration, heavy taxation, or foreign invasion. Likewise, the authority and stability of a new dynasty usually depended on implementing land redistribution and tax exemption, which guaranteed people’s livelihoods and ensured their support in the face of foreign invasions. When the PRC was set up, the first significant move was to distribute land to peasants. The state also promoted cooperatization to encourage mutual-aid and collective efforts to handle production, irrigation, mechanization, and so on.

The first launching of the People’s Communes during the Great Leap Forward Campaign in 1958 met with peasant resistance and had to be retracted soon after. The re-imposition of the People’s Communes as an institution during the Cultural Revolution period was carried out with a political and administrative force from above, from the state. The result was that while the state guaranteed minimal survival and livelihood needs, including food, health, and education, the surplus value produced by peasants and rural laborers was extracted to contribute to China’s industrialization.

Bo Yibo, Vice Premier of the PRC in 1979–1983—the years of the dismantling of the People’s Commune institution—writes in his book, A Review of Some Major Decisions and Events (1991), that the country had to industrialize. It had to accumulate agricultural surplus for industrial investment, requiring some people to make sacrifices. The central government, after repeated discussions, determined that the peasants had to make such sacrifices and contributions.¹⁸

Agricultural collectivization was based on the massive extraction of agricultural surpluses by the state for primitive industrial accumulation. As Wen Tiejun argues, unlike the West, which developed through colonial plundering overseas during the fifteenth to early twentieth centuries and then transferred the cost of economic upgrading through a global regime after the Second World War, China achieved industrialization through introvert primitive accumulation in two ways: (1) extracting the surplus value of labor of the whole nation through highly collectivized social organization and the agricultural surplus through the price scissors between industrial and agricultural products; (2) investment of large-scale labor force into state infrastructure building. In the second, the labor force resource was capitalized as a substitute for capital scarcity. This whole national mobilization system afforded China the capacity to accomplish the “alarmingly dangerous saltation” of primitive accumulation for industrialization without compromising national sovereignty. However, the enormous institutional cost of this atypical development growth had to be borne by all citizens (and often unevenly).¹⁹

There have been many studies that look at how much collectivization contributed to the country’s industrialization. From 1953 to 1986, the state implemented the policy of unified purchase and marketing, with the scissors price difference between industrial and agricultural products, to extract agricultural surplus for industrial production. It laid the initial foundation for China’s industrial modernization.²⁰ Yan Ruizhen calculated that the “scissors difference” between the prices of agricultural and industrial products expanded by 44.9 percent from 1955 to 1978. Similarly, according to joint research conducted by the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council, the state obtained unequal exchanges of agricultural inputs that amounted to RMB 510 billion from 1954 to 1978.²¹ In comparison, at the beginning of the Reform in 1978, China’s entire state-owned industrial fixed assets were only RMB 960 billion. Kong Xiangzhi calculated that the various contributions made by peasants over sixty years were about RMB 13.7 trillion.²²

Hence, the establishment of People’s Communes as an institution was highly effective in organizing production and increasing productivity, but collectivism imposed from above may not always have been welcomed by the commune members. It has also resulted in a divide and polarization between urban and rural China. This explains why the Household Responsibility System, which dismantled the People’s Commune system, was popular and could be claimed by the authorities to be done in compliance with the people’s wishes.

With the 1978 Reform, scattered peasant households became the main agents of production, while some rural collectives were retained to perform specific services and management functions. While the village communities maintain land ownership accompanied by the right of land adjustment and rent collection, peasants are entitled to household contract rights, can decide what to produce, and have the right to operational profits.

The demise of the People’s Commune system meant that the government retreated from the agricultural sector as well as public welfare services such as health and education in the countryside. Those costs are now borne by individual households. Various official rural institutions, such as credit cooperatives and supply and marketing cooperatives, have weakened in the following period of speedy urbanization. The four decades of Reform policy in China went hand in hand with the adoption of export-oriented industrialization, making the country into a kind of world factory. In the international division of labor, being a semiperipheral country, China sacrifices labor power and natural resources and provides a part of its surplus value to core countries. The dissolution of the People’s Communes in favor of the Household Responsibility System meant that the countryside acquired more autonomy but has also become susceptible to market fluctuations in the age of neoliberalism. The displacement of Township and Village Enterprises has also occurred as a result of the opening of the coastal areas to transnational manufacturing industries. All of this, coupled with the brain and capital drain from the countryside, means that rural society risks disintegration.

In recent years, the United States and Europe have imposed sanctions on China, and in the face of these hostilities, the Chinese government began promoting both domestic consumption and rural revitalization. Revitalizing the countryside has meant reorganizing scattered peasant producers and reactivating rural collectives. All of this takes place against the backdrop of a major step taken in 1998 that fosters local governance and democratic participation. At that time, the Organization Law of the Villagers’ Committees of the PRC was implemented, with the result that 600,000 Chinese villages directly elect their village chiefs every three years.

Looking back, we can see how millions of Chinese peasants experienced, first, the phase of communalization that occurred during the three decades following the Revolution, then relative atomization and individuation over the past four decades of Reform. The effects of these major policy shifts inevitably vary according to specific contexts. The three communities examined in this paper, each with its history and trajectory, are no exception to this principle. What made them hold on to collective management practices over the long haul, and how did they do it? Each had a strong, respected local leader committed to communist ideals and principles who demonstrated altruism and dedication, thereby securing the following of the cadres and villagers around them. It is also important to point out that in all three cases, going against the grain of marketization and liberalization required extra efforts on the part of the local communities to insist on pursuing their preferred path. It was only through extensive negotiations among the village stakeholders to agree on the greatest good for both the collective and its members that the many internal contradictions and conflicts could be resolved.

Uncle Man expressed his worries of common goods being dismantled, which may be taken to represent a widespread sentiment in the communities we examined. He said, “We have accumulated a large number of land resources and wealth after decades of hard work, but internal and external forces want to seize and plunder our wealth, which has made it difficult and risky to keep our community.” To avoid these dangers, these three rural communities have charted their own paths in defending the commons for the sake of self-sufficiency and collective survival, particularly in caring for groups who are vulnerable under the logic of the market, who would suffer under a more atomized system. They are attentive to the problems of wealth disparity and polarization. Collective ownership and management of land resources help to guard against plunder and appropriation by powerful insiders or outsiders.

In conclusion, we would like to make the following general observation. Forming and maintaining a collective or commune cannot be run by appealing merely to the economic and monetary interests of the members. Individualism and egoism are disruptive, so bonds based on social and interpersonal relationships need to be nurtured. When the majority of the collective or commune’s members can see how individual contributions relate to the public good (which in turn benefits the individuals); when they have initiative, satisfaction, and pride in being a member of the collective and in contributing their labor; when they see the long-term responsibility to enable future generations to live in an amicable political, economic, social, cultural, and natural environment, then there is hope and vitality in the commune.

Notes

1. ↩ National Bureau of Statistics of China, The Great Decade—Statistics on the Economic and Cultural Achievements of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1959).
2. ↩ “Circular on the Separation of Government and Society and the Establishment of Township Governments,” Communist Party of China News Network, China Reform Information Center, October 12, 1983, reformdata.org.
3. ↩ Yue Congxin, “The Agricultural Learning from Dazhai Campaign and Its Re-evaluation,” Party History and Literature Collection, no.10 (2012).
4. ↩ “Mao Zedong issued the ‘May 7 Instructions,'” News of the Communist Party of China, n.d., cpc.people.com.cn.
5. ↩ Old Field, “Discussion of the People’s Commune—20 Years after the Dissolution of the People’s Commune,” March 25, 2021, mzfxw.com.
6. ↩ Sit Tsui et al., “Rural Communities and Economic Crises in Modern China,” Monthly Review 70, no. 4 (September 2018): 35–51.
7. ↩ “Circular on the Separation of Government and Society and the Establishment of Township Governments.”
8. ↩ Yu Jingxian, “Long-Term Unchanged Land Contract Relationship Is a Major Declaration (Policy Interpretation),” People’s Daily, November 29, 2019.
9. ↩ Zhou Huaizong, “Extension of Land Contracts Requires Improvement of Supporting Policies,” Nanjing University News, March 4, 2024.
10. ↩ Zhang Yunhua, “Discussion on the Formation Mechanism of Rural Land Transfer Prices,” Rural Work Newsletter, November 6, 2024.
11. ↩ Department of Policy and Reform, “Central Document No.1 Released: Stages of Rural Collective Property Rights System Reform,” Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development of China, March 9, 2022, zcggs.moa.gov.cn.
12. ↩ “Law of the People’s Republic of China on Rural Collective Economic Organizations,” Xinhua, June 29, 2024.
13. ↩ Lau Kin Chi, “Revisiting Collectivism and Rural Governance in China: The Singularity of the Zhoujiazhuang People’s Commune,” Monthly Review 72, no. 5 (October 2020): 32–34.
14. ↩ Liu Guoyun, Zhoujiazhuang: The Miracle of Rural China (Wuhan: Hebei People’s Publishing House, 2016).
15. ↩ Dong Xiaodan, Zhanqi Village Over Fifty Years: The Micro-foundation of Chinese De-dependency (London: Palgrave MacMillian, 2024).
16. ↩ Peng Xiangping, “Paying Tribute to Advanced Models; Lu Xinyu, the First Secretary of Zanqi Village: Let the Gap Between the Urban and Rural Areas Become Smaller and Smaller, and the Villagers Live Better,” Red Star News, February 6, 2024, 163.com.
17. ↩ Yan Bihua, “Zhanqi Village: Walking in the Forefront, Starting a Good Demonstration,” People’s Life Weekly, June 12, 2023; Tianfu Xindu, “A New Year’s Custom in Zhanqi Village: Piles of New Year’s Goods Make a Mountain of Happiness!,” The Paper, January 25, 2025, thepaper.cn.
18. ↩ Bo Yibo, A Review of Some Major Decisions and Events, CPC Central Party School Press, 1991.
19. ↩ Wen Tiejun, Ten Crises: The Political Economy of China’s Development (1949–2020) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
20. ↩ Yan Ruizhen et al., China’s Price Scissors between Industry and Agriculture (Beijing: People’s University of China Press, 1988).
21. ↩ The General Research Group on Agricultural Inputs, “Agricultural Protection: Current Situation, Basis and Policy Recommendations,” China Social Science, no. 1 (1996).
22. ↩ Kong Xiang-zhi and He An-hua, “On the Contribution of Peasants to the Construction of New China for 60 Years,” Teaching and Research 43, no. 9 (2009): 5–13.