Agriculture looks for ‘shoes that fit’: The production responsibility system and its implications

by the end of 1981 problems clearly recognized within the communes included low productivity, the failure to accumulate funds for modern inputs, inefficient and corrupt cadres, hidden unemployment, inability to stimulate growth in other than major crops and disappointingly low levels of peasant incomes in many counties. In north China, peasants in 1980 began to divide up the collective fields on communes into smaller plots for cultivation by households and labour groups. Since then the face of China has been altered — physically, politically and organizationally — by the creation of the ‘responsibility system’ largely outside party control and influence. ‘Document 75’ of September 1980 sanctioning some form of ‘production responsibility system’ was itself overtaken by events, as a bewildering variety of forms emerged, swamping the cadres. Practice was rapidly expanding beyond the theoretical discussions, or pronouncements of officials like Du Runsheng The paper describes each of the many forms of contracting between peasant groups and the State now current in China, with estimates of the relative proportions of the accounting units involved in each type (Table 3). New contradictions are already emerging in the changed rural set-up, partly because farm management problems bear similarities to those that confronted the open-field strip farming of the European Manor, while the incentive to have more hands on family farms contradicts official Chinese population policy.