Peasants, ideology, and new incentive systems: Jiangsu province, 1978-1981

When in 1978 China's leaders called for reform in the rural incentive structures and the institution of a "responsibility system" (shengchan zhiren zhï) for agriculture, few analysts or, for that matter, Chinese could have predicted what the outcome of those changes would be. The original policy aimed at establishing a wide variety of organizational and remunerative techniques that linked the income of the individual peasant and his family to the quality or quantity of the agricultural goods produced. Yet, by 1983, the decollectivization of rural China had been completed and the individual household had again reemerged as the primary economic unit in rural China.1 How did this transition occur? Although the case can be made that some localities were forced by higher level bureaucrats to decollectivize against their will, other areas responded to the positive economic opportunities offered by the new policies.