"Farmers Do Not Live in Glass Houses": Economic Planning, Agricultural Statistics, and the Problem of Local Knowledge in the Maoist Countryside

In 1955, local cadres in Songjiang County, outside Shanghai, became frustrated with the difficulty of determining which farmers genuinely needed to buy grain from the state, and which were faking their hunger. Exasperated, they remarked, “Farmers’ houses are not made of glass—do they really not have any grain?” This statement encapsulates a fundamental challenge of economic planning in the early PRC: the problem of accessing local knowledge. Most studies of PRC agriculture tell the story of the state’s escalating coercion and control of farmers, which, paired with over-ambitious, utopian goals, caused disaster in the form of the Great Leap Forward. But central economic planning and the grain monopoly established in 1953 did not just give the CCP new tools of coercive control, but created a tremendous problem of gaining access to local knowledge—not only of grain reserves, but of local economic health, management practices, and land use. This presentation looks at the ways that the CCP attempted to gain access to local knowledge. This included familiar technologies such as agricultural statistics, but also “democratic” techniques such as “self-reporting” that originated in the wartime period—in which farmers voted on how much grain they would keep locally—as well as internal news systems. But as the 1950s ground on, the CCP came to see these bureaucratic techniques as inadequate for understanding the rural grassroots. As farmers resisted and manipulated regular data channels, the CCP adopted new methods to gain access to local information, including violent “struggle,” campaigns “against concealing grain,” and sending Beijing-based leaders back to their home villages to gather firsthand reports. However, these methods were unable to overcome farmers’ deep-seated suspicion of the state. False reporting continued on, setting the stage for the epistemic crisis of the Great Leap Forward.