The commune head was elected. In the commune, which was then the basic economic unit of the Oroqens, all production tools were communally owned. The commune members hunted together, and the game bagged was equally distributed to all families. This gave rise to bartering on a bigger scale and the emergence of private ownership. That brought about profound social, economic changes.
Individual families quit the clan commune and became basic economic units.
The clan commune had disintegrated, though members of the same clan did live or hunt together in the same area. Most soldiers sent to fight in Xinjiang, Yunnan, Taiwan and other places lost their lives. Most of them later fled back to hunt in the forests. A few whom the warlords had made officers became landlords who hired Oroqen, Han, Manchu and Daur laborers to open up large tracts of land for crops. The Japanese troops, who occupied northeast China in 1931, pulled down the cottages and smashed the farm implements of the remaining Oroqen farmers and drove them into the forests again.