The Responsibility System and Institutional Change

Ever since their formation in 1958, the communes have experienced periodic changes in the structure of their organisation and in the overall institutional environment in which they operate. The initial experimentation with extreme egalitarianism — characterised by too high a level of the basic accounting unit and too great an emphasis on the principle of ‘to each according to his need’ as the criterion of distribution — soon gave way to the emergence of the three-level organisation under which the lowest level, the team, became the basic accounting unit and collective income began to be distributed according to the work points earned. This structure was basically consolidated by the early 1960s and continued to survive to the time Mao Zedong died in September 1976, although certain tendencies had started to manifest themselves during the years of the Cultural Revolution as precursors of future changes envisaged by the dominant groups in the Chinese leadership of the time. In tracing the steps in the transformation initiated in the post-Mao period, it is useful to begin with a description of the basic structure of the system and the various tendencies that had begun to appear prior to Mao’s death.