Communes 1953-62

Question 1

How were the communes ideologically beneficial to the peasants?

Answer 1

• Communes organised both agricultural and industrial production as well as healthcare and education.
• Private ownership of land and livestock were abolished. Markets, denounced by the Party as evidence of rural capitalism, were banned.
• Income, which in the APC’s had been based on labour supplied, would now take into account the needs of the commune resident.

Question 2

How were the communes socially beneficial to the peasants?

Answer 2

• Mao believed that with women no longer forced to toil in the kitchen to prepare meals, or spend time raising their children, they would be able to escape domestic drudgery and join the men in the fields and factories.
• Propaganda celebrated these ‘iron women’ for taking their full equal role in economic production.
• An estimated 90 percent of women laboured in agriculture between 1958 and 1959.

Question 3

How were the communes harmful for the family life of the peasants?

Answer 3

• The traditional family meal was replaced by eating in a massive mess hall, surrounded by strangers. Parents lost influence over the raising of their children, grandparents became isolated from their relatives.
• Far from liberating women, life in communes was even harder. Women were forced to carry out harsh physical labour that had previously been the role of men.
• Ordinary family relations were completely destroyed between the peasantry class.

Question 4

How were the communes harmful with the failure of backyard furnaces to the peasants?

Answer 4

• The process of bringing people into the communes, or communization, successfully uprooted traditional ways of farming and living but often failed to replace them with viable or productive alternatives.
• People had to give up their personal belongings, including everyday items such as farming and kitchen tools to smelt in “backyard steel furnaces.” These items were supposed to be useless scrap materials, but cadres and other zealous commune members encouraged people to contribute more and more items, to the extent that some communities melted down all of their pots and pans.
• The resulting steel and iron was mostly useless, and people who had to make steel could not spend as much time working in the fields which worsened conditions during the Great Famine.