Reds Declare War on China's Peasants
BORKENAU, FRANZ
Reds Declare War on China's Peasants By Franz Borkenau Moo Tse-tung announces plan to collectivize 500 million by 1960 On october 17, after a curious ten-week delay, the Central Committee of the...
...In 1952, the radical tendencies gained impetus...
...But that general article of Communist faith is not enough to explain this latest rash plunge...
...Chinese Communism has thus decided to imitate Stalin's collectivization drive of 1929, from whose frightful effects-the massacre of the most efficient peasants and destruction of the livestock-Russia is still suffering, without having "gained" anything in exchange but a far-reaching subjection of the peasants to the Communist state...
...If the course of this struggle has remained obscure, that is even more true of the new policy's motives...
...But this breathing spell, far from meaning a period of peace, merely turns the Communist revolution inward in its most terrible form, with the aim of thrusting outward even more powerfully within a few years...
...Thus, Peking now states that collectivization must be carried out everywhere without regard to the lack of machines...
...Mao, who had relinquished direction of Government affairs for a long time because of illness, has now obviously reassumed the leadership...
...With these great national problems solved in varying degrees, Communism-from the standpoint of the vast majority of peasants and of most intellectuals-has done its work and can go...
...But even this restriction will not last long...
...To the terror throughout the country will now be added terror within the Party...
...In China, the vast majority of the peasants, and with them the entire country, are on the brink of starvation even in normal years...
...The earlier modest attempts at collectivization all showed consideration for the well-to-do peasants and sought to win their participation...
...In alliance with Army and administrative groups, Kao Kang was clearly working toward a "cold putsch" which would give him de facto leadership of the Party...
...Communism had the people behind it so long as it stressed questions of national unity vs...
...For a collectivization campaign on the Russian model will run parallel with the cooperativization campaign, and Mao expects a large part of the new cooperatives to become kolkhozes by 1960...
...And, if that Party-instigated social catastrophe ran counter to all the natural assumptions of Soviet agriculture, how much more will this apply to China...
...Indeed, concern over the gigantic catastrophe now looming up before China prevented Mao from explicitly proclaiming the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," as Stalin did in 1929...
...In the "cooperatives" now being planned, the members' land passes irrevocably into the common ownership of the collective...
...otherwise, they would not be Communists...
...now things have gone so far that true Stalinism is being introduced in this area, too...
...Collectivization was dropped, and those collectives already set up were disbanded...
...A tightening of intra-Party control had been evident for two or three years...
...One strongly suspects that the victorious faction felt the regime could not survive unless a swift end was put to peasant independence...
...How powerful must be, on the one hand, the internal pressure and, on the other, the ultimate goal pursued, to produce such a radical swing of the tiller...
...The "class struggle in the village" will be unleashed, the masses of poor peasants will oust the prosperous minority, and the latter will be barred from the cooperatives-which can only mean that they will be physically destroyed or driven into camps or cities...
...Mao's pronouncement means a drastic turn in China's entire intra-Party, political and foreign-policy situation...
...Yet, the projected campaign amounts to just that...
...Kao Kang, recalled from Manchuria, was destroyed politically by being placed at the head of the Planning Bureau and compelled to direct the very retreat he had fought so bitterly...
...The latter roughly corresponded to the simplest European peasant cooperatives...
...These reservations have now been shelved, and Mao, instead of exercising caution in view of China's natural disadvantages as compared with Russia, is trying to eliminate them by surpassing Stalin s collectivization drive of 1929...
...All that remains of the former private land tenure is this: In addition to work performed, the value of the land brought into the collective will somehow be taken into account in apportioning income among the various members...
...But Mao's speech and the decisions of the Central Committee show that it has now culminated in the complete victory of the extreme group...
...In sum, Mao has proclaimed the forcible collectivization of the entire Chinese peasantry (except for a few border regions) by 1960...
...There are many symptoms of profound discontent among the masses...
...In practice, little distinction will be made between the two forms in the forcible expropriation of peasant landowners...
...At all events, it is quite clear that China will for a number of years be incapable of any major action, in regard either to Russia or to the West...
...Russian-Chinese negotiations have resulted in increased, though still modest, Russian aid to Chinese industrialization, and since last year collectivization plans have been widened virtually from quarter to quarter...
...the refusal of the majority of Chinese POWs in Korea to return home is only one...
...Unexpected as this development is, it can now be seen in retrospect that the entire internal history of Chinese Communism since its victory in 1950 has turned on the struggle between the adherents and opponents of Stalinist methods...
...In organizational form, the Chinese farms will not be exactly like the Soviet kolkhozes...
...In addition to harsher persecution of urban businessmen, there were several attempts at farm collectivization, with the usual concomitants of famine, mass flights to the cities, floods resulting from neglect of dams, and peasant uprisings...
...This policy will inevitably arouse the opposition of those who have retained some sanity, and indeed this has already begun to develop...
...In Russia, large-scale tractor production accompanied the expropriation of the peasants, and the new kolkhozes were bolstered, at least in the heavy-soil areas, by state-owned tractors in the first two or three years...
...Obviously, there is little hope of drawing these peasants into the new adventure...
...warlordism, independence vs...
...The entire country is to be divided into 1.3 million cooperatives...
...At the same time, the Government is turning against the small cooperatives, which were favored until recently, and is demanding giant enterprises in their place...
...Reds Declare War on China's Peasants By Franz Borkenau Moo Tse-tung announces plan to collectivize 500 million by 1960 On october 17, after a curious ten-week delay, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party published a speech delivered by Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung on July 31...
...In Russia, the peasants had grown relatively prosperous during the 1920s, and they could be looted-at the price of a famine, to be sure, but not of a complete food-supply breakdown...
...Mao has declared that the intra-Party opposition has gone over to the bourgeoisie-thus providing the basis for police measures...
...The Russian press and radio seized this opportunity to create a new verbal monstrosity, speaking of "cooperativization...
...All this, together with the threatening situation in the countryside and the uncertainty following Stalin's death, led once more to a broad retreat in 1953...
...This situation has hitherto made the Chinese Communists extremely cautious in the matter of collectivization...
...Furthermore, his report on agriculture at the July Central Committee plenum was the most explosive document the Chinese Communist party has seen since 1932...
...Of course, the whole Party believes in the necessity of industrialization and forced collectivization...
...in about a decade...
...It is clear from Mao's speech that even now, or at least until their recent suppression, many Party experts have advocated substantial industrialization first, and only then large-scale collectivization...
...In China, mass production of tractors is as yet out of the question...
...Early in 1954, he was dismissed...
...In July 1952, Kao Kang, provincial chief in Manchuria and leader of the Party's left wing, demanded immediate annihilation of the urban bourgeoisie and completion of rural "cooperativization" by the end of the first five-year plan in 1957...
...The present phase therefore requires a shift to pure rule by force...
...Thus, China is already launching the "amalgamation" of collective farms which Stalin began only in the late 1940s-despite the garden-plot character of many Chinese farms...
...Such a policy is incompatible with the relatively humane relations among Party members...
...The planned "cooperatives," however, resemble the kolkhozes much more than they do the "peasant mutual aid" which formerly characterized Chinese agriculture...
...Such opposition cannot be overcome by persuasion, but only by violence...
...tractors are promised only for the third plan...
...However, just as Stalin immediately after Trotsky's fall took over the latter's radical program and went far beyond it, the fall of Kao Kang was the signal for a new turn to the left...
...Peking speaks of "cooperatives" rather than collectives...
...Though the first Chinese five-year plan still has two years to go...
...each cooperative will average some 400 inhabitants...
...Within five years, 500 million Chinese peasants will be brought into collective farms...
...At present, we know few details of this struggle...
...The "three-anti" and "five-anti" campaigns in 1951, which were directed against "bad elements" in the "national bourgeoisie," were a compromise between those who wanted to exterminate all bourgeois elements and those who wanted to spare them...
...Yet, the intra-Party struggle over these issues raged on bitterly, as shown by the fact that the principle of voluntary membership in collectives was retained, though it conflicted more and more with the expanding collectivization plans...
...foreign interference, overcoming corruption and inflation...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 47
