Collectivization Dilemma And Realistic Exploration:a Study On Grassroots Practice Of Responsibility Field In Wuwei County,anhui Province

The "Responsible Field " was an adjustment of agricultural production relations in Anhui province in the 1960 s to save the agricultural production crisis,but it lasted only about a year from pilot implementation to promotion to correction.Most people who experienced considered it to be a "life-saving field" and believed that they were conducive to increasing agricultural production and grain yield.Regarding the nature of the Responsible Field,there are still divergent views in the academic community and no definite conclusion has been reached yet.Based on the archives of Wuwei County,this paper compares the whole process of implementing the "Responsible Field System" in Anhui,and explores the evolution of the "Responsible Field " and the deviations of the county-level party committees in implementing the "Responsible Field System" from the perspective of county-level implementation.Through the political interaction between the central government and the Anhui Provincial Party Committee,we analyze the reasons for the implementation of the "Responsible Field System" in Anhui,and try to restore the difficult process of the implementation of the "Responsible Field System" by the Anhui Provincial Party Committee in the context of collectivization.On this basis,we use Wuwei County as an entry point to analyze the practice of implementing "Responsible Field System" at the grassroots level.As the area where the famine was most severe,at the beginning of the pilot implementation of "Responsible Field System",Wuwei County actually adopted two approaches in parallel to avoid political risks.With the adjustment of the central agricultural policy and the increase of political pressure,the promotion of "Responsible Field System" was once suspended in Anhui Province.In order to restart "Responsible Field System",Anhui Provincial Party Committee started to adjust the specific implementation methods of "responsible farming" and issued a series of new policy documents.Compared with the positive attitude in the pilot stage,Wuwei County was not so positive when the policy content of the original "Responsible Field System" conflicted with the central agricultural policy and needed to be adjusted,but had reservations instead.This reveals that the county party committee gave priority to production stability in the implementation of the policy.Throughout the twists and turns of the implementation of "Responsible Field System" in Anhui,the actual experience can be divided into several stages,and the specific content of the policy is constantly being debugged and improved.Therefore,the term "responsibility field" itself does not refer to a specific agricultural production management method,but rather to a series of methods introduced by the Anhui Provincial Committee in 1961 to strengthen the responsibility system of agricultural production.During this period,the name and content of the responsibility field were changed several times,which also reflected the difficulty of implementing the "Responsible Field System" in the political environment at that time.In Wuwei County,where the basic conditions of agricultural production were weak,although the Wuwei County Committee actively promoted it,a series of alienations and deviations occurred in the process of implementation,reflecting the inherent contradictions in the system design itself that were difficult to reconcile.As a new method of production,which emphasizes individual production initiative,it is incompatible with the environment of the times,which emphasizes collective production,and this is the fundamental reason for the difficulty of sustaining the responsibility fields.