The CCP’s Rural Organization Problems Before and After the Founding of the People’s Republic of China - Centering on the Cooperative Controversy -

This article aims to identify cooperative policies and debates surrounding cooperatives in the early years of the People's Republic of China, and in doing so, examine the CCP leadership's perception of rural organizational issues. Liu Shouqi's New Democracy-era initiative of rural economic development and rural organizing around supply and marketing cooperatives underwent a major shift less than two years after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Through the intervention of Mao Zedong, cooperativization centered on production organizations was promoted. This shift was driven by fears that capitalist elements were reappearing in the countryside after the land reform. Liu envisioned cooperatives as the main rural organization during the new democracy, organizing dispersed small producers outside of the main economic sectors directly controlled by the state. Liu's idea was to link people to the state economy through material benefits, rather than the party-state or party-state-led state economy. To better understand and evaluate Liu's cooperative concept, it is worth noting its relationship to the Soviet model. In terms of transitional organization and party-state initiative, Liu's idea of cooperatives is not very different from Mao Zedong's position on cooperatives in practice. Liu Shouqi's new democratic economic policy and cooperative theory was a theory of socialist transformation modeled on the Soviet Union, and he simply had a different understanding of the transitional period than Mao Zedong.