The Fate of the Commune

Land use rights, market transitions, and labour policy change in China (1980–84)

“…24 Lin (1988) first estimated this production function with the 'HRS ratio in the province'. The difference between Lin's estimate and mine is that my model uses the 1980the -1984the data. The reason I used 1980the -1984 data is that 1980 is the first year to show the HRS ratio and 1984 is the year of almost completely implemented HRS.…”

“…Under the commune system, peasants gave most of their pro-6 See also Riskin (1987) for detailed descriptions of communes and the state-owned economy in China before the reform. Shue (1984) documented the change of communes in the early 1980s. 7 Lin (1992, p. 37) mentioned that the development of the HRS was an unintended consequence in 1978 and that it was officially accepted by the central government when 45 percent of the production teams had already been dismantled.…”

“…Due to the lack of provincial-level HRS data for 1979-1980, Lin used data reported from Economic Weekly News to fill in the 1979-1981data. Also, the 1981-1984 figures are extracted from China Agriculture Yearbooks rather than from the dataset directly. Please see Lin (1992) for data source details and Lin (1992, p. 49) for his discussions of the way he circumvented the HRS data problems.…”

“…6 6 See also Riskin (1987) for detailed descriptions of communes and the state‐owned economy in China before the reform. Shue (1984) documented the change of communes in the early 1980s. …”

International Links and the Socioeconomic Development of Rural China

“…Such contributions are crucial, as they come at a time when the state has severely cut its direct aid to rural collectives (Wong, 1988: 23-24;Ghose, 1984: 268-269; Khan, 1984: 116;Howard, 1986: 168, 177;Lieberthal, 1985: 111). By the same token, Overseas Chinese connections have inadvertently strengthened the power and economic base of the collective government, which would otherwise have been weakened as a result of the re-organization of the commune system in the 1980s (Shue, 1984;Butler, 1985;Hartford, 1985;Kojima, 1988). The current zhen government, for example, retains a considerable amount of the proceeds from its joint-ventures with the qiaojuan families within its jurisdiction and controls the most essential social and economic infrastructures, some of which have been upgraded as a result of direct and indirect contributions from Overseas Chinese.…”