ABSTRACT
China’s economic achievements under communist rule have been impressive, in all likelihood surpassing what the country could have achieved under a less disciplined regime in peacetime. The Chinese development strategy includes the countryside as well as the city, in hopes of overcoming the rural-urban disparities in growth and living conditions that typically plague industrializing countries early on. In large communes like Huadong, relatively few brigades seem to correspond to traditional village or marketing communities. Huadong People’s Commune lies thirty miles north of Guangzhou, a major Chinese city and the capital of Guangdong Province on China’s southern coast. People in Huadong’s region have had fairly intense contact with foreigners, including Western missionaries and traders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Japanese soldiers during World War II. Older Huadong members recall that before the Communist period life in the area was hard, as it was in so many other rural communities in China.
