Zhao Shukai: China’s Rural Reform Began with Political Change

China’s rural reform is commonly recounted as a series of policy breakthroughs, above all the shift from collective to household farming. Zhao Shukai, however, argues that the political changes that preceded — and made possible — policy shifts should not be overlooked. A less monolithic distribution of power at the top, together with growing disagreement over rural policy, weakened political controls and created greater room for local initiative. It was within this newly opened political space that rural reform became possible.

This is the third instalment in Zhao Shukai’s series, Reflections on the History of China’s Rural Reform. The Chinese original is available on the WeChat blog 九号院时刻 (No. 9 Courtyard Moment). The first instalment appeared in Pekingnology, our sister newsletter, and our translation of the second was published on Wednesday.

Zhao is a retired Chinese official of rural policy and governance. From 1982 to 1989, he worked at the Rural Policy Research Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee’s Secretariat (later reorganised as the State Council’s Rural Development Research Centre and subsequently the Research Centre of Rural Economy under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs). Starting in 1990, he served at the Development Research Centre of the State Council, China’s government cabinet, holding roles including Director General of the Rural Department’s Organisation Research Office and Director General of the Information Centre.

Zhao has reviewed the following translation before publication.

— Yuxuan Jia

The history of rural reform is, first and foremost, a political history, because rural reform was, above all, political reform.

Rural reform unfolded through changes in policy. Those changes became possible only because political change had already taken place; political change was the precondition for policy change. At the macro level, this meant a shift in the fundamental ideas guiding policymaking. At the micro level, it meant that local authorities acquired a measure of policymaking power — or, in other words, policy autonomy.

Although the policies being changed were economic, the authority to formulate economic policy is itself political power. Acquiring such authority was a political process, not an economic one. This point was also vividly borne out in everyday life. When rural residents went to the cities for work or to do business, especially those formerly classified and controlled as “landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements”, the first obstacles they encountered were political discrimination and restrictions arising from their status.

Without the emancipation of these political outcasts and freedom from status-based constraints, many skilled craftspeople and rural migrants who left their land and villages to start businesses — and who later became entrepreneurs — could never have emerged. Any account of rural reform written solely from the perspective of economic history is therefore partial and superficial.

What is called rural reform was, in essence, a series of breakthroughs from existing policy. These breakthroughs became possible because the former system of oppressive political control had begun to loosen and, in some respects, to break down.

For farmers, contracting land to individual households and engaging in household farming were, of course, economic activities. Yet they became possible only because the political environment had changed, and that change arose from the disintegration and reconfiguration of the existing structure of political power. Changes in the political environment drove changes in economic behaviour.

In this sense, the history of rural reform is not primarily a history of economic reform, but one of political reform — or, more precisely, political change. I use “political change” rather than “political reform” to stress that the process was neither consciously initiated nor fully deliberate; it emerged as the political situation evolved.

The first condition for this political change was a transition in the political structure at the top. Had the intense political repression that prevailed before October 1976 continued, economic controls could not have been relaxed, nor could household contracting have emerged and spread. Mao’s death opened up new political space in China. Before then, the political environment had prevented household contracting from taking root, making reform impossible. The transformation of the political and institutional environment preceded changes in economic life not only chronologically but also causally.

The second condition was a change in policy thinking. Among the top leadership after October 1976, this did not amount to a fundamental reversal, but rather to a limited relaxation. The shift began with the arrest of the Gang of Four [Oct. 1976] and continued at the Second National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture [Dec. 1976], held soon afterward. Until then, the basic approach to rural work had been to “take class struggle as the key link,” put politics above all else, and attach little importance to production — an attitude captured in the slogan, “We would rather grow socialist weeds than plant capitalist seedlings.”

A closer examination of rural policy at the time, however, reveals that even under the overarching principle of politics taking command, two distinct policy lines coexisted: the Sixty Articles line and the Dazhai line. The the Regulations on People’s Communes, commonly known as the “Sixty Articles”, were drawn up under Mao Zedong’s direction and adopted and promulgated at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in September 1962. They established the basic policy framework for the people’s commune system: the production team would serve as the basic accounting unit, while small private plots, rural markets, and household sideline activities would be permitted.

The Dazhai line reflected policies of the communisation campaign that had preceded the Sixty Articles: the production brigade — or even the commune — would serve as the basic accounting unit, while private plots would be abolished, rural markets closed, and household sideline activities eliminated. The Sixty Articles, formulated under Mao’s personal direction, represented a policy adjustment introduced after the Great Leap Forward and communisation had brought about the Great Famine. Both lines could therefore claim Mao’s authority. At the central level, Ji Dengkui and Hua Guofeng represented the Sixty Articles line, while Zhang Chunqiao and Chen Yonggui represented the Dazhai line.

In the three years preceding the Cultural Revolution, from 1962 to 1966, the Sixty Articles were the dominant framework for rural policy. After the Cultural Revolution began, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee held two on-site conferences on learning from Dazhai in Xiyang County, in September 1967 and January 1968. These conferences set off a nationwide wave of visits to Dazhai by rural cadres. From the latter half of 1968 through the first half of 1970, localities across China emulated Dazhai practices that went beyond the Sixty Articles.

In particular, they shifted accounting from the production team to the production brigade, introduced Dazhai-style work points based primarily on political performance, abolished household private plots and sideline activities, and closed rural markets. Each successive wave of the campaign to learn from Dazhai in agriculture pushed rural policy further to the left. Yet amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, control from above also weakened, and some places — notably Wenzhou in Zhejiang and Putian in Fujian — introduced household contracting, which were condemned as “capitalist restoration.”

In August 1970, the State Council convened the Northern China Agricultural Work Conference in Xiyang, Shanxi. On the one hand, the conference elevated the campaign to learn from Dazhai to a new level of political importance. On the other, in terms of specific policy, it stressed that the Sixty Articles must be observed: localities were not to arbitrarily shift accounting to the production brigade, abolish private plots or household sideline activities, or close rural markets. The conference also emphasised the importance of distribution according to work contribution. Overall, its approach to concrete policy was constructive, and the Sixty Articles largely regained their standing.

In the spring of 1975, Mao Zedong called for restricting “bourgeois right” [a Marxist concept referring to inequalities retained under socialism, particularly in remuneration and distribution] and exercising all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. Against this backdrop, Zhang Chunqiao published an essay titled “On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie.”

At the time, distribution according to work contribution, collective ownership, household sideline activities, and private plots were all treated as manifestations of “bourgeois right.” Rural policy moved further toward the extreme left, and the Dazhai experience was promoted more vigorously.

In September, at the First National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture, Deng Xiaoping, then overseeing the work of the central leadership, continued to endorse the Dazhai approach. Localities subsequently departed from the Sixty Articles one after another, adopting brigade-level accounting and Dazhai-style work points, abolishing private plots and household sideline activities, and closing rural markets. Ultra-left policies became still more radical. Some places strictly prohibited farmers from raising chickens or ducks; others even placed farmers’ homes under public ownership. Policy increasingly came to resemble that of the 1958 communisation campaign. Chen Yonggui openly called for commune-level ownership throughout Xiyang County.

The Dazhai approach was clearly a continuation of the communisation campaign. As a popular saying put it, “Dazhai’s policy model was the communisation campaign of 1958 brought back from the dead in a new guise.” From the latter half of 1975 through the end of 1976, this set of ultra-left Dazhai practices essentially dominated rural work.

Throughout the Cultural Revolution, policy disagreements among the top leadership centred chiefly on whether to uphold the Sixty Articles or emulate the Dazhai model. Ji Dengkui described himself as a member of the “Sixty Articles faction.” The policy approach represented by Ji and Hua Guofeng was based on the Sixty Articles drafted under Mao’s direction.

Mao had been compelled to retreat from the commune system of 1958 after the failure of the Great Leap Forward and communisation caused the Great Famine — a retreat also described as a “policy adjustment.” The basic accounting unit was first scaled back from the people’s commune, encompassing several thousand households, to the production brigade, with several hundred households, and then scaled back again to the production team, with several dozen households.

This was known as “three-tier ownership, with the team as the basic unit.” Here, “team” had initially referred to the production brigade, but the Sixty Articles later specified the smaller production team. Within this three-tier system of ownership, private plots amounting to 5–7 per cent of the land were permitted, as were household sideline activities and limited participation in free markets.

Fundamentally, the Gang of Four and Chen Yonggui represented Mao’s original policy line, while Hua Guofeng and Ji Dengkui represented the line that emerged from Mao’s compromises and retreats. Strictly speaking, Mao accepted the latter line but did not embrace it willingly. In the practical rural work, the two approaches were bound to conflict, yet both could claim ample support from Mao. Around the time of Mao’s death, the conflict between the Sixty Articles and the Dazhai model became one of direct confrontation. This was the basic trajectory of the dispute over rural policy during the Cultural Revolution.

The choice between upholding the Sixty Articles and promoting the Dazhai approach might have appeared to be a disagreement over specific economic policies, but at the time it became a major political issue.

In political theory, the Dazhai model held an overwhelming advantage. Its chief theoretical exponent was Zhang Chunqiao, who elaborated on Mao Zedong’s statements and instructions. According to the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Dazhai model more fully embodied the socialist direction.

Upholding the Sixty Articles and granting farmers a small measure of economic freedom, by contrast, was often denounced as “putting material incentives in command,” compromising with the forces of small-scale peasant production, and indulging farmers’ spontaneous capitalist tendencies. Within this theoretical framework, disagreements over specific policies were elevated into political questions of whether China would take the capitalist road or the socialist road.

In such a climate, even raising a few chickens or ducks at home or engaging in petty trade could be labelled capitalist, and the people involved branded “class enemies.” For grassroots cadres, the lesson was clear: organising political study and campaigns of mass criticism was safe, while attending to agricultural production was dangerous and risked political error. Rural work at the grassroots thus descended into absurdity, as extreme political fervour displaced the material production essential to everyday life.

After Hua Guofeng assumed leadership, the Second National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture was convened in December 1976. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry had originally proposed a small symposium of around 200 participants. Hua, however, personally called for an exceptionally high-level and large-scale national conference, attended by 5,000 cadres from across the country at or above the rank of county Party secretary.

In effect, the conference marked Hua’s first public political appearance before a nationwide audience after taking power. Its agenda went far beyond learning from Dazhai in agriculture: its central purpose was to expose and criticise the Gang of Four. The conference still spoke in the established language of “continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “taking class struggle as the key link,” but its policy substance had already begun to change markedly.

The discussion materials focused their criticism on the crimes of the Gang of Four: allowing only politics to take command, forbidding attention to production, denouncing such attention as the “theory of productive forces” [the alleged error of treating the development of the productive forces as the overriding priority] and promoting the slogan “We would rather grow socialist weeds than plant capitalist seedlings.”

In the conference’s aftermath, local cadres began to take agricultural production seriously and felt able to devote themselves to it. In this sense, the conference partly repudiated the rural policy approach of taking class struggle as the key link and putting politics above all else. It foreshadowed the Party-wide shift in focus toward economic development. As a turning point, the conference eased the intense political pressure on rural work and thereby, in objective terms, opened the way for reform.

At the heart of what is now called “rural reform” was a break with the policy framework of the Sixty Articles: the farm household replaced the production team as the basic accounting unit, collective farming gave way to household farming, and the household economy was reestablished. Abandoning the production team as the basic accounting unit in favour of the household broke with both the ultra-left line represented by the Dazhai model and the Sixty Articles line represented by Ji Dengkui and Hua Guofeng.

Anhui and Sichuan, the first provinces to undertake reform, followed precisely this path: they moved beyond the Sixty Articles’ stipulation that the production team serve as the basic unit and restored household farming through household contracting. The leading provincial figures in this process included Wan Li, Zhao Ziyang, Zhou Hui, and Chi Biqing. Zhao did not explicitly support household production contracts while serving in Sichuan, but he reduced the size of production teams, increased the share of land allotted as private plots, and gave farmers greater scope to participate in markets, thereby facilitating the emergence and spread of the practice. Wan Li directly approved farmers’ demands for household production contracts, mounting a direct challenge to the people’s commune system.

Any study of the origins of rural reform must examine political power and recognise the fundamental role that changes in the political environment played in making reform possible. In this sense, reform began when power changed hands at the top, intense political control eased, and ultra-left policies began to loosen, creating space for farmers to exercise a measure of economic freedom. To this day, the historical narrative of rural reform remains seriously distorted, still mired in self-serving accounts by particular forces.

(November 2025)

Share