THE TACHAI CAMPAIGN AND CHINA'S RURAL POLICY, 1964-1979.

摘要

This study deals with China's basic rural policy issues, the changing nature of the Chinese leadership's consensus and dispute with regard to them, and a complex relationship among power struggle, policy change, and local response on the basis of a detailed analysis of the Tachai model and the Tachai Campaign in the post-Great Leap Chinese countryside.; China's basic rural policy issues center around China's historic search for a proper relationship between social revolution and economic development, which has been debated for generations throughout modern Chinese history. After 1949, there evolved serious differences of opinion among Chinese leaders over such broad ideological problems as how to balance with "politics" with "economics" as well as over some specific rural policies such as the extent of the leadership's concession to "capitalist tendencies" among the peasants. Generally speaking, the "conservative" leaders place greater emphasis on economic development and "efficient" economic policies, while the "radicals" stress the importance of political, ideological and organizational work to restrict "capitalist tendencies" among the peasants and "revisionist" effects of the conservatives' policies.; Despite the existence of serious disputes, however, the Chinese leadership was able to maintain a broad consensus or compromise on rural policies from 1949 to 1957, and also on the shift to the Great Leap Forward. The failure of the Great Leap created uncertainty and conflict, but the leadership was able to reach a compromise policy at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee held in 1962 on the basis of a balanced representation of the Party's "radical" line on classes and class struggle, on the one hand, and the Party's more or less "conservative" rural economic policies, on the other hand. These compromise policy guidelines remained basically unchanged in pre-Cultural Revolution periods and in the 1970s, even though the ambiguity of a compromise policy produced conflicting interpretations at both national and local levels.; In post-Great Leap China leadership included both "radical" and "conservative" elements, and hence one finds conflicting themes in every period--probably with a couple of exceptions--on rural policies. The evolution of the Tachai Campaign of 1964-1979 shows the coexistence of both radical and conservative views. At the same time, however, it also shows that the Tachai Campaign policies were generally formulated in accordance with the 1962 compromise. The Tachai model also reflects the leadership's compromise. Even though it was essentially "radical" in its emphasis on mass mobilization for rapid development of the rural economy and on the expansion of the collective economy, it stresses a direct linkage between "revolution" and "production," and an implementation of some Great Leap goals with more or less conservative approaches.; The emergence of a compromise leadership and policy in post-Great Leap China was due to the fragmentation of the leadership as well as the leadership's learning experience from both the Great Leap debacle and a rather drastic retreat from the Great Leap policies, which upset China's long-cherished goal of simultaneous achievement of social transformation and economic development. In addition, the diversification and division of Chinese society makes it increasingly difficult for national policy to be uniformly implemented. Local reactions to the Tachai Campaign indicate that socio-economic conditions of local units are no less important than political factors in affecting their performance in the Tachai Campaign.; In post-Mao China a compromise leadership and policy is seriously challenged by the conservative leadership. Given the fact that both radical and conservative forces are deeply rooted in Chinese politics and society, however, it would appear to be difficult for post-Mao leadership to abandon compromise politics in the near future.