From Commune to Capitalism - How Chinaas Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty Xu ZhunPaperback / softback

An account of China's transition into a global capitalist economy, as agrarian reform in the 1980s led Chinese peasants to industrial cities and into povertyIn the early 1980s, China undertook a massive reform that dismantled its socialist rural collectives and divided the land among millions of small peasant families. From the beginning, the official Chinese accounts, and many academic writings, uncritically portray this campaign as a huge success, both for the peasants and the economy as a whole. Known as the decollectivization campaign, it is one of the most significant reforms in China's transition to a market economy.

It also describes how the peasants, due to their dissatisfaction with the rural regime, This mainstream history argues that the rural communes, suffering from inefficiency, greatly improved agricultural productivity under the decollectivization reform.