Revolution Down on the Farm

Incomes grow as free enterprise replaces the communes

"Eating out of one big pot" was the way the Peking leadership once described China 's vast system of collectivized agriculture, in which peasants, grouped together in 52,000 sprawling communes, had to share their earnings more or less equally. In the past three years Peking has taken a great leap sideways from the collective idea. Applying what it calls the "responsibility system, " the government is returning much of the country's farming to individual households. The new system is gradually changing the lives of China's 800 million rural residents. The report of TIME Peking Bureau Chief Richard Bernstein:

The 62 families that make up the village-size Jun Tan Production Brigade, only a few miles from the lordly Yangtze River in Anhui province, have made some coveted purchases recently: 44 radios, eleven sewing machines, five bicycles, 47 wristwatches and 17 wall clocks. In the affluent West, that might appear unremarkable; in China it is a veritable cornucopia of consumerism. Every family in the brigade possesses an alarm clock, 90% of the families have savings accounts. In the past two years 24 households have built solid brick and tile houses to replace their old mud-and-thatch homes, compared with the 28 years before, when only seven such houses were constructed. "All the peasants feel happy," says Chen Quanchun, 37, the brigade's leader. "They work twice as hard as they used to because they know that if they work harder, they can make more money."

The relatively well-off Jun Tan brigade is doing far better than the average Chinese rural village. Its per person annual revenue of $201 is well above the national rural average of only $91, and with good reason. Jun Tan's income has doubled since the brigade started practicing two years ago the responsibility system, the basic principle of which is pragmatic: produce more, keep more for yourself.

Until the policy began to be gradually introduced, all Chinese peasants were grouped into production teams that worked the land in common. Each laborer earned work points, which were exchanged for a ration of grain and a small cash stipend. But in Jun Tan, as in an estimated 40% of China's villages, work points have now been abolished. Instead, each family has been allocated a plot of land to farm as it sees fit. The peasant gets seed and fertilizer free the first year; the second year the farmer uses his own money, or borrows it at a low interest rate. Each year he signs a four-page contract that obligates him to turn a fixed amount of his produce over to the state; the amount is set low enough to enable the peasant to exceed his quota if conditions are normal. Anything he can produce above his quota he keeps for himself, sells to the state, or carries to one of the 37,000 free markets that have proliferated across China since they were made legal in 1978.

Peking claims that the new system has helped increase the production of China's farms, particularly those that raise the key crop of cotton. Ironically, the new system has also created a new problem simply because it is more efficient. Workers who are no longer needed on the farms have added to the country's already grave unemployment rate, which is estimated at 30%.

Anticipating charges that they have abandoned collectivization, one of the basic tenets of Communism, Chinese agricultural officials hastily explain that the responsibility system is not really a departure from collective agriculture because the state-owned land cannot be bought or sold by the farmers. Still, China's bold new experiment is the closest thing to rural private enterprise in the Communist world, outside of Poland and Yugoslavia.

The responsibility system is a triumph for material incentives. Only a few years ago, even raising chickens or pigs privately was ruthlessly condemned as an example of "taking the capitalist road." Today families can decide for themselves how best to farm their land, and some family members have been freed for other cash-producing activities. In the Jun Tan brigade Carpenter Liu Zhangying, 34, receives $212 a year building furniture. He explains: "Before, I had to hand over more than half of my carpentry income in order to get the work points I needed for my grain ration. Now I get to keep everything I earn as a carpenter." By combining farming on one acre of land with carpentry, Liu and his family are now making almost $1,200 a year, an astronomical figure by Chinese standards.

China's newspapers are proclaiming that the system is successful throughout the country. In coastal Fujian province, peasants have been using their money to buy their own machinery, such as threshers, small tractors and even motorboats for commercial fishing, something they would have had little incentive to do when the stress was on collective sharing. In northeastern China's Liaoning province, the new individual responsibility system has reduced the power of autocratic local leaders so that now, reports the People's Daily, there is "less scolding and beating of commune members, less giving of blind directions and forced commands, and less wandering about without taking part in physical labor." In north-central Henan province, according to the People's Daily, the peasants' enthusiasm for private production has led them to buy fertilizer with the money they had set aside for their daughters' dowries or even for their own coffins.

Under rigidly applied collectivism, the country's peasants were relentlessly encouraged to follow such Utopian precepts as "Love the commune as you would love your own home." In these more realistic times, Chinese agricultural officials confess that such precepts were unworkable. "The speed of development in the past was not very fast," admits Peking Ministry of Agriculture Official Liu Xu-mao. It seems to have accelerated now that China's peasants no longer must eat out of one big communal pot.

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