2E.1 KT2 - Agriculture and industry, 1949-65

The enquiry frame

This Edexcel topic asks how China changed economically from 1949 to 1965. The topic has
four linked strands:

• early changes in agriculture, 1949-57
• the communes and their organisation
• the First Five-Year Plan, 1952-56
• the Second Five-Year Plan, or Great Leap Forward, 1958-62, and the reforms of 1962-65

The big analytical issue is control. The CCP wanted to control land, grain, labour,
investment, prices and production targets. Control could solve real problems: China in
1949 was poor, war-damaged and overwhelmingly rural. But control also created new
problems when peasants had little incentive to produce, local cadres exaggerated output,
and criticism became politically dangerous.

One complication is dating. Edexcel names the First Five-Year Plan as 1952-56,
whereas many historians date its formal implementation as 1953-57. For this topic,
use Edexcel's wording but understand the sequence: recovery and planning by 1952,
implementation from 1953, formal adoption in 1955, and results visible by 1956-57.

The key judgement is a tension. The First Five-Year Plan produced the most durable
industrial gains. The Great Leap Forward produced the most dramatic change in rural
organisation and the most devastating human consequences. Agriculture was the hinge
between the two because industrialisation depended on extracting resources from the
countryside.

Land reform to collectivisation

The CCP's first agricultural revolution attacked landlordism. In much of rural China,
land ownership was unequal, tenants paid rent, debts tied poorer peasants to local
elites, and landlord influence could support anti-communist power. The Agrarian
Reform Law of 30 June 1950 aimed to confiscate land from landlords and redistribute
it to poor and middle peasants. In the short term this was not collectivisation. It was
peasant landownership. Many households received title to land for the first time.

Land reform was political as well as economic. Villagers were sorted into class
categories such as landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant and poor peasant. "Speak
bitterness" meetings, public denunciations and local tribunals encouraged peasants to
accuse landlords of exploitation. In many areas the campaign became violent. Former
landlords could be beaten, humiliated, dispossessed, imprisoned or executed. For the
CCP, this destroyed a rival rural elite and made class struggle part of everyday village
life. For many poor peasants, it also made the revolution materially real.

The redistribution of land had limits. China still had small plots, limited draught
animals, primitive tools and low productivity. Industrialisation required grain to feed
urban workers and to generate state revenue. The state therefore moved from giving land
to peasants towards organising peasants more tightly.

The early stages were presented as voluntary. Mutual-aid teams pooled labour,
animals and tools for particular tasks. From 1953, lower agricultural producers'
cooperatives grouped roughly 20 to 30 households. In these lower cooperatives,
peasants still retained some ownership claims, and returns could reflect both labour and
the land or tools contributed. This stage helped the CCP test cooperation while avoiding
an immediate assault on all private property.

Mao then pushed the process faster. In July 1955 he argued that rural cooperation should
accelerate, despite caution among other CCP leaders. Advanced cooperatives spread
rapidly in 1955-56. These were more fully collective: land was owned by the cooperative,
withdrawal was much harder, and income was distributed mainly through labour or work
points rather than private ownership. By the end of 1956, most rural households had
been absorbed into advanced cooperatives.

This is the change from voluntary to enforced collectivisation. Official language still
spoke of enthusiasm and mutual benefit, but the real pressure came from party cadres,
procurement quotas, grain rationing, political labelling and fear of being treated as a
backward or selfish peasant. Some peasants resisted passively by hiding grain, reducing
effort, slaughtering animals before they were collectivised, or trying to preserve small
private plots. The CCP gained more control over grain and labour, but it also weakened
the link between a family's effort and its reward.

For exam judgement, land reform should be seen as both a success and a trap. It won
support and smashed landlord power, but it created millions of small proprietors who had
reason to value their new land. Collectivisation then reversed much of that ownership.
The party had to move from popular redistribution to coercive control.

The First Five-Year Plan

The First Five-Year Plan aimed to make China a planned socialist economy with a modern
industrial base. Its model was Soviet. In the early 1950s China lacked capital,
specialist engineers, modern machinery and experience of national planning. The USSR
therefore mattered enormously. Soviet loans, blueprints, machines, technical advisers
and training helped China create planning ministries and major industrial projects.
The famous 156 Soviet-assisted projects included power plants, coal mines, machine
works, military industry and heavy industrial plants. The slogan in propaganda was that
the Soviet Union's present was China's future.

The plan's priorities were clear. Heavy industry came first: steel, coal, electricity,
machinery, chemicals, transport and defence-related production. Consumer goods and
agriculture came second. The state channelled investment through central ministries and
state-owned enterprises. The assumption was that heavy industry would create the
machines, energy and infrastructure needed for future growth.

There were real successes. The plan created a stronger industrial framework than China
had possessed in 1949. Output in heavy industry rose sharply. New plants and transport
links expanded the state sector, especially in the north-east and other key industrial
areas. The plan also trained Chinese engineers, managers and technicians in Soviet-style
methods. Public order, currency stability and central planning made economic life more
predictable than it had been during the civil war and inflation of the 1940s.

The plan also advanced socialist transformation. By 1955-56, private industry and
commerce were pressured into joint state-private or state-controlled forms. This did not
always mean immediate confiscation; owners could receive fixed interest payments or be
kept as managers. But the direction was unmistakable. The state was becoming the
dominant economic actor in the towns, while cooperatives were becoming dominant in the
countryside.

The failures were just as important for explaining what came next. First, the plan was
unbalanced. Heavy industry received investment while agriculture was expected to supply
surplus grain, raw materials and labour without comparable investment. Second, Soviet
methods brought bureaucracy and rigidity. Central ministries could issue targets, but
they could not always understand local conditions. Third, urban industrialisation
increased demand for food just as compulsory grain procurement was tightening pressure
on peasants. Fourth, reliance on the USSR created vulnerability when Sino-Soviet
relations later deteriorated.

This is why the First Five-Year Plan should not be judged only by its output figures.
It gave China the beginnings of a modern industrial base, so in that sense it was the
row's clearest economic achievement. But it also intensified the agricultural bottleneck.
Mao's later claim that China needed a different route - one that developed industry and
agriculture together through mass mobilisation - was partly a reaction against the
limits of this Soviet-style plan.

Communes and Great Leap design

The Second Five-Year Plan, better known as the Great Leap Forward, was launched
in 1958. It was not just a set of production targets. It was Mao's attempt to find a
Chinese road to socialism: faster, more rural, more egalitarian and less dependent on
Soviet capital-intensive industry.

Mao had several reasons for launching it. He believed the First Five-Year Plan had
created an industrial base but had also made China too dependent on urban ministries,
experts and Soviet-style planning. He wanted to overcome the agricultural bottleneck
without waiting for expensive mechanisation. China had little capital, but it had a huge
rural population. Mao thought mass labour, political enthusiasm and new organisation
could substitute for machines. The Great Leap also had a prestige dimension: China
would prove that a poor revolutionary country could catch up with advanced industrial
powers, even overtaking Britain in steel.