ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the varying fortunes of Chinese collective agriculture with reference to a simple model grounded in recent social science thinking on institution building and the economics of organization. It describes Chinese agriculture and village organization before the revolution. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy for rural development and increased food output through collective agriculture ruled out exogeneous sources of change, such as state investment in agricultural technology, rural industries, transportation, and infrastructure. The chapter discusses the basic design for collective agriculture in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It explores a simple model of the causal relationships between work incentives, team size, governance, and agricultural productivity and output. Finally, the chapter examines the model against the evidence of a quarter of a century of collective agriculture in a single village, and draws some conclusions.
