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IN 1940, nine years before his Communist Party seized power, Mao Zedong set out his plans for a "new China". The republic would, he said, "take certain necessary steps" to confiscate land from rural landlords. Under the principle of "land to the tiller", it would then "turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants." If only things had turned out this way. The "necessary steps" involved widespread slaughter. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of landowning rural residents and their families were executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers. The peasants got their small parcels of land, but not for long. By the late 1950s, private land ownership had been eliminated and peasants had become property-less members of "People's Communes". It was an upheaval that, along with bad weather and a frenzied attempt to catch up with American levels of industrial production, contributed to millions more deaths in a nationwide famine. As our survey describes, China has yet to undo the damage. A few years after Mao's death in 1976, the People's Communes were dismantled. Under Deng Xiaoping, agricultural production soared as for the first time in 30 years peasants were allocated (but not given full ownership of) plots of land to farm independently. This marked the start of the economic transformation that today holds the world spellbound. But it is the prosperity of urban China that mesmerises foreign businesses. Since its boom in the early 1980s, the countryside has lagged ever further behind. |
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