Rural development, Agrarian structure and the county in China

Abstract

In 1975, elements in the Chinese leadership attempted to establish a comprehensive policy line for rural development. Issued as a set of guidelines for setting up “Dazhai-type counties,” the program, publicized most notably in Hua Guofeng's speech at the First National Conference on Learning from Dazhai in Agriculture, reinterpreted and extended on a general level a set of policies and “experiences” that had been in evidence in Dazhai and Xiyang since the Cultural Revolution, and had grown out of earlier experiments with collective economic forms since the formation of the people's communes. A close look at these documents, especially at Hua's six-point program for building Dazhai-type counties, shows a general policy that incorporated many on-going tensions of the turbulent Cultural Revolution decade and may be considered an attempted compromise among existing positions, though, in light of present perspectives, with a radical “lean.”