Home › Features › Essays › Carrot and Stick in Rural China

Carrot and Stick in Rural China

By Wolf Ladejinsky
October 1957
Article Summary and Author Biography

WOLF LADEJINSKY, Adviser to the Government of Viet Nam; formerly with the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and former scientific consultant on the staff of SCAP, Tokyo

Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

EVER since the Communists became masters of China, they have sought to create the impression of a giant in full control of a well-planned and efficient economic and political machine, marching from success to success. Mao Tse-tung's pronouncements of February and March of this year are perhaps the frankest testimony we have had indicating that the picture has been overdrawn. We may not know all the motives for Mao's rejection of that sacred premise of Communist theology--the absence of conflicting interests between the Communist State and the people it rules--but certainly one of them is the seriousness of China's economic problems and the troublesome political issues to which they have given rise.

This is especially evident from the failure of the Communists to attain complete mastery of rural China. Within a period of eight years the Communists both accumulated and dissipated most, if not all, of their political capital in the countryside. The slogan of "land to the landless," so deftly used in the Communist drive for power, is a painful memory for the millions who accepted it at face value. Not only have the landlords lost their property through the land distribution program, but those who received the land and those who had long worked their own land were subsequently deprived of it by forced collectivization. Partly because of the demands of an ambitious industrialization program, and partly because of doctrinaire assumptions, the "pragmatic" Chinese Communists have proved to be as oblivious to peasant welfare as have the Russian Communists. They are harvesting a crop of discontented peasants with interests and objectives quite at variance with those of the State. Yet the future of China and the success of the Communists are inextricably tied to the course of events in the village.

II

For many years past, it has been widely recognized that institutional and technical agrarian reform in China was long overdue. Before the war, China (including Manchuria) had about 250 million acres of cultivated land and a population of 450-500 million, of which 70 percent was rural. With the rapid population growth in the past century, the average size of a farm holding had been reduced to between three and four acres, one of the smallest in the world...

This is a premium article

You must be a logged in Foreign Affairs subscriber to continue reading. If you wish to continue reading this article please subscribe , or activate your online account to get full online access.

Buy PDF

Buy a premium PDF reprint of this article.

Related

Essay, Oct 1967
China's Next Phase
Robert S. Elegant

No people is fonder of reading the future from the past than the Chinese, perhaps because no other people possesses a past which has for more than three millennia been as minutely recorded and as consistently glorious. The Chinese passion for their own history has bred a propensity for repeating both past triumphs and past mistakes. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were in many ways in thrall to their own voluminous and detailed chronicles. When the intellectual sat down to the obligatory study of those chronicles, the profuse commentaries thereon and other quasi- sacred works of great antiquity, he was quite consciously performing an act of affirmation. He was at once affirming his personal commitment to the spiritual and political values of the great central tradition and renewing that two-thousand-year-old tradition. He was excluding any radical change in those values or the society based upon them, and he was severely restricting the possibilities of evolutionary change. Alterations did, of course, occur, some of them quite sweeping. But they occurred within the framework of the central tradition-or, at least, the Chinese could pretend that they occurred within that framework. When they considered the probable shape of the future they could therefore assume that it would, with some variations, repeat the past in perpetuity.

Read
Essay, Mar/Apr 2001
China's Cyber-Strategy
Nina Hachigian

The Chinese Communist Party is simultaneously fostering the growth of the Internet and weaving a web of regulations to limit network content and use. But regulations cannot entirely block Internet communication, and the state's previously solid control over information is shifting to the citizens. If a future economic or political crisis spurs a challenge to party rule, this shift in information control may decide the outcome.

Read
Essay, Jul 1967
Mao's China: The Decline of a Dynasty
L. La Dany

For a long time it was thought that the way the People's Republic of China was being governed opened a new chapter in Chinese history. Some scholars argued that the communist system in China was a continuation of Confucianism, but a closer look disclosed little resemblance. The country was subject to spasmodic, repetitious political campaigns; the national economy constantly went through major reshuffles-land reform, socialization, communization, the retreat from communization and the Great Leap Forward. Traditional Chinese values were repudiated or ignored. Even the old Chinese concern for "face" seemed to be disregarded. Everybody was expected to expose in public meetings the evil words and evil deeds of friends and colleagues, of parents and brothers. The traditional Chinese family was severely disrupted, though, as the old Chinese proverb says, it is useless to attack a city if the hearts are not won over. The hearts were not won over, but for a long time it appeared that the régime was solidly established and enjoying general support, if not from love, then from fear.

Read