Relations of production, productive forces and the mass line in the formation of the rural people's communes in China∗

Abstract

The structure, pace and uneven progress of the collectivisation of Chinese agriculture can be explained in terms of contradictions that persisited between relations of production and productive forces in the countryside and the ways in which these contradictions could be confronted through the application of the principle of the mass line. The formation and subsequent re‐organisation of the Rural People's Communes is interpreted as a necessary response to the fact that collectivisation was not predicated on prior modernisation of agriculture, but rather that Chinese political economy predicated the modernisation of agriculture on the success of the communes.