War, Trade and Socialism: Grain Resource Control in Rural Chongqing, 1937-1953

This thesis examines the Chinese Nationalist Government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s grain policies from 1937 to 1953 in southwestern China, specifically the rural areas around Chongqing. By examining agricultural taxation and grain market management policies, it argues that Chinese governments were engaged in what amounted to a joint project of grain resource centralisation since the War of Resistance against Japan. The land taxation policy shifted from a reliance on levying in cash currency to tax in kind; the levying targets expanded from the wealthy class to the broader rural peasants; and the grain price policy was gradually reformed from publishing official price according to the market price to eliminating regional, wholesale-retail and seasonal price difference actively. After establishing the progressive taxation system and settling on a stable tax rate, the Communists shifted grain resource collection policy toward a total state monopoly, creating the conditions in Sichuan which would prepare the way for the socialist transformation.
This thesis argues that the methods of the CCP’s grain policy and agricultural collectivisation in the early 1950s were not only rooted in its based areas experience, but also inherited the Nationalist Government’s wartime economy policies. The thesis also emphasises international connectivity of China both during and after the Second World War. The wartime Allies’ international aid along with Japanese blockade on international trade and transportation provided the soil for growing state capitalism and state directed domestic and international trade in southwestern China, which was continued and strengthened by the Communist Government after 1949.
The thesis draws heavily from Chongqing’s county-level archives, which allows for insights into how governments approached land reforms, levying of taxation at the rural level, as well price controls, all of which had implications for legitimacy and rural resistance. The thesis is culminated by an investigation of the events of 1953, during which the CCP extended the Nationalist “Extraordinary Period Economy Policy” in Chongqing to the nationwide “Socialist Transition Period Five-Year Plan”, controlling grain markets and all population’s grain ration through the Unified Purchase and Sale of Grain Policy.