Chinese Terms
| Adding Work Points ( |
was a way to solve the debts of overspent households, namely, by matching the work points among overspent households. |
| Agriculture Campaign for Learning from Dazhai ( |
was one of the most influential movements in 1960s China, that lasted until the 1970s and had a great impact on agriculture in China. In industry, learning from Daqing was the mainstream. |
| Agriculture Work Point ( |
was the most important work point in the period of the people’s commune, accounting for approximately 80 percent of the total amount of work points of peasant households. In other words, except for fertilizer work points, which accounted for 10 percent or so, all the other kinds of agricultural production work points could be called agriculture work points. |
| The Basic Accounting Unit ( |
is called “the basic production accounting unit”. Chinese rural people’s communes were operating agencies which occupied an important position in the rural economy, in that they were self-financing, practiced independent forms of accounting, and directly organized production and income distribution. Under the “three-level ownership and team-based” system, the production team was generally taken as the basic accounting unit. There were also a few areas that made the production Brigade or commune the basic unit responsible for accounting. Basic accounting units had autonomy in dealing with all land, livestock, agricultural machinery, forest, water, grassland and in making production and management arrangements. |
| Basic Work Point ( |
refers to a basic score evaluated according to age, working ability and working attitude attributed to every commune member before going into the work process, and was similar to the wage rate. The male labor force was usually evaluated using the basic work point of 10, and the scores of other male members would fluctuate on this basis, with the highest basic work point of 12, and lower ones like 9.5, 9, 8.5, etc. The basic work point for female labor was usually 8, and 4 for children. |
| Basic Work Point Assessment ( |
refers to the initial assessment of members of a commune before going into the process of work, and this kind of assessment was conducted annually or semi-annually in general. |
| Boasting and Exaggeration ( |
a tendency that appeared during the Great Leap Forward period, and refers to the overstatement of grain and steel production. Xushui County in Hebei province, for instance, boasted a grain harvest of 1.2 billion Jin in a year. |
| Brigade Work Point (Mobile Work Point) |
was a kind of work point (also known as a mobile work point in some places) given to those laborers who were transferred from the production team by the production Brigade to participate in farm work. These team members could only participate in the distribution by returning to the original production team. |
| Caring Work Point ( |
was a particular kind of work point attributed by the production Brigade on account of special family conditions, such as being an orphan, widow, soldier or for families of the fallen. |
| Commune Member ( |
specifically refers to a member of the Chinese rural people’s communes. |
| Compulsory Work Point ( |
was another kind of work point produced by compulsory labor work in this period. |
| Dazhai Work Point System ( |
the most common work point system used in the middle and late period of the people’s communes. It’s name came from its origin in a small village called Dazhai in Shanxi Province. The Dazhai work point was different from other systems such as the “quota contract system”, or “remuneration based on joint production” and other systematic forms of organizing responsibility. This system blurred the lines between individual labor and the results of production, and thus the Dazhai work point is also known as the “rough work point”. |
| Default ( |
refers to a peculiar economic phenomenon in the period of people’s communes, i.e. peasant households in debt had to pay extra money to the production team while part of the distribution decided at the end of the year. |
| Educated Youth ( |
is a historical term that refers to young urban citizens who went to rural areas or remote regions to do farm work or to defend the frontiers; nevertheless most educated young people only received junior or senior high school education. |
| Extra help Ration ( |
were the rations allocated to those families afforded special consideration, such as soldiers and families of the fallen. |
| Farm Work Assignment ( |
Generally, the leader of a production team or the head of a labor group assigned daily farm work to its team members in the morning. |
| Fertilizer Work Point ( |
was a vital form of work point in the people’s commune period, second only to agriculture work points. A fertilizer work point was the amount of work points exchanged for the accumulation of manure used as fertilizer by peasant households. |
| “Laishu” and “Qushu” ( |
In the periods characterized by the use of agricultural support groups and agricultural production cooperatives, the use of “Laishu” and “Qushu” referred to a system of calculating the conversion of labor into value among different labor participants before the emergence of the work point system, and mainly calculated the amount of labor or tools used. |
| Leveling/Equalizing Brigade Work Points ( |
was a method used to determine the Brigade work points of all production Brigades, i.e. after the mobile work points of different production teams were divided equally by its population or land acres, then the mobile work points allocated per person or per acre of each production team would basically be equal. |
| Lost Work Point ( |
refers to points given as reimbursement for the lost work points of production team cadres when they attended meetings in the people’s commune or the county. |
| Over-spending Households ( |
refers to a kind of household whose income is deemed not enough to offset their annual consumption at the year-end settlement. They would thus owe cash to the production team. Such peasant households were called over-spent households. |
| Private Plots ( |
small plots of land allocated to commune members for private use. |
| People’s Communes ( |
includes the rural people’s commune and the urban people’s commune, but are usually referred to as the rural people’s communes (the urban people’s communes had little influence). The rural people’s commune, or people’s commune for short, was the basic unit of China’s socialist society in rural areas as well as a component of China’s socialist regime. People’s communes existed from 1958 to 1984, with its most prominent feature being the integration of the government and the commune (both were either production organizations or local regimes), and the combination of workers, farmers, businessmen, students and soldiers. |
| Production Brigade (referred to as Brigade) ( |
the intermediate first-level organization among the three levels of rural people’s communes in China. As people’s communes were organized with the unity of government and commune in mind, the production Brigade was not only the intermediate-level economic management of communes, but also the level-one form of administration under the local government of the state. In addition to leading the production and operation of its sub-Brigades, some production Brigades ran Brigade-owned industrial and agricultural enterprises, and some even acted as level-one basic accounting units of the people’s communes. |
| A Production Team ( |
was the lowest of the three levels of organization in a Chinese rural people’s commune. A production team was a form of economic cooperative under collective ownership, which conducted independent accounting and was self-financing. The land and other means of production used by the production team was collectively owned by the team, and it would organize the unified operation and distribution of its labor force. |
| Purchased Work Point ( |
was also a kind of work point, purchased with cash, mostly by those commune members who went out as migrant workers or worked elsewhere. Due to the distribution policies in that period, these people had to pay a certain amount of cash in exchange for work points so they could stay in the production team that was participating in the distribution system. |
| Ration, Work Point Provision ( |
was a system of food distribution in this period in which rations were distributed according to the size of the population as opposed to work point provision which were allocated in line with household work point income. |
| Rural Class Status ( |
refers to the status of peasants before China’s reform and opening-up and included classifications of landlord/rich peasant/upper-middle class peasant/middle class peasant/the poor and lower-middle class peasant ( |
| Self-Proposing and Group-Discussing ( |
were major forms of basic work point assessment, meaning that a commune member proposed the number of basic work points for himself/herself, and the whole group discussed whether the self-proposal was valid. A corresponding addition or subtraction would be made to the basic work point if the group judgement was not in line with the self-proposed one. |
| Sideline ( |
refers to industries undertaken other than agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery, such as raising pigs and chicken, weaving mats, gathering herbs, etc. |
| Siqing Yundong ( |
the socialist education movement carried out by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in urban and rural areas nationwide from 1963 to the first half of 1966. Its content focused on “clearing work points, clearing accounts, clearing warehouses and clearing inventory” in rural areas in the early part of the movement, whereby it concentrated on “clearing thought, clearing politics, clearing organization and clearing economy” both in urban and rural areas in the later period. |
| Team-Based Three-Level Ownership ( |
was the fundamental system used in the early people’s commune, and refers to ownership shared by a people’s commune, production Brigade, and a production team other than the one owned by society or by the entire people. The production team was the basic accounting unit and was responsible for the management and running of its production. |
| The Great Leap Forward ( |
a nationwide far-left movement carried out by the Chinese Communist Party from 1958 to 1960, the essence of which was to continuously improve industrial and agricultural production targets. |
| Value of a Work Point ( |
also called Work Point Price, or Distribution Price, referred to the monetary or equivalent value of every average work point. The value of a work point was equal to the distribution of work across a whole year in the collective economy divided by the total number of annual participations in the distribution of labor points. |
| Women’s Half of the Sky ( |
a slogan put forward in the People’s Commune Period to increase women’s status and promote equality between men and women. |
| A Work Point ( |
was the unit used to calculate a member’s labor consumption and payment during the period of agricultural cooperatives and people’s communes. A working day would usually be divided into ten work points. |
| Work Point Assessment and Grading ( |
was a method used to evaluate the basic work points, the labor expended and to calculate the labor work points of commune members. Assessment was usually conducted by the cadre of a production team and member representatives, while a scorekeeper would do the grading. |
| The Work Point System ( |
also called the working day system, was a series of labor organization rules and regulations which provided the bases for calculating the amount of collective labor expended and measuring income distribution among commune members in the rural collective economic system during China’s agricultural collectivization period. The work point system contained three layers of meanings: calculating both the amount of labor used and the quality of that labor, the basis for labor income distribution and the form of labor organization. On the basis of unified accounting and distribution in rural collective economy organizations, the total amount of laborers’ payment was determined by the amount of work points accumulated and the value of those work points earned by laborers participating in collective production. |
| Yida Ergong ( |
were the most essential characteristics of people’s communes, and meant ““large in size and high collectivization”, in which “large” means the large scale of people’s communes, i.e. some were township communes, some even county-sized communes; “high” meant the communes had a high degree of socialization, where unified production and distribution were practiced in people’s communes, and almost every means of production and output were collectively owned, that is, were public. |
| Yida Sanfan ( |
a political campaign launched during the Cultural Revolution to crack down on counter-revolutionary sabotage, and to combat corruption, theft, speculation and profitmaking, extravagance and waste. |