People’s commune
인민공사
The large rural collective created in summer 1958 during the Great Leap by merging agricultural cooperatives, averaging about five thousand households and combining production, administration, militia and schooling in one unit. Communal dining halls and “free supply” distribution, the abolition of private plots and the mass mobilisation of labour for irrigation and steel were its marks, and as the unit of state procurement it magnified the Great Famine. After 1962 it survived with the production team as the basic accounting unit until the household responsibility system dissolved it in 1983.
In depth
The communes began as spontaneous mergers of cooperatives in Henan and elsewhere; after Mao praised them in August 1958 — “people’s communes are good” — and the Beidaihe conference endorsed them, they covered 99 per cent of the countryside within months. Advertised as a shortcut to communism, they let peasants eat freely in communal dining halls, organised labour on military lines and in places collectivised livestock, tools and even houses.
Inflated harvest reports in 1958–1959 raised state procurement, and the commune’s control of grain removed the peasants’ means of protecting their own food. The waste of the dining halls followed by exhaustion of stocks, and harvests left in the fields while labour was diverted to irrigation and steel, combined to produce the famine of 1959–1961. From late 1960 the “twelve articles” and the “sixty articles” of 1962 restored private plots and team-level accounting.
The reduced commune remained the basic rural unit for the next twenty years and was the stage for the Dazhai model. As household contracting spread from Anhui and Sichuan after 1978, a central document of 1983 separated government from commune, giving administration to township governments and ending the commune.