How far do you agree that, in the years 1949–62, communal living was more beneficial
than harmful to Chinese peasants? (20 marks)
I strongly disagree with the fact that communal living was more beneficial than harmful
for Chinese peasants. Communal living was when APCs merged together to form a
commune. Mao believed pooling resources together would create more produce, and
therefore expanding the economy. Despite this being true in the short term, there was a lot
of negative impacts of communal living. I will be exploring these using criteria: types of
people impacted, amount of people impacted, types of impacts and indirect consequences.
One reason why communal living was more harmful than beneficial was that it abolished
private farming. Villagers had no choice but to join a commune, even thought it was meant
to be “voluntary”. Therefore, there was no need for personal possessions as everything was
shared, and this included people’s land. This meant motivation for the Chinese peasants
decreased as the state was providing for everyone’s needs, so no matter how hard the
peasants worked, the rewards were the same. The type of impact this would’ve created is
that the peasants work rate decreased, which ultimately led to the Great Famine as there
wasn’t enough food to go round. Furthermore, communal living was set up partly due to
enthusiastic cadres in Henan claiming local APCs wanted to merge. This was most likely
false as they just wanted to please Mao. The first People’s Commune was had over 9000
households. Over 2 years, 120 million households were in communes. This demonstrates
the huge scale of impact communal living had, as it affected hundreds of millions of
people, both in the long term – the Great Famine -, and short term. All these reasons also
illustrate the power of Mao, because cadres would overstate how well APCs were doing
due to their fear of Mao, and this made Mao create communes. In conclusion, the decrease
in motivation was harmful to Chinese peasants, as they didn’t do as much work as they
would do previously and this contributed the Great Famine, which killed 50 million
people.
To continue, another reason why communal living was more harmful than beneficial was
due to the introduction of Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism was named after the Ukrainian
agricultural scientist, Lysenko. Mao introduced an 8-point programme, based off his ideas
and his official policy. This included increasing fertilisation and pest control. Communal
living essentially led to Lysenkoism, because Mao abolished private farming, as there was
no need for it since everyone was part of a commune, therefore he introduced the policies
of Lysenkoism onto people in communes, as it would be a lot easier to carry out. This
shows how Lysenkoism is a factor in how communal living was more harmful, because the
pest control policy was disastrous since the peasants would bang pots together to prevent
the birds from landing, but the result meant insects multiplied uncontrollably as they
weren’t being eaten by the birds, and instead the insects destroyed food crops. This in the
long term led to the Great Famine, as it resulted into a food shortage. Furthermore, the
policy of increasing fertilisation led to destruction of homes, as the walls contained animal
dung, which was useful to increase it. This made people homeless, which is the opposite of
the whole theory of what a commune is supposed to be. This affected all people living in
the communes, and ultimately it led to the Great Famine, as Mao got rid of all intellectuals
during the antis-campaign, thus Mao had to make do with Lysenko, and this all stemmed
from communal living. To conclude, it’s clear that communal living was harmful in the
long-term, and ultimately led to the Great Famine.
