ABSTRACT
A common source of distortion in most accounts of policy formation is the failure to situate events in their historical context. The old district and township organs of rural administration, which had levied land taxes and arbitrarily arrested, imprisoned, and tortured peasants in the past, had lost their authority and had been replaced by the authority of the peasant associations. Mao’s investigation and report on the peasant movement in Hunan was an early example of an approach to political communication that would later be identified as “the mass line.” The poor peasant corps served another essential function, which was to train local cadres. Elections to the executive committees of the corps were held frequently, every three months at the township level. The campaign that undoubtedly had the greatest impact on closing the gap between a large, expensive, and remote government bureaucracy and isolated villages was the production movement.
