Group Farming and Work Incentives in Collective-Era China

This article will address the question of work incentives under the systems of group farming that operated in China between 1955 and the early 1980s. Emphasis will be given to material incentives at both individual and group levels, although other types of incentive will be touched upon. The article attempts to answer two major questions: (1) What work incentives were operative in Chinese group farming between the mid-1950s and the adoption of baogan daohu; and (2) could Chinese agriculture have achieved 1980s-like performance under group farming if alternative policies had been pursued beginning in 1955? I will address these questions by reference to both the literature on the economic theory of agricultural and nonagricultural producers' cooperatives, and the empirical social science literature on Chinese collective agriculture, including works by noneconomists such as Chan, Madsen, and Unger's Chen Village (1984).