People's Commune

The term ”renmin gongshe”, or Peoples Commune, first appeared in China in the  socialist magazine Red Flag in 1958. In the magazine, an article described the many benefits of collective production methods as opposed to the wastefulness of capitalist liberalized production. The sudden appearance of this new concept is often described as spontaneous, but it is difficult to believe that the article was entirely coincidental because only a month after its publication, an enormous transformation in the Chinese countryside began when independent farms were reorganized into collective production on a massive scale. The creation of Peoples communes was seen as an important step towards the communist end goal, but the communes proved difficult to run in a feasible manner, and in 1983 they were all dissolved.