ABSTRACT
China has always been, and remains, a predominantly rural society: consequently, social change in the countryside has had a critical impact on China’s overall development. During the implementation of the radical policies of land reform and collectivisation in the 1950s, the old pre-revolutionary rural social structure was attacked and it appeared that it had been destroyed. In its place were installed social organisations that could be controlled more effectively by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) bureaucratic and military machine. The history of these developments was outlined in Chapter 4.
