Two Decades of Rural Reform in China: An Overview and Assessment

China's countryside has been the target of dramatic change since 1949. The CCP directed redistribution in land reform, the transformation away from private farming to collectivization, and, most recently, the move back to household production. Throughout the PRC's 50 years, agriculture and peasants have paid for the regime's ambitious programme of industrialization, as the price scissors consistently favoured the urban over the rural producers. The state struggled with its food producers over the grain harvest, using ideology and organization to maximize both the production and extraction of the surplus from the countryside.