People's commune
Based on Wikipedia: People's commune
In 1958, Mao Zedong toured the Chinese countryside and declared, simply, "People's communes are good." Within months, nearly the entire rural population of China—hundreds of millions of people—found themselves living in a radical social experiment unlike anything the world had ever seen. Families were separated. Private homes were demolished. Individual plots of land vanished into vast collective units. And communal dining halls replaced the family kitchen, that ancient center of Chinese domestic life.
The people's commune wasn't just a new way of organizing farms. It was an attempt to remake human society from the ground up.
The Dream of the Commune
The word "commune" carries a long history in Western political thought. It originally referred to autonomous, self-governing towns in medieval Europe—places where citizens managed their own affairs free from feudal lords. The socialist theorist Robert Owen adopted the term, and Friedrich Engels used it to describe the basic unit of organization in an ideal communist society. Karl Marx saw the commune as a form of governance by and for the working class.
Mao absorbed these influences and imagined something grander still. His people's communes would be the building blocks of Chinese society itself—massive units where the working class ruled, where production reached industrial heights, and where the old ways of living simply melted away.
"They're called people's communes, first, because they're big and, second because they're public," Mao wrote. "Lots of people, a vast area of land, large scale of production, and all their undertakings are done in a big way."
Big was an understatement. Each commune contained, on average, twenty-four thousand people spread across forty-five hundred hectares of land. Some communes merged together what had previously been thirty smaller cooperative units. Others swallowed up to one hundred.
The Road to Collectivization
The communes didn't appear from nowhere. They emerged from a decade of experimentation in reorganizing rural China.
Before the Communist Party took power in 1949, Chinese agriculture looked much like it had for centuries. Landlords owned nearly half the land in rural areas and rented it out to tenant farmers. Most farms were small, family-run operations. The rhythms of life followed the harvest—frantic work during planting and reaping seasons, relative quiet in between.
The Communists began by redistributing land. In campaigns that could turn violent, they identified landlords, seized their property, and handed it to peasants who had previously owned little or nothing. By the early 1950s, individual families owned the plots they farmed, paid taxes directly to the state, and sold their grain at government-set prices.
But individual farming didn't fit the Communist vision. Socialism meant collective ownership. So the Party encouraged families to join together in progressively larger units.
First came Mutual Aid Teams—informal groups where families shared labor and equipment. By 1954, sixty-eight million families had joined these teams. Then came Agricultural Producer Cooperatives, which pooled land and resources at the village level. Farmers received shares of the harvest based on how much land and labor they contributed.
By 1956, the government pushed further. Over sixty percent of rural households found themselves in Higher-level Agricultural Producers' Cooperatives. These looked similar to the collective farms, called kolkhozy, that had transformed Soviet agriculture decades earlier. Tens of households combined their land and draft animals. Instead of owning their harvest, farmers earned "work points" based on their labor. At year's end, after the state took its share in taxes and mandatory purchases, the cooperative distributed what remained according to points accumulated.
This system created its own problems. But the Party wasn't done.
The Great Leap Forward
In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward. The goal was nothing less than vaulting China into the ranks of industrial powers—surpassing Britain, catching up to the United States, perhaps even beating the Soviet Union to true communism.
The people's commune was central to this vision. By combining tens of thousands of people into single administrative units, the Party believed it could mobilize labor on an unprecedented scale. Projects that no individual family or even village could attempt—massive irrigation works, local steel production, large-scale mechanization—suddenly seemed possible.
Three principles defined the communes during the Great Leap. First, industrialization at all costs. Communes would produce not just grain but steel, in backyard furnaces that consumed cooking pots and farming tools to meet production quotas. Second, military-style mobilization. Commune members were organized into brigades and teams, expected to display soldier-like discipline and selfless devotion. Third, self-reliance. Each commune was supposed to produce everything it needed to function, from food to tools to the machinery of industry.
The reality proved catastrophic.
Living in the Commune
To understand what the communes meant in practice, imagine the transformation of daily life.
Your family's home might be demolished, its materials reused for communal buildings. You would move into shared dormitories—men and women often separated regardless of marriage, multiple families crowded together. Your land, your tools, your animals, even your cooking pots became collective property.
You ate in communal dining halls. At first, the Party promoted these as liberating, especially for women who no longer had to spend hours preparing family meals. "There is a thorough road for women's liberation," Mao declared. Wages went to individuals, not family heads, which he saw as "smashing the patriarchal system."
Your work was assigned, not chosen. Commune leaders decided what needed doing and who would do it. You earned work points that determined your share of whatever the commune produced. The rhythms of the agricultural year—those ancient cycles of busyness and rest—gave way to constant mobilization.
The scale boggled the mind. The communes ranged from fifty thousand to ninety thousand across rural China. Each commune served as the highest administrative level in its area, handling not just agriculture but industry, education, culture, and even military affairs. The distinction between government and economic management blurred into nothing.
The Famine
The communes became instruments of catastrophe.
The Great Leap Forward famine killed tens of millions of people between 1959 and 1961, making it the deadliest famine in human history. The communes didn't cause the famine alone—weather, planning failures, and political pressures all played roles. But the commune system made everything worse.
The communal dining halls, which initially seemed to promise abundance, became sites of desperate rationing. Local officials, pressured to report ever-higher production figures, exaggerated harvests while grain was seized to meet quotas. The true harvest shrank as farmers were pulled away from fields to make backyard steel. The collective structure meant individual families had little ability to store food or make independent decisions about survival.
When the scope of the disaster became undeniable, the Party reformed the communes but didn't abolish them. The free supply system returned to one based on labor contributions. The unit of accounting—determining who produced what and who received what—devolved downward from the commune as a whole to smaller brigades and eventually to production teams of just a few dozen households.
By 1961, the average commune shrank to one-third its original size. Mao retreated from directing economic policy. Other leaders tried to make the system workable.
Why It Didn't Work
Some Communist Party officials had warned from the beginning. They pointed to the massive resources—iron, steel, petroleum—that rapid agricultural modernization would require. They worried about unemployment if mechanization displaced rural workers who had nowhere else to go. Urban industry, after all, remained relatively small.
These skeptics lost the internal debates. But their concerns proved prescient.
The fundamental problem was this: the Chinese economy in the 1950s couldn't support what the communes were supposed to achieve. Most productive industry sat in cities, not the countryside. Urban workers in key enterprises received the best pay and food. The rural masses, organized into communes, existed primarily to extract grain to feed the cities and support urban production.
The communes, despite their revolutionary rhetoric, became instruments for draining the countryside rather than developing it.
This represented an awkward contradiction. The communes were supposed to bring industry to rural areas, to develop the countryside, to prove that China could achieve communism through a different path than the Soviet Union. Instead, they concentrated the burden of national development on the backs of peasants who had the least power to resist.
A Comparative View
It's worth noting what didn't happen. Soviet collectivization in the 1930s had proceeded through tremendous violence and sparked widespread sabotage. Peasants slaughtered livestock rather than surrender them to collective farms. The state responded with brutal repression.
Chinese collectivization, by contrast, proceeded relatively smoothly. Scholars attribute this to several factors. The process was more gradual, moving through several intermediate stages rather than attempting sudden transformation. The Land Reform had already reorganized rural society and created a network of state institutions in the countryside. And at each stage, productivity appeared to increase, creating apparent vindication for the next step.
This smoother transition made the eventual disaster more surprising. The system looked like it was working until suddenly it wasn't.
After the Great Leap
The communes survived the famine, reformed but not abolished. They remained the basic unit of rural administration from 1958 until 1983—a quarter century.
Over that time, they evolved considerably. The massive initial units broke into smaller pieces. Power devolved to brigades and teams that more closely resembled the cooperatives that had preceded the communes. Small private plots returned, allowing families to grow vegetables and raise animals for their own consumption or local sale.
The Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, brought new upheavals. The communes took on additional governmental and political functions. Ideological campaigns swept through rural areas. But by then, the system had found a kind of stability—not the revolutionary transformation Mao had envisioned, but a workable if often inefficient way of organizing agricultural production and rural administration.
When the communes finally ended in 1983, they were replaced by townships—administrative units that maintained governmental functions but allowed far more private economic activity. The production teams that had become the basic unit of agricultural work dissolved as the "household responsibility system" returned farming to individual families, who contracted to deliver fixed amounts to the state and kept whatever surplus they could produce.
The Legacy
What did the communes achieve? The question resists easy answers.
They failed at their grandest ambitions. China did not reach communism. Women were not fully liberated from housework—the communal dining halls eventually gave way to family kitchens again. Sustainable agricultural practices did not emerge. The countryside remained subordinate to urban development.
Yet the communes did build. Irrigation systems, roads, and other infrastructure emerged from mobilized labor. Some local industries took root. Rural health care and education expanded, however unevenly. The very existence of a system that could coordinate tens of millions of people, even imperfectly, represented an organizational achievement of sorts.
The human cost was immense. Beyond the famine dead, there was the disruption of family life, the loss of autonomy, the crushing of individual initiative, the years of grinding collective labor. These costs fell almost entirely on peasants—the very class the revolution claimed to serve.
Perhaps the deepest legacy lies in what the communes revealed about the gap between revolutionary vision and human reality. Mao imagined transforming society through sheer will and organization. He believed that properly mobilized masses could overcome material limitations, that the right system could produce the right outcomes, that human nature itself could be reshaped.
The countryside, and its people, proved more complicated than any ideology could capture.
Connections and Comparisons
The Chinese commune experiment wasn't unique. The Israeli kibbutz offered a voluntary version of collective living that persists to this day, though most have privatized to varying degrees. Soviet collective farms lasted from the 1930s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tanzania's ujamaa villages attempted African socialism through forced villagization in the 1970s, with similarly mixed results.
What distinguished the Chinese communes was their scale, their speed of implementation, and their totality. They didn't just reorganize agriculture—they attempted to reorganize life itself, from how people ate to where they slept to how they related to family members. This comprehensiveness made them both more ambitious and more destructive than comparable experiments elsewhere.
The reforms that followed the commune era transformed China into something Mao would hardly recognize—a country of private farmers, market pricing, and eventually industrial capitalism operating under Communist Party control. Whether this represents the failure or the evolution of his vision depends on how you understand what he was trying to achieve.
What seems clear is that the people's communes were good, as Mao declared, only for demonstrating the limits of what any system can accomplish when imposed upon millions of human beings living lives more complex than any ideology can encompass.