The Crafting of the Dengist Rural Development Strategy in Post- Mao China: 1978-88

Abstract

From the late 1970s for almost a decade post-Mao China witnessed momentous rural reforms. The focus on rural development emerged as it was no longer tenable to raise agricultural production with efficient costs and obtain a higher proportion of it for urban industrial supplies without attending to the peasants' interests and aspirations for a better standard of living. Any further muddling through the situation could have been politically costly for the party state. Post 1978, under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership a new rural development strategy was therefore devised, which was markedly different from the earlier Maoist strategy. This paper explores the course of the rural reforms since the Third Plenum that witnessed swift de-collectivization once reforms in the commune system were initiated and examines the party-state’s response to reforms induced emergent problems, to finally argue that under Deng’s leadership, the new framework of rural development that was instituted was informed by a logic of privatization, within the socialist economy that Mao had built. Contemporary China’s economic rise can be traced to these reforms.