Joining the Socialist Camp } 53
to end the debate: cooperatives were to be a transitional stage of several years,
to be followed by full-scale collectivization. Liu, Zhang, and others immedi-
ately endorsed Mao’s view. Collectivization of agriculture along Soviet lines
became the objective.
In April 1952, the Ministry of Agriculture and the North China Bureau of
the CCP sent the PRC’s first major agricultural delegation to the Soviet Union.
It stayed nearly six months studying the organization of collective agriculture
in the Soviet Union. Upon the delegation’s return to China, a full-scale pro-
paganda campaign was launched to educate China’s peasants about the bright
situation of collectivized agriculture in the Soviet Union, which they, China’s
farmers, would soon enjoy. Members of the recently returned delegation
gave talks and hosted seminars. Newspapers interviewed delegation mem-
bers and wrote articles depicting the glories of Soviet collective agriculture.
Soviet collective farmers were depicted as living in a virtual paradise, with
big homes, private yards, and horses, sheep, and cows of their own. Soviet
collective farmers had abundant food. They no longer feared natural disaster.
Productivity on farms was very high. Soviet collective farming was highly
mechanized. Everyone enjoyed riding on the tractor on sunny days. Soviet
farmers received subsidies from the state to support raising children. Photos
of happy Soviet collective farmers with their tractors accompanied articles.
The point of this propaganda was that China’s farmers should be joyful that
they would soon follow the Soviet path of collective farming.^45
Stalin’s lukewarm attitude toward expropriation of rich and middle peas-
ants was reflected in lack of actual movement in that direction in China while
he was alive. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, however, Mao began to push
for quick progress toward transition to socialism, including the full collectiv-
ization of farming. By the fall of 1953, he had won acceptance from other top
CCP leaders that over the next four years the CCP would push forward with
progressively “higher” types of cooperatives as transitional preparatory steps
for full-scale collectivization. In the meantime, propaganda educating peas-
ants about socialism, the glories of collective farming, socialist industrializa-
tion, and China’s Soviet future would continue. By the end of 1955, 63.3 percent
of peasant households were members of higher-level producers’ cooperatives.^46
Mao and the CCP were imposing on China a failed agricultural
model. A plausible case can be made for heavy state investment in the
industrial sector, where many new industries had to be established and
expanded. The same cannot be said for the collectivization of agricul-
ture. The Soviet Union’s agricultural sector was hugely unproductive.
One authoritative post-Stalin Soviet study found that overall agricul-
tural production fell from a base of 100 in 1928, the start of collectiv-
ization, to 81.5 by 1933, when collectivization was basically complete.
The number of livestock fell by half. In only two years, 1937 and 1941,
did collectivized agriculture exceed the precollectivization output.^47