While a three-year lockdown over Covid-19 still rings fresh in the minds of most people in rural China, it goes without saying that anything from this period that hints at freedom curtailing can have a sensational run. Indeed, something of a similar caliber is already running its course in a remote hamlet in Xian, north China.
On 1st of April 2023, a notice by a roadside in this village warned the locals not to grow climbing vines such as beans, squashes and melons in their backyards in a bid to beautify the area.
A tweet on April 21st that went out @songpinganq has fueled online anger at the possible revival of Mao-style agriculture control policies and has garnered a lot of comments. Now, is it true that Chairman Zedong’s proletarian agricultural policies, starting in the ‘50s are back for real?
It is, in any case, a reminder of how small-scale farmers (called proletarians in Mao times) have always been the force behind agriculture in most farming nations.
The fact that the Songpinganq tweet has garnered over 1.4 million views so far and generated thousands of retweets highlights the importance of the matter.
The notice on 1st created untold fever of online activity on the very day it first appeared in a village in Xian. People from the hamlet scrambled for commentary, questioning the directive. Among others, they concluded that from now on they could not grow anything from zucchini to climbing vegetables, as all these were ‘forbidden crops.’
After Songpinganq’s tweet stormed the social media world with its graphic short video of police accompanying planters in the selective uprooting of some plants, all sorts of commentary broke loose. Some of the most heartfelt commentary evoked notions of state emergency logistics. This is a system where the government stocks food and rations the rest to the residents against a critical future date whereby there would be enough supplies for all. It was a sound system during the Cold War years when 80 percent of the rural population in China were farmers. Thus, they could have supplied the state with millions of tons of spare food in case of a war outbreak.
Another pinpoint implication in the tweet’s reply section includes the growing number of officers mandated with the control of the agricultural sector. One tweet reads the policy came to be “in 2018. Now it has 87000 agents.” Whether this is factual or not, it nevertheless points out another aspect of Mao time’s food policy. It was an all-out state machinery with designated officers mandated to enforce food policies. It paints a picture that the only way to make farmers accountable is to police them so that they can implement state goals in the interest of the people.
Food situation in China after the Covid-19 lockdown
This new equivocal measure reminiscent of Maoist approaches coincides with a time when China is experiencing food security issues in the aftermath of the Covid-19 global crisis. The lockdown had prevented proper food distribution for three years. The government reprinted an important priority document of December 2022, in March 2023. In the document, the state notes two related issues as very essential: increasing population (now at 1.4 billion) and food security. The latter comes to the forefront when one considers the need to feed such a high number of people.
State figures put the volume of grain needed to feed all Chinese at 700,000MT, besides 230,000MT of meat. The vegetable tonnage, however, is sky high at 1.9 million tonnes per year.
This issue of prioritizing agrarian-related matters as the chief goal of the ruling Communist Party did not begin as late as in 2018, however. By 2004, the government had made the food matter its number one priority and in 2013, President Xi Jinping reiterated it as still the number one policy of his administration. Zooming in five years later, a vacuum enters and blankets the policy due to the unanticipated Covid-19 lockdown. The control in movement dealt a blow to universal food distribution not only in China but globally.
It is no wonder, then, that President Xi has always affirmed that all local “bowls” ought to be brimful of local rice, and in particular brimming with “Chinese grains.” These, it is notable, are not the climbing vegetables that the April 1st law in a Xian village blacklisted. The aim, it appears, is to keep the effort of farming at par with the growing population by feeding it by local staples like rice. Indeed, GPS images highlight that of all food crops on the Chinese mainland, 70 percent are grains.
Related: Chinese Rice Prices Including Export and Wholesale
However, it is notable that the Mao-era agricultural land of 1957 has sharply decreased over the years: so has the degradation of land happened in tandem with the decrease in total acreage. Farmers in 2023 are using 7.4 times the number of fertilizer applications on their soil that their counterparts in the late ‘70s used.
There is clearly an unequal share of land against a rising population. The only solution-at least to some-is a return of collective dining as it happened during the Maoist era.
Chairman Mao’s agrarian policy
As soon as Chairman Mao Zedung claimed the authoritarian task as Supreme Leader, his initial moratorium was to dispatch the army in four-figure multitudes to make a beeline for the Chinese northeast. Back in the 1950s, this fertile zone was lush with forestland. The soldiers brought it all down and created homes for new collective families that would perpetuate what would come to be known as collective farming and collective dining.
The system was a hit that sustained the country for decades. Though deforested, the northeast region became famous for its productive dark soil. Even today, this formerly forested land belt still accounts for half of all rice production in all of China.
This Mao era agriculture control policy had already transformed land ownership into communes led by farmers’ cooperatives. Landlord ownership was gradually all but forgotten through forceful muscling of capitalist property rights. It came to be known as the land reform policy and in its wake were farmers in local-level cooperatives farming for both their subsistence and the state. The system, though, had an aim to reduce poverty but it left wealth in the state rather than in the farmers’ pockets.
Overall, the land reform policy of the Mao era had a major impact in equality in land ownership. More than 60 percent of the rural poor had now earned significant rights to land, of course through their cooperatives. Cooperatives led to an economic system of land ownership and they were answerable to the communes to which they subscribed.
Does Mao’s control system fit in the 21st century?
In 2013, president Xi Jinping came to power and tried to get a grip on land degradation and the sharp decrement of arable land, especially in areas of the northeast which Mao had transformed into an agricultural paradise. The question is: will he eventually recoup the glory of the 1950s? He has the insurmountable task of regaining the virgin forests that were there before, fertilizers from the 1970s onwards degraded the soil and cities grew and ate up the land.
The recent ‘command’ not to grow beans, melons and squashes in the backyard has evoked a vital question: can Mao-era policies work today? Technically, it cannot because it will be a violation of the constitution.
There is also the inexcusable option of attempting yet another desertification campaign in the modern times. The Mao agriculture control policy did this by cutting down forests in the northeast in the 1950s. Unless the state introduces new measures in these post-socialism times, it cannot copy cat Maoist policies note for note. As the engagement on the tweet we started with shows, they would meet with a viral and forceful reaction.
Conclusion
Therefore, even as the tweet raises the question on the likelihood of Mao era agriculture control being back in China, it remains to be seen whether the Xi Jinping administration can cope with a population literate in social media era reactions. This is a thing that Mao Zedong did not have to worry about. There was no social media back in the day, and now social media is powerful – yes, even in China.
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