Lesson 4-What was life like in China's Great Communes? Flashcards
Define commune.
Organised regions were collectives were grouped
What are the Ten Guarantees?
Guarantees of:
Meals
Clothes
Housing
Schooling
Medical attention
Burial
Haircuts
Theatrical entertainment
Money for heating in winter
Money for weddings
What are Happiness Homes?
Homes for elderly set up in communes
Define irrigation.
The agricultural process of applying controlled amounts of water to land to assist in the production of crops
What is Utopian Socialism?
Socialism reached by persuading Capitalists to share their wealth for the greater good.
Define abolition.
Bring to an end of ban
What is Lysenkoism?
The Soviet theories of improved crop yields which earned the support of Joseph Stalin.
What is Sparrowcide?
The extermination of sparrows is also known as the smash sparrows campaign
Define Agit-Prop.
Political (originally Communist) propaganda, especially in art or literature.
What is Four Pests Campaign?
One of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.
What were peasants in communes divided into?
Production brigades
Where were peasants brought together in communes?
Communal canteens and dormitories
Who were peasants working lives dictated by in communes?
New management teams
Give examples of industrial enterprises communes would organise.
Flour mills
Brick works
Tool repair workshops
Backyard furnaces
Communes were meant to be a unit for a local government and would take over responsibility for providing what local services?
Education
Public health
Policing
Militia
Childcare
Canteen facilities
What was the communes providing local services meant to do for women?
Free them up so they could work
What were parents encouraged to abandon in favour of?
Bourgeois emotional attachments in favour of a regimented lifestyle where they worked for long hours purely for communal good.
What did freeing peasants from domestic responsibilities mean?
They could be redeployed to work on projects.
Give examples of projects peasants were freed from domestic responsibilities to work on.
Water conservancy
Irrigation schemes
Building new roads or bridges
What was there some talk of in communes?
Utopian Socialism and moving away from a monetary economy
What did some communes claim to provide?
Ten Guarantees
Once the countryside had been transformed by communal living, what was planned next?
That communal living should be extended to cities
Unlike the collective where membership had been voluntary, peasants had no choice but to be put into the commune.
True or false?
True
What happened to a peasant’s private property after they had been put into the commune?
They had to surrender all of it without compensation.
Because there was no need to farm for private need since private farming was abolished, who was food provided by in the communes?
The government provided food within the communes centrally.
Under the collectives what was issued for good work?
Work points
Why were work points pointless in the communes?
The state were providing equally for the needs of the people within the communes.
What did the removal of work points mean in the communes?
There was a reduced incentive to work as rewards were the same regardless.
Who were workers compelled to work by to some extent?
Team leaders
How did communes have increased control?
Had a military element.
Give an example of how communes included a military element.
People were being placed into militia to be trained between ages of 15-50
Who was Lysenkoism named after?
Trofirm Lysenko
Who was Trofirm Lysenko?
Ukrainian agricultural scientist
When had Stalin relied on the theories on Lysenko?
In the aftermath of the Russian famine of the early 1930s
What did Mao do in 1958, in regards to Lysenkoism?
Made it an official policy and drafted it in an eight-point programme based on his ideas
Give examples of some of Lysenko’s common sense ideas.
Development of new farm tools
Use of new breeds of seeds
Improved field management
Increased irrigation
Which ideas of Lysenko were potentially dangerous when actioned together?
Close planting
Deep ploughing
Increased fertilisation
Pest control
What idea of Lysenko was the most obviously catastrophic?
Pest control
Why was pest control most obviously catastrophic?
Focused on killing birds to prevent them eating seeds.
This upset the ecological balance, leading to a growth in insects.
How did peasants kill birds (sparrows) to prevent them from eating seeds?
Peasants wasted hours banging pots and pans together in order to prevent them from landing, until they fell exhausted from the sky
What happened as a result of growing insects?
Locusts and other vermin like rats multiplied and destroyed grain stocks
What did the focus on increased fertilisation lead to?
The destruction of thousands of peasants houses.
Why were peasants houses destroyed because of the focus on increased fertilisation?
They were ploughed into the ground as the animal dung used to build the walls was deemed to be useful for fertilisation
What happened to the peasants whose houses were destroyed?
Thousands of peasants sought accommodation wherever they could find it.
How did some of the daily duties of communal living impact the lives of those who lived in them?
Not allowed to cook at home-forced to use collective canteens
Food given out according to merit
Underwent military training everyday
Each morning chief would decide when day started and ended
How did work points impact daily life in communes?
Notion of wages disappeared
If you were not on attendance list, your work points would be taken away-leading to less food
How has their been competition between communes?
Awards ceremonies for best performing communes
Launching a satellite-led to falsification of figures
Certain communes claiming to have created a few tonnes of steel a da
How was the apparently ‘successful’ harvest of 1958?
Lying at all levels of the party
Lots of talk amongst the party about lots of good but at a local level there clearly was a problem
Area like Danchen which was fertile had little crops
Tax paid by cadres in grain- all the amount harvested taken due to falsified figures
Give examples of suffering as a result of the spring harvest of 1959.
Eating tree bark
Villager eating white mice
Adult collapsing whilst trying to eat bean paste, dying with food still in his mouth
Entitled to 250 kilograms a day- cadres took more than share
Severely beaten and attacked for stealing food
Sexual exploitation
