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But China was a poor country. It was only beginning to industri- alize. It didn’t have very many factories. It didn’t have a well- developed system of roads, bridges, canals, or railways along which raw materials, goods, and equipment could move. Its work- force was largely uneducated. With these and other disadvan- tages, how could China quickly become an economic giant? Mao looked to rural China for the answer. It had a vast supply of peasant labor. But in Mao’s view, these workers weren’t being used efficiently. Too many were engaged full time in agriculture. A new way of organizing rural society could change that. In early 1958, the Chinese government ordered the replace-

This Chinese poster from 1956 describes a 10-year plan for the development of agriculture. The illustrations show Mao Zedong in a meeting, peasants in a field with a poster of Mao, two people with vegetables, and a man on horseback with a herd of horses.

ment of agricultural producers’ cooperatives with much-larger “people’s communes.” These would be headed by a manager and a central committee, all of whom were members of the Communist Party. On average, each people’s commune com- prised around 60 villages and contained about 22,000 people. Each commune was subdivided into village-sized “production brigades.” The brigades, in turn, were composed of “produc-

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Communism: Control of the State