Rise of the Chinese People's Communes: Part 5

In 1958, the Chinese people began a process of consolidating cooperatives into larger entities, which began to take on greater roles in governing the lives of local communities. Until their dismantlement in the early 80s, these people's communes (人民公社), as they came to be known, would become the basic units of the social organization of Chinese society, and supposedly the bedrock social unit for what would one day become full communism, organizing not only production, but medical services, infrastructure, distribution, and other social, economic and political functions. Their formation marked not only a boon in the material well-being of the Chinese people, allowing for huge strides in agriculture, health, infrastructure, and other markers of economic and social development; more abstractly, they were the cause for, and symbols of, the hope of the Chinese people for an egalitarian future, in which people would govern themselves, and the famines and inequities that plagued China for millennia would forever be things of the past.

Anna Louise Strong was a US journalist and staunch defender of socialism, writing books about the Soviet Union, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the People's Republic of China, and more, countering reactionary narratives about the successes (and failures) of socialist construction across the globe.

Note on Chinese pronunciation: Chinese words and names in this text are rendered in the Wade–Giles system of romanization. This system is today considered quite outdated, and its odd and seemingly arbitrary rendering of Chinese has led to many mispronunciations from foreign speakers. I have done my best to find the readings for these words in pinyin, the far superior system of Chinese romanization, and they will be pronounced that way, if not with the correct tones. To give some examples, you will hear: Mao Zedong, not Mao Tsetung; Beijing, not Peking; Hebei, not Hopei; Xinjiang, not Sinkiang; Zhang Chunqiao, not Chang Chun-chiao. I also take the liberty of replacing Canton with the Chinese Guangzhou. However, I do not pronounce Chiang Kai-shek as Jiang Jieshi, figuring that the latter would be unfamiliar to most listeners and would cause confusion.

You can find a free digital copy of this book here:
https://archive.org/details/byannalouisestrongtheriseofthechinesepezlib.org/mode/1up

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