Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise. Two broad types of communal farms exist: agricultural cooperatives, in which member-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective; and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which fa At the end of the Land Reform movement, individual families in China owned the land they farmed, paid taxes as households, and sold grain at prices set by the state. Rural collectivization began soon after the CCP announced its 1953 "general line for the transition to socialism". Over the next six years, collectivization took several incrementally progressing forms: mutual aid groups, primitive cooperatives, and people's communes. As London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Lin Chun notes, researchers agree that communization proceeded on a largely voluntary basis that avoided both the violence and sabotage that occurred during the Soviet collectivization. Like Professor Barry Naughton, she observes that China's collectivization proceeded smoothly in part because, unlike the Soviet experience, a network of state institutions already existed in the countryside. Similarly, Professor Edward Friedman describes China's collectivization process as a "miracle of miracles". During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (chuji nongye hezuoshe). In the complex system of beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives, farmers received a share of the harvest based on a combination of how much labor and how much land they contributed to the cooperative. By June 1956, over 60% of rural households had been collectivized into higher-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (gaoji nongye hezuoshe), a structure that was similar to Soviet collective farmering via kolkhozy. In these cooperatives, tens of households pooled land and draft animals. Adult members of the cooperative were credited with work points based on how much labor they had provided at which tasks. At the end of the year, the collective deducted taxes and fixed-price sales to the state, and the cooperative retained seed for the next year as well as some investment and welfare funds. The collective then distributed to the households the remainder of the harvest and some of the money received from sales to the state. The distribution was based partly on work points accrued by the adult…