History of the Agricultural Cooperative Movement

Author: Luo Pinghan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-03-01
Features: After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, family contract responsibility system was widely implemented in rural areas of our country. On the surface, it seemed to return to the individual management state before agricultural cooperativization. As a result, some people expressed the sentiment, "If I had known it would be like this today, why did I do it back then?" Some even believed that the agricultural cooperativization movement back then was entirely unnecessary and redundant. In fact, the family contract responsibility system, characterized by the basic feature of household contract responsibility, has a fundamental difference from the human agricultural before agricultural cooperativization. This is that before cooperativization, the main production asset of land was privately owned by individual farmers. After the implementation of household contract responsibility, the management method changed from collective production to individual labor of farmers, but the ownership of land remained collective, and farmers had a contractual relationship with the collective. The purpose of agricultural cooperativization back then was to change the private ownership of main production assets into the achievements of the cooperativization movement, and it was the development and deepening of the cooperativization cause under the new historical conditions.