Land Utilization and Productivity in Prewar Chinese Agriculture: Preconditions for Collectivization

The distinguishing feature of the strategy for agricultural development adopted in China after the Communist takeover was the rapid series of organizational changes that occurred. Following the land reform, mutual aid terms were organized, followed in rapid succession by elementary producer cooperatives, advanced producer cooperatives, and finally the rural communes.' Although estimates of grain output prior to the Great Leap Forward differ widely, it is generally agreed that China's agricultural performance during this early period was much better than that of many other developing countries.2 The interesting and as yet unresolved question regarding that experience is the role that the organizational changes themselves played in raising output. It is useful to conceptually distinguish several aspects of the causal relationship between the organizational changes and agricultural productivity. The official Chinese literature places primary emphasis on the labor mobilization aspect as the key to increased productivity through investments in land reclamation, irrigation, and agricultural infrastructure. The collectivization process was the mechanism by which increasingly large amounts of rural labor could be mobilized. A second closely related aspect of the relationship is the whole question of peasant incentives.3 There is little doubt that the land reform raised the incomes of poor farmers by effectively eliminating the landlord class and allowing the peasants to capture the returns to the land and other assets, but the extent to which widespread increases in productivity directly resulted in C ina is unclear. Private land ownership was eliminated with the formation of the advanced producer cooperatives, so it would seem that those arguments that attribute substantial benefits to the incentives created by the establishment of individual property rights by land reform are not applicable to the present case. (For a survey of the literature on land reform and its effects, see Raup.) To the extent that landlord control was simply replaced fter a few years by state control, one could hardly argue that elimination of the former significantly improved production incentives in the long run. The present paper concerns a third aspect of the relationship between changes in organization and productivity, the extent to which static efficiency gains result from the induced reallocation of resources. The land reform consolidated fragmented holdings and effectively eliminated tenancy, transferring ownership from landlords to former tenants and poor peasant farm households; the formation of mutual aid teams formalized and extended cooperation between farm households in the use of labor, work animals, and capital implements; and the formation of the cooperatives increased the effective size of operational units substantially. Using data on prewar China, a simple regression analysis is used to relate tenancy, fragmentation of landholdings, and farm size to agricultural output in order to assess the potential for efficiency gains that existed prior to the Communist takeover and reorganization of agriculture. The existence of such potential would seem to be a necessary condition for significant static efficiency gains to result from organizational changes. The organization of the paper is as follows. After a brief discussion of some characteristics of land utilization in prewar China, the method of analysis is described, the variables defined, and the statistical results presented. The final section of the paper relates the results to results of a previous complementary study and offers some tentative conclu-