Mutual Aid, Mutual Learning: Indian Visions of Chinese Agrarian Economics

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of India started the 1950s with certain shared economic challenges and characteristics. Despite their different political and economic systems, both countries quickly pursued a policy of ‘friendship’ towards each other in defiance of emerging Cold War bloc politics. Friendship implied a horizontal relationship and mutual learning in contradistinction to the hierarchies of imperialism and Cold War era security pacts and aid. Economic exchange was an important aspect of this relationship, and throughout the 1950s both sides exchanged expertise on agricultural economics, statistics, and organization. This presentation will focus on Indian interest in Chinese land reform and cooperativization. Indian observers ranging from Communist Party members to conservative Gandhian land rights activists used Chinese experiences of land redistribution and its subsequent effect on crop yields and worker productivity to suggest that, without an emphasis on comprehensive rural reform, Indian development would be frozen in place. Amidst debates on the importance of land reform within India and resistance to it from the judicial system in the early 1950s, China’s seeming success with the project of land redistribution in order to boost peasant political mobilization and productivity - thus serving as the foundation for other revolutionary policies - offered a clear juxtaposition for Indian observers. As the decade progressed and Indian planners and agrarian experts turned towards the ideals of cooperative farming, Chinese experimentation here too proved influential on Indian understandings of an ideal, ‘Asian’ rural economy. Chinese rural development, albeit warped and incomplete understandings of it, had a pronounced effect on the way that Indians conceptualized the ideal role that agriculture would play in their country’s quest for democratic socialism and industrialization.