Nanjie Village and Xiaogang Village: 

China's Rural Prosperity Path and Decline Path

Author: Zhong Zhishuo

Today I happened to read an article titled "Path to Death or Path to Light—Looking at the Path Dispute Between Xiaogang Village and Nanjie Village." The author begins by discussing: "All along, Nanjie Village, known as a 'communist village,' along with other villages following collective economy, have been subjects of controversy. Liberal factions represented by Southern Media [note: influential Chinese media group] view them as thorns in their side, constantly anticipating the bankruptcy of these collective economy villages and even fabricating many bankruptcy rumors. Meanwhile, many in leftist circles strongly support these collective economy villages, considering them exemplars of socialist economy whose achievements demonstrate the superiority of socialist systems and believing rural areas should vigorously develop this model."

The two paths of Nanjie Village and Xiaogang Village actually represent two development paths for Chinese rural areas: the collective economy development path and the individual management path.

I. From Mutual Aid Cooperation to People's Communes: China's Rural Path to Prosperity

After the founding of New China, public ownership of production means was not implemented from the beginning. After achieving victory in the New Democratic Revolution, the Communist Party of China responded to farmers' interest demands of "those who till should own the land," conducting land reform and establishing individual ownership of farmers' land and production means.

In our country, farmers' individual ownership originated from the farming-warfare system formed during the Qin State's Duke Xiao and Shang Yang's reforms in pre-Qin times. This system existed and developed for over two thousand years from the Qin State until the founding of the nation in 1949. From the Qin Dynasty through the Song and Yuan periods, this basic system was advanced globally. However, after Western Europe's capitalist production mode represented by workshop handicrafts emerged, social production gradually transformed toward modern production modes of division of labor and cooperation. Our country continued this self-sufficient, individual family management model through the Ming and Qing periods. Therefore, by New China's establishment in 1949, this family-unit individual production method was already at least two hundred years behind Western countries.

The Enclosure Movement in 16th-18th century England was a typical event of Western countries eliminating small-scale agriculture. Due to wool export growth and sheep farming development, landlords used violence or deception to forcibly occupy farmers' common and share lands, enclosing land with fences, hedges, and moats, transforming it into large pastures or farms owned by landlords and nobles, forcing farmers to become hired workers, flow to cities, or become beggars and vagrants. This was England's process of eliminating small-scale agriculture and England's agricultural capitalization process. "The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West" (Marx and Engels, "The Communist Manifesto," p. 28, 1949 edition). The 1840 Opium War, where tiny England defeated the Qing Empire with its hundreds of millions of people using just over ten thousand troops and warships within a few years, was not only due to capitalist production mode's rise, but more importantly because the Qing Dynasty, inheriting over two thousand years of feudal imperial system, had become thoroughly corrupt, morally bankrupt, and lost popular support, lacking the ability to organize masses against foreign enemies.

Against the backdrop of capitalism's two-to-three-hundred-year development, small farmers' individual management was already a backward, outdated production mode. This production mode would either be eliminated by capitalism (similar to England's Enclosure Movement) or gradually transition through cooperation to modern production modes based on public ownership of land and production means. Therefore, household individual management could only be a temporary transitional production mode.

Precisely under this international background, particularly after individual farming led to polarization trends, mutual aid groups emerged as farmers' cooperative methods in our rural areas, later developing into cooperatives. Cooperatives developed from elementary to advanced stages, completing the transformation from individual to collective ownership of farmers' land and production means. Finally, advanced cooperatives were further standardized into the People's Commune system. After three years of trials revealed problems, the central government adjusted the People's Commune system to "three-level ownership with production teams as the foundation." From 1962 onward, People's Communes actually entered normal development tracks. In fact, excluding the exploration period from 1958-1961, People's Communes' normal development lasted only about twenty years from 1962-1983. However, during these twenty-plus years, People's Communes created favorable environments suitable for laborers' survival and development.

Farmers had their own collective organization. Many things previously impossible were accomplished during the People's Commune period, enabling Chinese agriculture to fundamentally transform from primitive to scientific cultivation within just over twenty years. Production teams established basic systems fully embodying labor ownership rights. Every commune member could both decide production teams' major affairs and determine team leaders' appointments and dismissals through member assemblies, and participate in production teams' output distribution based on labor input. This system embodying laborers' democratic control and distribution according to labor was unique to People's Communes. Commune members participating in collective production could truly achieve "more work, more gain," satisfying themselves and their families' needs through honest labor, meeting their public needs. During the People's Commune period, families with couples raising three, four, or five children were very common. This was because the labor rights system made members' income directly connected both to their labor input and collective production results, creating an ecological environment where more labor could yield more returns. Additionally, members had collective care for struggling families and guarantees for childless elderly. Some families temporarily fell into difficulty due to many children and few laborers; production teams would provide care based on actual situations to help them through difficulties. For childless elderly, five-guarantee systems ensured their later years. People's Commune members' advantages also manifested in good educational environments.

From having no schools to production brigades having elementary schools and communes having middle and high schools; from having no books to read to 2-3 yuan per semester fees—for members, this was blessing. People's Communes popularized healthcare systems. When members fell ill, brigades had clinics, communes had hospitals; only serious illnesses required county trips—convenient and inexpensive. People's Commune members' prosperity also showed in low marriage costs. Young men and women advocated prospering through hard work; ordinary people faced little pressure in starting families and careers. More importantly, People's Communes' advantages included cadre teams truly serving people and connecting with masses. Cadres working deeply in communes and brigades, eating and laboring with farmers, became prevalent good practices then.

Though People's Communes ended in 1983, they fundamentally reformed our agricultural production's basic conditions, achieving agricultural electrification and irrigation, scientific farming and management, and beginning agricultural mechanization and rural industrialization trends. However, since our agricultural modernization process had just completed its startup period without entering the harvest period of significantly increased farmer income from improved labor productivity after agricultural mechanization and rural industrialization, plus the benefits of rural urbanization in place, this caused much dissatisfaction with People's Communes. Fortunately, units like Zhoujia Village, Huaxi Village, and Nanjie Village persisting with collective economy continued developing, actually completing the three development stages People's Communes hadn't finished: agricultural mechanization development, rural industrialization development, and rural urbanization in place. With collective economy's further development, the portion meeting public needs in distribution according to labor has achieved distribution according to need for collective members' major family expenses like food, housing, education, marriage, healthcare, and elderly care in places like Zhoujia Village and Nanjie Village, realizing fundamental transformation from primarily distribution according to labor to primarily distribution according to need.

Connecting the development of collective economy units like Zhoujia Village, Huaxi Village, and Nanjie Village with People's Communes' complete development process, we see our agriculture and rural areas developing from primitive production and living conditions toward modern agriculture and rural development. This is a development picture from common hard struggle to common prosperity, from socialist production modes toward communist production and living modes.

II. From Production Teams to Individual Farming: China's Rural Path to Decline

Browsing headlines, I saw netizens upload two photos of farmers' field work after the dissolution of large collectives in the 1980s: one shows a couple pulling and pushing while plowing; another shows a family of three with the woman supporting the plow from behind while father and son pull in front. Such scenes are heartbreaking. Actually, these situations aren't rare. Even today, forty years later, visiting rural areas, you'll still see such primitive cultivation scenes. When land was first divided, farmers faced enormous pressure. With individual cultivation, you needed production tools, but with collectives dissolved, everything had to be figured out yourself. For example, without tractors for plowing, and individual households unable to afford draft animals, only manual labor remained for land preparation. You also had to establish your own threshing machinery—700-800 yuan expense—plus equip yourself with sprayers, etc. Logically, our industrial development had long provided conditions for comprehensive agricultural mechanization. But individual household farming made mechanization very impractical: each family's contracted land was just a few mu divided into several plots. Establishing agricultural machinery yourself lacked both capability and cost-effectiveness. Hiring specialized machinery services, your small plots couldn't generate sufficient work volume—machines just turned circles in fields. After coming once or twice, they stopped coming. What could you do? Either farm manually or abandon the fields.

For farmers, initially dividing into individual households seemed liberating—they were free. Without collective constraints, they could decide how to work themselves. For instance, while collectives required intensive cultivation, now they could be casual, choosing the easiest methods. But this brought various problems: among individual farming households, those capable of specialized sideline businesses and developing into individual bosses were very few, while the vast majority could only grow grain. As market-oriented reforms deepened, departments that previously provided public services in communes became profit-seeking units, fundamentally changing farmers' living environments and conditions. On one hand, while grain prices rose somewhat, the increase was limited, while costs for fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, mechanized farming, etc., rose dramatically, determining that farmers' income from farming increased limitedly or even declined. On the other hand, commercialized education and healthcare, plus the shift from "Labor is Most Glorious" to "Everything Looks Toward Money," significantly increased living costs. "Can't afford medical care, can't afford education, can't afford housing, can't afford wives, can't afford children" became reality.

The farming industry that once could support large families and rural areas that could support three to five children now couldn't even support the farmers themselves through farming. Thus, working outside became young people's inevitable choice, gradually turning rural areas into empty shells. When large numbers of young people chose to leave rural areas, agriculture was actually abandoned. Online doggerel describes today's rural areas: "Returning to villages during New Year, tears fill the handkerchief upon return; abandoned fields hide wild rabbits, no farmers seen. Hard to find childhood companions, mostly see elderly and grandchildren. Young adults play mahjong, grandparents tend young ones. Many children left behind, parents nowhere seen. Occasionally see two students, constantly playing phones. Blue sky remains, but clear water nowhere found. Though local accent unchanged, faces now strange. Red brick, green tile buildings—luxurious houses empty of people."

Recently, I met a village official and learned about current farmers' situations: ordinary contracted households no longer farm themselves, transferring responsibility fields to large farming households for 1,200 yuan rent. In this rent, large farmers pay 400 yuan themselves, the state subsidizes 400 yuan, and village committees supplement 400 yuan. This means in today's rural areas, even farmers must be supported by others.

I saw an article "China Youth Daily | Rural Elderly Suicide... Shocking!" (Liu Yanwu, Kunlun Policy Network, April 20, 2024, Anhui) specifically introducing rural elderly suicide situations. Liu Yanwu, a lecturer in Wuhan University's Sociology Department and principal investigator of the National Social Science Fund project "Sociological Research on Rural Elderly Suicide," visited over 40 villages in 11 provinces including Hubei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Henan, and Guizhou. The article mentions Liu Yanwu's findings: Using 400-plus days of village survey data, he drew a curve of "rural elderly suicide rates": starting from 1990, Chinese rural elderly suicide rates rose dramatically and remained high. This contrasts sharply with a recent University of Hong Kong research report stating China's suicide rate plummeted by half over the past decade-plus, "falling to among the world's lowest," with fewer than 10 suicides per 100,000 people. "China's overall suicide rate is declining," Liu Yanwu told China Youth Daily reporters, then continued in heavy tones, "But rural elderly find it increasingly difficult to escape this path (suicide), perhaps their unique way of diluting and digesting modern aging society's pain." Compared to biological sons, "medicine son" (drinking pesticide), "rope son" (hanging), "water son" (drowning) are more reliable. Lin Muwen's death caused few ripples in the village where the elderly had lived his whole life. Even the elderly's son, a former village party secretary, didn't blame his wife as Liu Yanwu expected, but was "very calm": "People must live with the living; you can't live with the dead, right?" Liu Yanwu said suicide was viewed as normal, even reasonable locally. Villagers felt no need to discuss and offend his son—"the dead are dead." Not only ordinary villagers, but rural doctors often shared villagers' attitudes toward suicide, "viewing it as normalized death." Especially when elderly got sick and "couldn't endure," choosing suicide, rural doctors "don't even consider this suicide."

The article mentions: "After 2000, rural elderly suicide rates rose particularly fast and reached extremely high levels.' Liu Yanwu said with considerable worry, describing this situation as 'extremely severe' wouldn't be excessive." Liu Yanwu believes behind the pathological suicide wave is collective anxiety brought to middle-aged people by extreme economic differentiation—how to travel light in market society, participate in fierce social competition and win. Undoubtedly, elderly, being more vulnerable than them, became burdens they wanted to shed. "My own burden is so heavy, how can I care for the old?" some interviewed farmers told Liu Yanwu frankly. As China's aging deepens, today's Jingshan [note: county mentioned in study] might be many places' tomorrow. Each year, Liu Yanwu spends three months doing fieldwork in farmers' homes.

According to Liu Yanwu's statistics, the main cause of rural elderly suicide is survival difficulties, followed by escaping disease pain—together accounting for 60% of direct causes, followed by emotional problems. "In other words, reducing elderly non-natural deaths requires solving three problems: not starving to death, not dying from disease, not dying from loneliness." Liu Yanwu suggests establishing "new collectivism" through semi-market, semi-state home care to alleviate current rural elderly care and medical contradictions. Frequent rural elderly suicide reflects many problems in today's rural areas and provides bad omens for the future. Facing elderly's living conditions makes young people doubt the meaning of having children or even marrying.

Practice is the standard for testing truth. As a reform pioneer, Xiaogang Village, through their actions, revealed the correctness and merits of individual versus collective management. Xiaogang, the "first reform village," hasn't lived better than other places due to land division and individual farming. In modern social competition, individual farming is the least competitive method. Xiaogang Village's changes temporarily solved food problems but didn't solve prosperity problems for twenty to thirty years. Hence came provincial government-dispatched first secretaries, repeated collectivization efforts, and movements learning from Nanjie Village and Dazhai Village...

Editor: Feizhou