The Great Leap Forward Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster
对中央计划经济体制下的“大跃进”过失的剖析
Wei Li 李伟
University of Virginia, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business,
and Centre for Economic Policy Research
弗吉尼亚大学，长江商学院以及经济政策研究中心
Dennis Tao Yang 杨涛（丹尼斯）
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
弗吉尼亚理工大学
咨询中国：李泽龙 译
The Great Leap Forward disaster, characterized by a collapse in grain production and a widespread famine in China between 1959 and 1961, is found attributable to a systemic failure in central planning. Wishfully expecting a great leap in agricultural productivity from collectivization,
the Chinese government accelerated its aggressive industrialization timetable. Grain output fell sharply as the government diverted agricultural resources to industry and imposed an excessive grain procurement burden on peasants, leaving them with insufficient calories to sustain labor productivity. Our analysis shows that 61 percent of the decline in output is attributable to the policies of resource diversion and excessive procurement.
从1959年到1961年，由于“大跃进”过失所导致的粮食的减产和全国普遍饥荒，在某种程度上反映了中央计划经济体制的失败。寄希望于农村集体合作社能够带来农业生产率的大跃进，中国政府加速了工业化的进程。政府大力把农业资源转移到工业领域和对农民进一步地加征粮食税，使得他们没有足够的体力来维持农业生产力，而与此同时粮食出现大量的减产。我们的研究结果表明，粮食的减产61%是由于对农业资源的转移和过度征税等相关政策所导致的。
Ten thousand years are too long, seize the day, seize the hour!
[Mao Zedong “Manjianghong—a Reply to ComradeGuo Moruo,” 1963]
一万年太久，只争朝夕！
--毛泽东，《满江红•和郭沫若同志》 ，1963年
I. Introduction 引言
In China, the world’s most populous country that was barely self-sufficient in food supply, the unthinkable happened: National grain output plunged by 15 percent in 1959 and by another 16 percent in the following two years. The government, which ran a closed economy, neither requested nor accepted international assistance. Famine soon raged across China.
中国，一个在粮食生产方面仅仅只能自给自足的世界上人口最多的国家，发生意想不到的事情：在1959年以及接下来的两年国家粮食产量分别下降了15%和16%，而实行封闭政策的政府既没有向国际社会求援，也没有接受国际方面的援助，不久饥荒袭击全国。
The turn of events in China in the late 1950s was dramatic. With much fanfare, the new Communist government launched the Great Leap Forward (GLF) movement in 1958. In its New Year’s editorial, the People’s Daily—the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party— proclaimed that the GLF would propel China to surpass Great Britain in industrial production in 15 years and the United States in 20 or 30 years. The nation was soon propelled to a state of exuberance, as news about extraordinary gains in agricultural and industrial production broke out across the country. It appeared that even the seemingly lofty GLF goal could be achieved much sooner. But as the first signs of famine emerged in the winter of 1959, grim reality gradually set in. Years later, demographers who extrapolated mortality trends in China estimated the total number of premature deaths during the GLF famine at between 16.5 and 30 million. Even by the most conservative estimate, this famine ranked the worst in the loss of human lives in recorded world history.
50年代末发生在中国的重大事情非常具有戏剧性，1958年伴随着嘹亮的号角，刚刚建立起来的共产党政府拉开了“大跃进”运动的序幕，当时中国共产党的官方报纸—《人民日报》新年社论宣称，“大跃进”运动将促使中国工业产量在15年之内赶超英国，20到30年之内赶超美国。这样的号角在全国立刻引起巨大的反响，整个国家弥漫在有关农业与工业产量显剧提高的消息报道中，这只是表面上给人感觉“大跃进”运动在如此短的时间内取得巨大的成就。但是随着第一例饥荒于1959年冬出现，残酷的现实慢慢涌现。若干年后，人口统计学家推断在“大跃进”饥荒期间，人口夭折率达1650万到3000万。即使保守估计，这次饥荒所导致的人口死亡在世界史上也是最严重的。
Since the release of official data in the late 1970s, this catastrophe has attracted much attention from social scientists. Recent empirical research has concentrated on the causes of the famine, taking food shortage as a given. This paper departs from the literature by focusing on the fundamental issue: What caused the collapse in grain output?
自从70年代末官方公布相关数据以来，这次灾难引起了很多社会学科学家极大的关注。近来来的研究工作主要集中引起饥荒的原因上，如事物短缺。在这里我们撇开其他文献所关注的，主要集中在基本问题上：是什么原因导致粮食的剧减？
The postmortem official explanation puts the blame mainly on bad weather (Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1981) and refers to the period 1959–61 as “three years of natural calamities.” Using meteorological data collected independently, Kueh (1995) finds that bad
weather was a contributing factor. But he notes that bad weather of similar magnitude in the past did not produce such a serious reduction in aggregate grain output. Kueh’s finding suggests that there were other important factors. Piece by piece, researchers have identified a number of plausible policy factors. They include reductions in labor and acreage used in grain production (e.g., Peng 1987; Yao 1999), implementation of radical programs such as communal dining (e.g., Yang 1996; Chang and Wen 1997), and reduced work incentives due to the formation of the people’s communes (Perkins and Yusuf 1984). Another policy factor, identified by Lin (1990), is the deprivation of peasants’ rights to exit from the commune. Lin argues that the threat of withdrawal from an agricultural collective by harder-working members helps discipline would-be shirkers. The removal of exit rights destroyed this self-enforcing discipline, reduced work incentives, and hence contributed to the fall in grain output. To date, however, few studies have assessed in a systematic manner the relative quantitative effects of these and other possible factors on grain output, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of the GLF crisis. The paucity of systematic empirical research
is perhaps due in part to the lack of a consistent framework for analyzing GLF policies.
事后，官方对此灾难的解释主要归咎于恶劣的天气条件（中国共产党中央委员会，1981年）并且把1959年到1963年这一段时期称之为“三年自然灾害”。1995年库厄独立收集和应用相关气象数据，研究发现天气的确是主要的因素，但是过去同样的恶劣天气却没有产生如此严重的粮食减产，所以库厄的研究结果表明（导致大饥荒的）还存在其他重要的因素。逐渐地，学者们开始注意到一些具有争论的政策因素，具体有劳动力和粮食种植面积的下降（如彭1987年；姚1999年），激进政策的执行如“大锅饭”（如杨1996年，常和温1997年）以及人民公社组织导致激励的下降（如帕金斯和Yusuf 1984年）。当然还有其他政策因素，如林1990年研究发现的“农民公社退出权的剥夺”。林认为从农村集体合作社撤退意味着将受到其他人员的威胁和处罚，这种没有退出权的机制在某种程度上与所谓的“自我约束”纪律是不相容的，极大地降低了工作激励，因此才导致粮食的减产。然而在数据方面，却很少有研究从定量的角度估计各种影响食粮减产因素，为我们理解“大跃进”危机留下巨大的黑洞，之所以缺少这方面的研究可能部分原因是缺少一个稳当框架来分析“大跃进”时期所实行的相关政策。
In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of central planning that rationalizes the observed GLF policies and identifies additional factors that may have contributed to the collapse of output. Given the government’s objective of rapid industrialization, the observed policies are consistent with a false premise ingrained in the dominant Soviet economic ideology that collectivization would transform Chinese agriculture from small household farming into large-scale mechanized production, achieving a great leap in productivity. The leap in productivity is what the increasingly impatient central planner wanted. With it, the central planner could extract more surplus (or taxes) from the peasantry to fund an accelerated industrialization campaign. Our model predicts
that the impatient central planner, believing in the magic power of collectivization, would divert labor (and other resources) from agriculture to industry and impose excessive burdens of grain procurement on the rural population. Diversion of resources reduces agricultural output directly. Excessive procurement, when combined with an actual reduction in productivity caused by collectivization, significantly reduces food available for consumption in rural areas, leading to a severe nutritional deficiency among rural workers. The resulting reduction in physiological capacity to carry out manual labor would in turn reduce the quality of labor input in growing next year’s crops, leading to an additional decline in production. As we shall show later, the model’s prediction of the dynamic progression of the GLF crisis is consistent with the stylized facts in the data.
在这里我们建立一个中央计划动态模型用来合理地考察“大跃进”期间所执行的政策和确认导致产量下降的其他因素，政府的目标--加速工业化进程是给定的，考察的政策与苏联占主导地位的经济意识形态完全一致的，即集体化将把中国从家庭农业转变成大规模的机械化生产农业，取得生产率飞跃地发展，而在正式愈加急功近利的中央计划者所希望的。有了农业产量的飞跃地提高，中央计划者就可以从农民那里榨取更多的剩余用来援助正在加速发展的工业化进程。在我们的模型中，急功近利的中央计划者确信集体化所带来的巨大生产力，将从农村转移劳动力或者资源到农业领域，而且进一步加大对农村人口的负担，而转移的这些资源将直接导致农业产量的下降。加重负担的同时伴随着集体化生产所导致的生产率的下降，使得农村地区的食物供给出现明显的剧减，这样农村的劳动力出现严重的营养不足，这极大地限制了农村的生产活动，直接影响到来年的粮食质量和产量。接下来我们将用数据来演绎模型中“大跃进”危机发展的动态过程。
To test our hypothesis that the GLF policy package—diversion of agricultural resources and excessive procurement—was responsible for a significant portion of the collapse in grain output, we compiled a province-level panel data set from published sources. We also conducted a retrospective survey in 1999 to acquire additional data from local data archives and agricultural experts. Using these data, we estimate a production function that takes into account both the quantity and quality of factor inputs for assessing the role of various factors in determining changes in grain output between 1952 and 1977. By including as explanatory variables in the production function not only conventional inputs and nutritional status of agricultural workers but also climate conditions and other institutional variables, we are able to test both existing and new hypotheses under a unified framework and assess the relative contributions of various factors to the collapse and the subsequent
recovery of grain output.
为了检验我们的假设，在这里进行定量分析“大跃进”时所实行的相关政策如对农村资源的转移和额外的农业负担在多大程度上影响了粮食产量的下降。我们一些来自出版物的省级数据进行整理和编辑，思索1999年时一些地方文件和农业专家所提供的信息和数据，然后用来估计相关的生产函数，即从质和量的角度来分析各种要素对1952年到1977年之间粮食产量的影响程度。这个函数不仅包括常规投入和农民营养状况等因素，而且还包括了天气条件和其他一些制度变量，这样我们就可以在一个统一的框架内来检验现有的和新提出的假设，以及估计各种要素对粮食的减产和接下来的产量恢复的影响程度。
Our findings suggest that the most important causal factor is the diversion of resources from agriculture, which was responsible for 33 percent of the collapse of output between 1958 and 1961. Excessive procurement of grain, which decimated the physical strength of the peasantry, is the next-largest contributor, accounting for 28.3 percent of the decline in output. Bad weather did play a role, contributing to 12.9 percent of the collapse in production. The crisis thus had the marks of a perfect storm.
我们的研究结果表明，导致1958年到1961年的粮食减产的最重要的原因是农村资源的转移，它应该为粮食下降的33%负责；第二大因素是过度的粮食税收制约着农民的体力支出，其占的比例达28.3%；而恶劣的天气对粮食减产所起的作用仅为12.9%，如此看来这场危机还真算一场完美的暴风雪。
Agricultural crises and associated famines have long occupied the attention of scholars. While natural disaster has been a leading cause of many crop failures, Rosen (1999) and this study show that bad judgments can also be fatal. For the Irish famine that Rosen studied, erroneous
expectation on the productivity of seed potatoes provoked over saving, which delayed possible substitution of other crops and led to a sharp reduction in the following year’s food supply. Unlike Ireland, China had a diversified crop portfolio and a huge land mass. It therefore had natural hedges against natural calamities. But through collectivization and the imposition of central planning, the Chinese government introduced a systemic risk: As decisions became centralized, any policy failure would have nationwide repercussions. During the GLF, falsified statistics combined with the central planner’s fanciful vision (which encouraged statistical gamesmanship in the first place) led to massive diversion of resources from agriculture and excessive grain procurement with nationwide disastrous consequences. What makes the Chinese experience unique is that the GLF catastrophe was largely the result of a systemic failure in central planning.
农业危机及其导致的饥荒长期以来受到许多学者的关注，罗森1999年研究发现，虽然自然灾害为粮食减产的主要因素，但是对形势的错误估计有时也可能是致命的，如罗森在研究爱尔兰饥荒时发现，对土豆种子发芽率的乐观估计，再加上其他替代粮食的延迟导致了来年的食物供给的剧减。不象爱尔兰，中国拥有许多农作物组合和大量土地，因此可以使用正常的对冲手段来抵制自然灾害的发生。但是因为集体化生产和实行计划经济体制，在某种意义上来说中国政府面对的是体制（系统）风险，因为决策的高度集中，任何的政策的失败其影响可能是全国性的。在“大跃进”期间，虚假的统计数据加上中央计划者的急功近利心态才使得政策把农村大量资源的转移和加给农民过度的粮食负担，由此而导致了全国范围的重大损失和灾难。中国饥荒最独特之处就是“大跃进”过失主要是中央计划体制的系统风险所导致的。
II. Development Strategy and Rural Institutions 发展展览与农村制度
Devastated by a century of turmoil and wars, the China that the Communists took over in 1949 was a desperately poor agrarian economy with hardly any industrial assets. Nearly 90 percent of the population lived in rural areas, toiling on small plots of land using century-old labor-intensive farming technology. As the economy started to recover, the new government swiftly adopted a Soviet-style, heavy-industry oriented development strategy in 1952. To fund rapid industrialization,
most investable surplus had to be extracted from the vast peasant population. Agricultural productivity had to be raised quickly in order to free up resources for industrial development. In a speech on July 31, 1955, Chairman Mao drew the link between industrialization, grain production,
and collectivization:
经过一个世纪的动乱和战争的破坏，1949年中国共产党接手的是一个几乎没有任何工业基础的农业经济，接近90%的人口都住在农村，用着落后的农业技术辛苦地耕种着一小块土地。随着经济的恢复，1952年新生的政府立刻实行了苏联式的重工业发展战略，为了支援快速发展的工业化进程，从农村转移了大量的投资剩余，农业生产率的提高将极大地支援工业化的进程。在1955年7月31日的一次会上，毛主席做了《论工业化，粮食生产和集体化的关系》的报告：
[Some] comrades fail to understand that socialist industrialization cannot be carried out in isolation from the cooperative transformation of agriculture. In the first place, as everyone knows, China’s current level of production of commodity grain and raw materials for industry is low, whereas the state’s need for them is growing year by year, and this presents a sharp contradiction. If we cannot basically solve the problem of agricultural cooperation within roughly three five-year plans, that is to say, if our agriculture cannot make a leap from small-scale farming with animal-drawn implements to large-scale mechanized farming, . . . then we shall fail to resolve the contradiction between the ever-increasing need for commodity grain and industrial raw materials and the present generally low output of staple crops, and we shall run into formidable difficulties in our socialist industrialization and be unable to complete it. (Mao 1977, 5:196–97)
The Great Leap Forward Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster
The Great Leap Forward Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster
对中央计划经济体制下的“大跃进”过失的剖析
Wei Li 李伟
University of Virginia, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business,
and Centre for Economic Policy Research
弗吉尼亚大学，长江商学院以及经济政策研究中心
Dennis Tao Yang 杨涛（丹尼斯）
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
弗吉尼亚理工大学
咨询中国：李泽龙 译
The Great Leap Forward disaster, characterized by a collapse in grain production and a widespread famine in China between 1959 and 1961, is found attributable to a systemic failure in central planning. Wishfully expecting a great leap in agricultural productivity from collectivization,
the Chinese government accelerated its aggressive industrialization timetable. Grain output fell sharply as the government diverted agricultural resources to industry and imposed an excessive grain procurement burden on peasants, leaving them with insufficient calories to sustain labor productivity. Our analysis shows that 61 percent of the decline in output is attributable to the policies of resource diversion and excessive procurement.
从1959年到1961年，由于“大跃进”过失所导致的粮食的减产和全国普遍饥荒，在某种程度上反映了中央计划经济体制的失败。寄希望于农村集体合作社能够带来农业生产率的大跃进，中国政府加速了工业化的进程。政府大力把农业资源转移到工业领域和对农民进一步地加征粮食税，使得他们没有足够的体力来维持农业生产力，而与此同时粮食出现大量的减产。我们的研究结果表明，粮食的减产61%是由于对农业资源的转移和过度征税等相关政策所导致的。
Ten thousand years are too long, seize the day, seize the hour!
[Mao Zedong “Manjianghong—a Reply to ComradeGuo Moruo,” 1963]
一万年太久，只争朝夕！
--毛泽东，《满江红•和郭沫若同志》 ，1963年
I. Introduction 引言
In China, the world’s most populous country that was barely self-sufficient in food supply, the unthinkable happened: National grain output plunged by 15 percent in 1959 and by another 16 percent in the following two years. The government, which ran a closed economy, neither requested nor accepted international assistance. Famine soon raged across China.
中国，一个在粮食生产方面仅仅只能自给自足的世界上人口最多的国家，发生意想不到的事情：在1959年以及接下来的两年国家粮食产量分别下降了15%和16%，而实行封闭政策的政府既没有向国际社会求援，也没有接受国际方面的援助，不久饥荒袭击全国。
The turn of events in China in the late 1950s was dramatic. With much fanfare, the new Communist government launched the Great Leap Forward (GLF) movement in 1958. In its New Year’s editorial, the People’s Daily—the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party— proclaimed that the GLF would propel China to surpass Great Britain in industrial production in 15 years and the United States in 20 or 30 years. The nation was soon propelled to a state of exuberance, as news about extraordinary gains in agricultural and industrial production broke out across the country. It appeared that even the seemingly lofty GLF goal could be achieved much sooner. But as the first signs of famine emerged in the winter of 1959, grim reality gradually set in. Years later, demographers who extrapolated mortality trends in China estimated the total number of premature deaths during the GLF famine at between 16.5 and 30 million. Even by the most conservative estimate, this famine ranked the worst in the loss of human lives in recorded world history.
50年代末发生在中国的重大事情非常具有戏剧性，1958年伴随着嘹亮的号角，刚刚建立起来的共产党政府拉开了“大跃进”运动的序幕，当时中国共产党的官方报纸—《人民日报》新年社论宣称，“大跃进”运动将促使中国工业产量在15年之内赶超英国，20到30年之内赶超美国。这样的号角在全国立刻引起巨大的反响，整个国家弥漫在有关农业与工业产量显剧提高的消息报道中，这只是表面上给人感觉“大跃进”运动在如此短的时间内取得巨大的成就。但是随着第一例饥荒于1959年冬出现，残酷的现实慢慢涌现。若干年后，人口统计学家推断在“大跃进”饥荒期间，人口夭折率达1650万到3000万。即使保守估计，这次饥荒所导致的人口死亡在世界史上也是最严重的。
Since the release of official data in the late 1970s, this catastrophe has attracted much attention from social scientists. Recent empirical research has concentrated on the causes of the famine, taking food shortage as a given. This paper departs from the literature by focusing on the fundamental issue: What caused the collapse in grain output?
自从70年代末官方公布相关数据以来，这次灾难引起了很多社会学科学家极大的关注。近来来的研究工作主要集中引起饥荒的原因上，如事物短缺。在这里我们撇开其他文献所关注的，主要集中在基本问题上：是什么原因导致粮食的剧减？
The postmortem official explanation puts the blame mainly on bad weather (Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1981) and refers to the period 1959–61 as “three years of natural calamities.” Using meteorological data collected independently, Kueh (1995) finds that bad
weather was a contributing factor. But he notes that bad weather of similar magnitude in the past did not produce such a serious reduction in aggregate grain output. Kueh’s finding suggests that there were other important factors. Piece by piece, researchers have identified a number of plausible policy factors. They include reductions in labor and acreage used in grain production (e.g., Peng 1987; Yao 1999), implementation of radical programs such as communal dining (e.g., Yang 1996; Chang and Wen 1997), and reduced work incentives due to the formation of the people’s communes (Perkins and Yusuf 1984). Another policy factor, identified by Lin (1990), is the deprivation of peasants’ rights to exit from the commune. Lin argues that the threat of withdrawal from an agricultural collective by harder-working members helps discipline would-be shirkers. The removal of exit rights destroyed this self-enforcing discipline, reduced work incentives, and hence contributed to the fall in grain output. To date, however, few studies have assessed in a systematic manner the relative quantitative effects of these and other possible factors on grain output, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of the GLF crisis. The paucity of systematic empirical research
is perhaps due in part to the lack of a consistent framework for analyzing GLF policies.
事后，官方对此灾难的解释主要归咎于恶劣的天气条件（中国共产党中央委员会，1981年）并且把1959年到1963年这一段时期称之为“三年自然灾害”。1995年库厄独立收集和应用相关气象数据，研究发现天气的确是主要的因素，但是过去同样的恶劣天气却没有产生如此严重的粮食减产，所以库厄的研究结果表明（导致大饥荒的）还存在其他重要的因素。逐渐地，学者们开始注意到一些具有争论的政策因素，具体有劳动力和粮食种植面积的下降（如彭1987年；姚1999年），激进政策的执行如“大锅饭”（如杨1996年，常和温1997年）以及人民公社组织导致激励的下降（如帕金斯和Yusuf 1984年）。当然还有其他政策因素，如林1990年研究发现的“农民公社退出权的剥夺”。林认为从农村集体合作社撤退意味着将受到其他人员的威胁和处罚，这种没有退出权的机制在某种程度上与所谓的“自我约束”纪律是不相容的，极大地降低了工作激励，因此才导致粮食的减产。然而在数据方面，却很少有研究从定量的角度估计各种影响食粮减产因素，为我们理解“大跃进”危机留下巨大的黑洞，之所以缺少这方面的研究可能部分原因是缺少一个稳当框架来分析“大跃进”时期所实行的相关政策。
In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of central planning that rationalizes the observed GLF policies and identifies additional factors that may have contributed to the collapse of output. Given the government’s objective of rapid industrialization, the observed policies are consistent with a false premise ingrained in the dominant Soviet economic ideology that collectivization would transform Chinese agriculture from small household farming into large-scale mechanized production, achieving a great leap in productivity. The leap in productivity is what the increasingly impatient central planner wanted. With it, the central planner could extract more surplus (or taxes) from the peasantry to fund an accelerated industrialization campaign. Our model predicts
that the impatient central planner, believing in the magic power of collectivization, would divert labor (and other resources) from agriculture to industry and impose excessive burdens of grain procurement on the rural population. Diversion of resources reduces agricultural output directly. Excessive procurement, when combined with an actual reduction in productivity caused by collectivization, significantly reduces food available for consumption in rural areas, leading to a severe nutritional deficiency among rural workers. The resulting reduction in physiological capacity to carry out manual labor would in turn reduce the quality of labor input in growing next year’s crops, leading to an additional decline in production. As we shall show later, the model’s prediction of the dynamic progression of the GLF crisis is consistent with the stylized facts in the data.
在这里我们建立一个中央计划动态模型用来合理地考察“大跃进”期间所执行的政策和确认导致产量下降的其他因素，政府的目标--加速工业化进程是给定的，考察的政策与苏联占主导地位的经济意识形态完全一致的，即集体化将把中国从家庭农业转变成大规模的机械化生产农业，取得生产率飞跃地发展，而在正式愈加急功近利的中央计划者所希望的。有了农业产量的飞跃地提高，中央计划者就可以从农民那里榨取更多的剩余用来援助正在加速发展的工业化进程。在我们的模型中，急功近利的中央计划者确信集体化所带来的巨大生产力，将从农村转移劳动力或者资源到农业领域，而且进一步加大对农村人口的负担，而转移的这些资源将直接导致农业产量的下降。加重负担的同时伴随着集体化生产所导致的生产率的下降，使得农村地区的食物供给出现明显的剧减，这样农村的劳动力出现严重的营养不足，这极大地限制了农村的生产活动，直接影响到来年的粮食质量和产量。接下来我们将用数据来演绎模型中“大跃进”危机发展的动态过程。
To test our hypothesis that the GLF policy package—diversion of agricultural resources and excessive procurement—was responsible for a significant portion of the collapse in grain output, we compiled a province-level panel data set from published sources. We also conducted a retrospective survey in 1999 to acquire additional data from local data archives and agricultural experts. Using these data, we estimate a production function that takes into account both the quantity and quality of factor inputs for assessing the role of various factors in determining changes in grain output between 1952 and 1977. By including as explanatory variables in the production function not only conventional inputs and nutritional status of agricultural workers but also climate conditions and other institutional variables, we are able to test both existing and new hypotheses under a unified framework and assess the relative contributions of various factors to the collapse and the subsequent
recovery of grain output.
为了检验我们的假设，在这里进行定量分析“大跃进”时所实行的相关政策如对农村资源的转移和额外的农业负担在多大程度上影响了粮食产量的下降。我们一些来自出版物的省级数据进行整理和编辑，思索1999年时一些地方文件和农业专家所提供的信息和数据，然后用来估计相关的生产函数，即从质和量的角度来分析各种要素对1952年到1977年之间粮食产量的影响程度。这个函数不仅包括常规投入和农民营养状况等因素，而且还包括了天气条件和其他一些制度变量，这样我们就可以在一个统一的框架内来检验现有的和新提出的假设，以及估计各种要素对粮食的减产和接下来的产量恢复的影响程度。
Our findings suggest that the most important causal factor is the diversion of resources from agriculture, which was responsible for 33 percent of the collapse of output between 1958 and 1961. Excessive procurement of grain, which decimated the physical strength of the peasantry, is the next-largest contributor, accounting for 28.3 percent of the decline in output. Bad weather did play a role, contributing to 12.9 percent of the collapse in production. The crisis thus had the marks of a perfect storm.
我们的研究结果表明，导致1958年到1961年的粮食减产的最重要的原因是农村资源的转移，它应该为粮食下降的33%负责；第二大因素是过度的粮食税收制约着农民的体力支出，其占的比例达28.3%；而恶劣的天气对粮食减产所起的作用仅为12.9%，如此看来这场危机还真算一场完美的暴风雪。
Agricultural crises and associated famines have long occupied the attention of scholars. While natural disaster has been a leading cause of many crop failures, Rosen (1999) and this study show that bad judgments can also be fatal. For the Irish famine that Rosen studied, erroneous
expectation on the productivity of seed potatoes provoked over saving, which delayed possible substitution of other crops and led to a sharp reduction in the following year’s food supply. Unlike Ireland, China had a diversified crop portfolio and a huge land mass. It therefore had natural hedges against natural calamities. But through collectivization and the imposition of central planning, the Chinese government introduced a systemic risk: As decisions became centralized, any policy failure would have nationwide repercussions. During the GLF, falsified statistics combined with the central planner’s fanciful vision (which encouraged statistical gamesmanship in the first place) led to massive diversion of resources from agriculture and excessive grain procurement with nationwide disastrous consequences. What makes the Chinese experience unique is that the GLF catastrophe was largely the result of a systemic failure in central planning.
农业危机及其导致的饥荒长期以来受到许多学者的关注，罗森1999年研究发现，虽然自然灾害为粮食减产的主要因素，但是对形势的错误估计有时也可能是致命的，如罗森在研究爱尔兰饥荒时发现，对土豆种子发芽率的乐观估计，再加上其他替代粮食的延迟导致了来年的食物供给的剧减。不象爱尔兰，中国拥有许多农作物组合和大量土地，因此可以使用正常的对冲手段来抵制自然灾害的发生。但是因为集体化生产和实行计划经济体制，在某种意义上来说中国政府面对的是体制（系统）风险，因为决策的高度集中，任何的政策的失败其影响可能是全国性的。在“大跃进”期间，虚假的统计数据加上中央计划者的急功近利心态才使得政策把农村大量资源的转移和加给农民过度的粮食负担，由此而导致了全国范围的重大损失和灾难。中国饥荒最独特之处就是“大跃进”过失主要是中央计划体制的系统风险所导致的。
II. Development Strategy and Rural Institutions 发展展览与农村制度
Devastated by a century of turmoil and wars, the China that the Communists took over in 1949 was a desperately poor agrarian economy with hardly any industrial assets. Nearly 90 percent of the population lived in rural areas, toiling on small plots of land using century-old labor-intensive farming technology. As the economy started to recover, the new government swiftly adopted a Soviet-style, heavy-industry oriented development strategy in 1952. To fund rapid industrialization,
most investable surplus had to be extracted from the vast peasant population. Agricultural productivity had to be raised quickly in order to free up resources for industrial development. In a speech on July 31, 1955, Chairman Mao drew the link between industrialization, grain production,
and collectivization:
经过一个世纪的动乱和战争的破坏，1949年中国共产党接手的是一个几乎没有任何工业基础的农业经济，接近90%的人口都住在农村，用着落后的农业技术辛苦地耕种着一小块土地。随着经济的恢复，1952年新生的政府立刻实行了苏联式的重工业发展战略，为了支援快速发展的工业化进程，从农村转移了大量的投资剩余，农业生产率的提高将极大地支援工业化的进程。在1955年7月31日的一次会上，毛主席做了《论工业化，粮食生产和集体化的关系》的报告：
[Some] comrades fail to understand that socialist industrialization cannot be carried out in isolation from the cooperative transformation of agriculture. In the first place, as everyone knows, China’s current level of production of commodity grain and raw materials for industry is low, whereas the state’s need for them is growing year by year, and this presents a sharp contradiction. If we cannot basically solve the problem of agricultural cooperation within roughly three five-year plans, that is to say, if our agriculture cannot make a leap from small-scale farming with animal-drawn implements to large-scale mechanized farming, . . . then we shall fail to resolve the contradiction between the ever-increasing need for commodity grain and industrial raw materials and the present generally low output of staple crops, and we shall run into formidable difficulties in our socialist industrialization and be unable to complete it. (Mao 1977, 5:196–97)
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对中央计划经济体制下的“大跃进”过失的剖析
Wei Li 李伟
University of Virginia, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business,
and Centre for Economic Policy Research
弗吉尼亚大学，长江商学院以及经济政策研究中心
Dennis Tao Yang 杨涛（丹尼斯）
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
弗吉尼亚理工大学
咨询中国：李泽龙 译
The Great Leap Forward disaster, characterized by a collapse in grain production and a widespread famine in China between 1959 and 1961, is found attributable to a systemic failure in central planning. Wishfully expecting a great leap in agricultural productivity from collectivization,
the Chinese government accelerated its aggressive industrialization timetable. Grain output fell sharply as the government diverted agricultural resources to industry and imposed an excessive grain procurement burden on peasants, leaving them with insufficient calories to sustain labor productivity. Our analysis shows that 61 percent of the decline in output is attributable to the policies of resource diversion and excessive procurement.
从1959年到1961年，由于“大跃进”过失所导致的粮食的减产和全国普遍饥荒，在某种程度上反映了中央计划经济体制的失败。寄希望于农村集体合作社能够带来农业生产率的大跃进，中国政府加速了工业化的进程。政府大力把农业资源转移到工业领域和对农民进一步地加征粮食税，使得他们没有足够的体力来维持农业生产力，而与此同时粮食出现大量的减产。我们的研究结果表明，粮食的减产61%是由于对农业资源的转移和过度征税等相关政策所导致的。
Ten thousand years are too long, seize the day, seize the hour!
[Mao Zedong “Manjianghong—a Reply to ComradeGuo Moruo,” 1963]
一万年太久，只争朝夕！
--毛泽东，《满江红•和郭沫若同志》 ，1963年
I. Introduction 引言
In China, the world’s most populous country that was barely self-sufficient in food supply, the unthinkable happened: National grain output plunged by 15 percent in 1959 and by another 16 percent in the following two years. The government, which ran a closed economy, neither requested nor accepted international assistance. Famine soon raged across China.
中国，一个在粮食生产方面仅仅只能自给自足的世界上人口最多的国家，发生意想不到的事情：在1959年以及接下来的两年国家粮食产量分别下降了15%和16%，而实行封闭政策的政府既没有向国际社会求援，也没有接受国际方面的援助，不久饥荒袭击全国。
The turn of events in China in the late 1950s was dramatic. With much fanfare, the new Communist government launched the Great Leap Forward (GLF) movement in 1958. In its New Year’s editorial, the People’s Daily—the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party— proclaimed that the GLF would propel China to surpass Great Britain in industrial production in 15 years and the United States in 20 or 30 years. The nation was soon propelled to a state of exuberance, as news about extraordinary gains in agricultural and industrial production broke out across the country. It appeared that even the seemingly lofty GLF goal could be achieved much sooner. But as the first signs of famine emerged in the winter of 1959, grim reality gradually set in. Years later, demographers who extrapolated mortality trends in China estimated the total number of premature deaths during the GLF famine at between 16.5 and 30 million. Even by the most conservative estimate, this famine ranked the worst in the loss of human lives in recorded world history.
50年代末发生在中国的重大事情非常具有戏剧性，1958年伴随着嘹亮的号角，刚刚建立起来的共产党政府拉开了“大跃进”运动的序幕，当时中国共产党的官方报纸—《人民日报》新年社论宣称，“大跃进”运动将促使中国工业产量在15年之内赶超英国，20到30年之内赶超美国。这样的号角在全国立刻引起巨大的反响，整个国家弥漫在有关农业与工业产量显剧提高的消息报道中，这只是表面上给人感觉“大跃进”运动在如此短的时间内取得巨大的成就。但是随着第一例饥荒于1959年冬出现，残酷的现实慢慢涌现。若干年后，人口统计学家推断在“大跃进”饥荒期间，人口夭折率达1650万到3000万。即使保守估计，这次饥荒所导致的人口死亡在世界史上也是最严重的。
Since the release of official data in the late 1970s, this catastrophe has attracted much attention from social scientists. Recent empirical research has concentrated on the causes of the famine, taking food shortage as a given. This paper departs from the literature by focusing on the fundamental issue: What caused the collapse in grain output?
自从70年代末官方公布相关数据以来，这次灾难引起了很多社会学科学家极大的关注。近来来的研究工作主要集中引起饥荒的原因上，如事物短缺。在这里我们撇开其他文献所关注的，主要集中在基本问题上：是什么原因导致粮食的剧减？
The postmortem official explanation puts the blame mainly on bad weather (Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1981) and refers to the period 1959–61 as “three years of natural calamities.” Using meteorological data collected independently, Kueh (1995) finds that bad
weather was a contributing factor. But he notes that bad weather of similar magnitude in the past did not produce such a serious reduction in aggregate grain output. Kueh’s finding suggests that there were other important factors. Piece by piece, researchers have identified a number of plausible policy factors. They include reductions in labor and acreage used in grain production (e.g., Peng 1987; Yao 1999), implementation of radical programs such as communal dining (e.g., Yang 1996; Chang and Wen 1997), and reduced work incentives due to the formation of the people’s communes (Perkins and Yusuf 1984). Another policy factor, identified by Lin (1990), is the deprivation of peasants’ rights to exit from the commune. Lin argues that the threat of withdrawal from an agricultural collective by harder-working members helps discipline would-be shirkers. The removal of exit rights destroyed this self-enforcing discipline, reduced work incentives, and hence contributed to the fall in grain output. To date, however, few studies have assessed in a systematic manner the relative quantitative effects of these and other possible factors on grain output, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of the GLF crisis. The paucity of systematic empirical research
is perhaps due in part to the lack of a consistent framework for analyzing GLF policies.
事后，官方对此灾难的解释主要归咎于恶劣的天气条件（中国共产党中央委员会，1981年）并且把1959年到1963年这一段时期称之为“三年自然灾害”。1995年库厄独立收集和应用相关气象数据，研究发现天气的确是主要的因素，但是过去同样的恶劣天气却没有产生如此严重的粮食减产，所以库厄的研究结果表明（导致大饥荒的）还存在其他重要的因素。逐渐地，学者们开始注意到一些具有争论的政策因素，具体有劳动力和粮食种植面积的下降（如彭1987年；姚1999年），激进政策的执行如“大锅饭”（如杨1996年，常和温1997年）以及人民公社组织导致激励的下降（如帕金斯和Yusuf 1984年）。当然还有其他政策因素，如林1990年研究发现的“农民公社退出权的剥夺”。林认为从农村集体合作社撤退意味着将受到其他人员的威胁和处罚，这种没有退出权的机制在某种程度上与所谓的“自我约束”纪律是不相容的，极大地降低了工作激励，因此才导致粮食的减产。然而在数据方面，却很少有研究从定量的角度估计各种影响食粮减产因素，为我们理解“大跃进”危机留下巨大的黑洞，之所以缺少这方面的研究可能部分原因是缺少一个稳当框架来分析“大跃进”时期所实行的相关政策。
In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of central planning that rationalizes the observed GLF policies and identifies additional factors that may have contributed to the collapse of output. Given the government’s objective of rapid industrialization, the observed policies are consistent with a false premise ingrained in the dominant Soviet economic ideology that collectivization would transform Chinese agriculture from small household farming into large-scale mechanized production, achieving a great leap in productivity. The leap in productivity is what the increasingly impatient central planner wanted. With it, the central planner could extract more surplus (or taxes) from the peasantry to fund an accelerated industrialization campaign. Our model predicts
that the impatient central planner, believing in the magic power of collectivization, would divert labor (and other resources) from agriculture to industry and impose excessive burdens of grain procurement on the rural population. Diversion of resources reduces agricultural output directly. Excessive procurement, when combined with an actual reduction in productivity caused by collectivization, significantly reduces food available for consumption in rural areas, leading to a severe nutritional deficiency among rural workers. The resulting reduction in physiological capacity to carry out manual labor would in turn reduce the quality of labor input in growing next year’s crops, leading to an additional decline in production. As we shall show later, the model’s prediction of the dynamic progression of the GLF crisis is consistent with the stylized facts in the data.
在这里我们建立一个中央计划动态模型用来合理地考察“大跃进”期间所执行的政策和确认导致产量下降的其他因素，政府的目标--加速工业化进程是给定的，考察的政策与苏联占主导地位的经济意识形态完全一致的，即集体化将把中国从家庭农业转变成大规模的机械化生产农业，取得生产率飞跃地发展，而在正式愈加急功近利的中央计划者所希望的。有了农业产量的飞跃地提高，中央计划者就可以从农民那里榨取更多的剩余用来援助正在加速发展的工业化进程。在我们的模型中，急功近利的中央计划者确信集体化所带来的巨大生产力，将从农村转移劳动力或者资源到农业领域，而且进一步加大对农村人口的负担，而转移的这些资源将直接导致农业产量的下降。加重负担的同时伴随着集体化生产所导致的生产率的下降，使得农村地区的食物供给出现明显的剧减，这样农村的劳动力出现严重的营养不足，这极大地限制了农村的生产活动，直接影响到来年的粮食质量和产量。接下来我们将用数据来演绎模型中“大跃进”危机发展的动态过程。
To test our hypothesis that the GLF policy package—diversion of agricultural resources and excessive procurement—was responsible for a significant portion of the collapse in grain output, we compiled a province-level panel data set from published sources. We also conducted a retrospective survey in 1999 to acquire additional data from local data archives and agricultural experts. Using these data, we estimate a production function that takes into account both the quantity and quality of factor inputs for assessing the role of various factors in determining changes in grain output between 1952 and 1977. By including as explanatory variables in the production function not only conventional inputs and nutritional status of agricultural workers but also climate conditions and other institutional variables, we are able to test both existing and new hypotheses under a unified framework and assess the relative contributions of various factors to the collapse and the subsequent
recovery of grain output.
为了检验我们的假设，在这里进行定量分析“大跃进”时所实行的相关政策如对农村资源的转移和额外的农业负担在多大程度上影响了粮食产量的下降。我们一些来自出版物的省级数据进行整理和编辑，思索1999年时一些地方文件和农业专家所提供的信息和数据，然后用来估计相关的生产函数，即从质和量的角度来分析各种要素对1952年到1977年之间粮食产量的影响程度。这个函数不仅包括常规投入和农民营养状况等因素，而且还包括了天气条件和其他一些制度变量，这样我们就可以在一个统一的框架内来检验现有的和新提出的假设，以及估计各种要素对粮食的减产和接下来的产量恢复的影响程度。
Our findings suggest that the most important causal factor is the diversion of resources from agriculture, which was responsible for 33 percent of the collapse of output between 1958 and 1961. Excessive procurement of grain, which decimated the physical strength of the peasantry, is the next-largest contributor, accounting for 28.3 percent of the decline in output. Bad weather did play a role, contributing to 12.9 percent of the collapse in production. The crisis thus had the marks of a perfect storm.
我们的研究结果表明，导致1958年到1961年的粮食减产的最重要的原因是农村资源的转移，它应该为粮食下降的33%负责；第二大因素是过度的粮食税收制约着农民的体力支出，其占的比例达28.3%；而恶劣的天气对粮食减产所起的作用仅为12.9%，如此看来这场危机还真算一场完美的暴风雪。
Agricultural crises and associated famines have long occupied the attention of scholars. While natural disaster has been a leading cause of many crop failures, Rosen (1999) and this study show that bad judgments can also be fatal. For the Irish famine that Rosen studied, erroneous
expectation on the productivity of seed potatoes provoked over saving, which delayed possible substitution of other crops and led to a sharp reduction in the following year’s food supply. Unlike Ireland, China had a diversified crop portfolio and a huge land mass. It therefore had natural hedges against natural calamities. But through collectivization and the imposition of central planning, the Chinese government introduced a systemic risk: As decisions became centralized, any policy failure would have nationwide repercussions. During the GLF, falsified statistics combined with the central planner’s fanciful vision (which encouraged statistical gamesmanship in the first place) led to massive diversion of resources from agriculture and excessive grain procurement with nationwide disastrous consequences. What makes the Chinese experience unique is that the GLF catastrophe was largely the result of a systemic failure in central planning.
农业危机及其导致的饥荒长期以来受到许多学者的关注，罗森1999年研究发现，虽然自然灾害为粮食减产的主要因素，但是对形势的错误估计有时也可能是致命的，如罗森在研究爱尔兰饥荒时发现，对土豆种子发芽率的乐观估计，再加上其他替代粮食的延迟导致了来年的食物供给的剧减。不象爱尔兰，中国拥有许多农作物组合和大量土地，因此可以使用正常的对冲手段来抵制自然灾害的发生。但是因为集体化生产和实行计划经济体制，在某种意义上来说中国政府面对的是体制（系统）风险，因为决策的高度集中，任何的政策的失败其影响可能是全国性的。在“大跃进”期间，虚假的统计数据加上中央计划者的急功近利心态才使得政策把农村大量资源的转移和加给农民过度的粮食负担，由此而导致了全国范围的重大损失和灾难。中国饥荒最独特之处就是“大跃进”过失主要是中央计划体制的系统风险所导致的。
II. Development Strategy and Rural Institutions 发展展览与农村制度
Devastated by a century of turmoil and wars, the China that the Communists took over in 1949 was a desperately poor agrarian economy with hardly any industrial assets. Nearly 90 percent of the population lived in rural areas, toiling on small plots of land using century-old labor-intensive farming technology. As the economy started to recover, the new government swiftly adopted a Soviet-style, heavy-industry oriented development strategy in 1952. To fund rapid industrialization,
most investable surplus had to be extracted from the vast peasant population. Agricultural productivity had to be raised quickly in order to free up resources for industrial development. In a speech on July 31, 1955, Chairman Mao drew the link between industrialization, grain production,
and collectivization:
经过一个世纪的动乱和战争的破坏，1949年中国共产党接手的是一个几乎没有任何工业基础的农业经济，接近90%的人口都住在农村，用着落后的农业技术辛苦地耕种着一小块土地。随着经济的恢复，1952年新生的政府立刻实行了苏联式的重工业发展战略，为了支援快速发展的工业化进程，从农村转移了大量的投资剩余，农业生产率的提高将极大地支援工业化的进程。在1955年7月31日的一次会上，毛主席做了《论工业化，粮食生产和集体化的关系》的报告：
[Some] comrades fail to understand that socialist industrialization cannot be carried out in isolation from the cooperative transformation of agriculture. In the first place, as everyone knows, China’s current level of production of commodity grain and raw materials for industry is low, whereas the state’s need for them is growing year by year, and this presents a sharp contradiction. If we cannot basically solve the problem of agricultural cooperation within roughly three five-year plans, that is to say, if our agriculture cannot make a leap from small-scale farming with animal-drawn implements to large-scale mechanized farming, . . . then we shall fail to resolve the contradiction between the ever-increasing need for commodity grain and industrial raw materials and the present generally low output of staple crops, and we shall run into formidable difficulties in our socialist industrialization and be unable to complete it. (Mao 1977, 5:196–97)
The Great Leap Forward Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster
The Great Leap Forward Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster
对中央计划经济体制下的“大跃进”过失的剖析
Wei Li 李伟
University of Virginia, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business,
and Centre for Economic Policy Research
弗吉尼亚大学，长江商学院以及经济政策研究中心
Dennis Tao Yang 杨涛（丹尼斯）
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
弗吉尼亚理工大学
咨询中国：李泽龙 译
The Great Leap Forward disaster, characterized by a collapse in grain production and a widespread famine in China between 1959 and 1961, is found attributable to a systemic failure in central planning. Wishfully expecting a great leap in agricultural productivity from collectivization,
the Chinese government accelerated its aggressive industrialization timetable. Grain output fell sharply as the government diverted agricultural resources to industry and imposed an excessive grain procurement burden on peasants, leaving them with insufficient calories to sustain labor productivity. Our analysis shows that 61 percent of the decline in output is attributable to the policies of resource diversion and excessive procurement.
从1959年到1961年，由于“大跃进”过失所导致的粮食的减产和全国普遍饥荒，在某种程度上反映了中央计划经济体制的失败。寄希望于农村集体合作社能够带来农业生产率的大跃进，中国政府加速了工业化的进程。政府大力把农业资源转移到工业领域和对农民进一步地加征粮食税，使得他们没有足够的体力来维持农业生产力，而与此同时粮食出现大量的减产。我们的研究结果表明，粮食的减产61%是由于对农业资源的转移和过度征税等相关政策所导致的。
Ten thousand years are too long, seize the day, seize the hour!
[Mao Zedong “Manjianghong—a Reply to ComradeGuo Moruo,” 1963]
一万年太久，只争朝夕！
--毛泽东，《满江红•和郭沫若同志》 ，1963年
I. Introduction 引言
In China, the world’s most populous country that was barely self-sufficient in food supply, the unthinkable happened: National grain output plunged by 15 percent in 1959 and by another 16 percent in the following two years. The government, which ran a closed economy, neither requested nor accepted international assistance. Famine soon raged across China.
中国，一个在粮食生产方面仅仅只能自给自足的世界上人口最多的国家，发生意想不到的事情：在1959年以及接下来的两年国家粮食产量分别下降了15%和16%，而实行封闭政策的政府既没有向国际社会求援，也没有接受国际方面的援助，不久饥荒袭击全国。
The turn of events in China in the late 1950s was dramatic. With much fanfare, the new Communist government launched the Great Leap Forward (GLF) movement in 1958. In its New Year’s editorial, the People’s Daily—the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party— proclaimed that the GLF would propel China to surpass Great Britain in industrial production in 15 years and the United States in 20 or 30 years. The nation was soon propelled to a state of exuberance, as news about extraordinary gains in agricultural and industrial production broke out across the country. It appeared that even the seemingly lofty GLF goal could be achieved much sooner. But as the first signs of famine emerged in the winter of 1959, grim reality gradually set in. Years later, demographers who extrapolated mortality trends in China estimated the total number of premature deaths during the GLF famine at between 16.5 and 30 million. Even by the most conservative estimate, this famine ranked the worst in the loss of human lives in recorded world history.
50年代末发生在中国的重大事情非常具有戏剧性，1958年伴随着嘹亮的号角，刚刚建立起来的共产党政府拉开了“大跃进”运动的序幕，当时中国共产党的官方报纸—《人民日报》新年社论宣称，“大跃进”运动将促使中国工业产量在15年之内赶超英国，20到30年之内赶超美国。这样的号角在全国立刻引起巨大的反响，整个国家弥漫在有关农业与工业产量显剧提高的消息报道中，这只是表面上给人感觉“大跃进”运动在如此短的时间内取得巨大的成就。但是随着第一例饥荒于1959年冬出现，残酷的现实慢慢涌现。若干年后，人口统计学家推断在“大跃进”饥荒期间，人口夭折率达1650万到3000万。即使保守估计，这次饥荒所导致的人口死亡在世界史上也是最严重的。
Since the release of official data in the late 1970s, this catastrophe has attracted much attention from social scientists. Recent empirical research has concentrated on the causes of the famine, taking food shortage as a given. This paper departs from the literature by focusing on the fundamental issue: What caused the collapse in grain output?
自从70年代末官方公布相关数据以来，这次灾难引起了很多社会学科学家极大的关注。近来来的研究工作主要集中引起饥荒的原因上，如事物短缺。在这里我们撇开其他文献所关注的，主要集中在基本问题上：是什么原因导致粮食的剧减？
The postmortem official explanation puts the blame mainly on bad weather (Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1981) and refers to the period 1959–61 as “three years of natural calamities.” Using meteorological data collected independently, Kueh (1995) finds that bad
weather was a contributing factor. But he notes that bad weather of similar magnitude in the past did not produce such a serious reduction in aggregate grain output. Kueh’s finding suggests that there were other important factors. Piece by piece, researchers have identified a number of plausible policy factors. They include reductions in labor and acreage used in grain production (e.g., Peng 1987; Yao 1999), implementation of radical programs such as communal dining (e.g., Yang 1996; Chang and Wen 1997), and reduced work incentives due to the formation of the people’s communes (Perkins and Yusuf 1984). Another policy factor, identified by Lin (1990), is the deprivation of peasants’ rights to exit from the commune. Lin argues that the threat of withdrawal from an agricultural collective by harder-working members helps discipline would-be shirkers. The removal of exit rights destroyed this self-enforcing discipline, reduced work incentives, and hence contributed to the fall in grain output. To date, however, few studies have assessed in a systematic manner the relative quantitative effects of these and other possible factors on grain output, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of the GLF crisis. The paucity of systematic empirical research
is perhaps due in part to the lack of a consistent framework for analyzing GLF policies.
事后，官方对此灾难的解释主要归咎于恶劣的天气条件（中国共产党中央委员会，1981年）并且把1959年到1963年这一段时期称之为“三年自然灾害”。1995年库厄独立收集和应用相关气象数据，研究发现天气的确是主要的因素，但是过去同样的恶劣天气却没有产生如此严重的粮食减产，所以库厄的研究结果表明（导致大饥荒的）还存在其他重要的因素。逐渐地，学者们开始注意到一些具有争论的政策因素，具体有劳动力和粮食种植面积的下降（如彭1987年；姚1999年），激进政策的执行如“大锅饭”（如杨1996年，常和温1997年）以及人民公社组织导致激励的下降（如帕金斯和Yusuf 1984年）。当然还有其他政策因素，如林1990年研究发现的“农民公社退出权的剥夺”。林认为从农村集体合作社撤退意味着将受到其他人员的威胁和处罚，这种没有退出权的机制在某种程度上与所谓的“自我约束”纪律是不相容的，极大地降低了工作激励，因此才导致粮食的减产。然而在数据方面，却很少有研究从定量的角度估计各种影响食粮减产因素，为我们理解“大跃进”危机留下巨大的黑洞，之所以缺少这方面的研究可能部分原因是缺少一个稳当框架来分析“大跃进”时期所实行的相关政策。
In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of central planning that rationalizes the observed GLF policies and identifies additional factors that may have contributed to the collapse of output. Given the government’s objective of rapid industrialization, the observed policies are consistent with a false premise ingrained in the dominant Soviet economic ideology that collectivization would transform Chinese agriculture from small household farming into large-scale mechanized production, achieving a great leap in productivity. The leap in productivity is what the increasingly impatient central planner wanted. With it, the central planner could extract more surplus (or taxes) from the peasantry to fund an accelerated industrialization campaign. Our model predicts
that the impatient central planner, believing in the magic power of collectivization, would divert labor (and other resources) from agriculture to industry and impose excessive burdens of grain procurement on the rural population. Diversion of resources reduces agricultural output directly. Excessive procurement, when combined with an actual reduction in productivity caused by collectivization, significantly reduces food available for consumption in rural areas, leading to a severe nutritional deficiency among rural workers. The resulting reduction in physiological capacity to carry out manual labor would in turn reduce the quality of labor input in growing next year’s crops, leading to an additional decline in production. As we shall show later, the model’s prediction of the dynamic progression of the GLF crisis is consistent with the stylized facts in the data.
在这里我们建立一个中央计划动态模型用来合理地考察“大跃进”期间所执行的政策和确认导致产量下降的其他因素，政府的目标--加速工业化进程是给定的，考察的政策与苏联占主导地位的经济意识形态完全一致的，即集体化将把中国从家庭农业转变成大规模的机械化生产农业，取得生产率飞跃地发展，而在正式愈加急功近利的中央计划者所希望的。有了农业产量的飞跃地提高，中央计划者就可以从农民那里榨取更多的剩余用来援助正在加速发展的工业化进程。在我们的模型中，急功近利的中央计划者确信集体化所带来的巨大生产力，将从农村转移劳动力或者资源到农业领域，而且进一步加大对农村人口的负担，而转移的这些资源将直接导致农业产量的下降。加重负担的同时伴随着集体化生产所导致的生产率的下降，使得农村地区的食物供给出现明显的剧减，这样农村的劳动力出现严重的营养不足，这极大地限制了农村的生产活动，直接影响到来年的粮食质量和产量。接下来我们将用数据来演绎模型中“大跃进”危机发展的动态过程。
To test our hypothesis that the GLF policy package—diversion of agricultural resources and excessive procurement—was responsible for a significant portion of the collapse in grain output, we compiled a province-level panel data set from published sources. We also conducted a retrospective survey in 1999 to acquire additional data from local data archives and agricultural experts. Using these data, we estimate a production function that takes into account both the quantity and quality of factor inputs for assessing the role of various factors in determining changes in grain output between 1952 and 1977. By including as explanatory variables in the production function not only conventional inputs and nutritional status of agricultural workers but also climate conditions and other institutional variables, we are able to test both existing and new hypotheses under a unified framework and assess the relative contributions of various factors to the collapse and the subsequent
recovery of grain output.
为了检验我们的假设，在这里进行定量分析“大跃进”时所实行的相关政策如对农村资源的转移和额外的农业负担在多大程度上影响了粮食产量的下降。我们一些来自出版物的省级数据进行整理和编辑，思索1999年时一些地方文件和农业专家所提供的信息和数据，然后用来估计相关的生产函数，即从质和量的角度来分析各种要素对1952年到1977年之间粮食产量的影响程度。这个函数不仅包括常规投入和农民营养状况等因素，而且还包括了天气条件和其他一些制度变量，这样我们就可以在一个统一的框架内来检验现有的和新提出的假设，以及估计各种要素对粮食的减产和接下来的产量恢复的影响程度。
Our findings suggest that the most important causal factor is the diversion of resources from agriculture, which was responsible for 33 percent of the collapse of output between 1958 and 1961. Excessive procurement of grain, which decimated the physical strength of the peasantry, is the next-largest contributor, accounting for 28.3 percent of the decline in output. Bad weather did play a role, contributing to 12.9 percent of the collapse in production. The crisis thus had the marks of a perfect storm.
我们的研究结果表明，导致1958年到1961年的粮食减产的最重要的原因是农村资源的转移，它应该为粮食下降的33%负责；第二大因素是过度的粮食税收制约着农民的体力支出，其占的比例达28.3%；而恶劣的天气对粮食减产所起的作用仅为12.9%，如此看来这场危机还真算一场完美的暴风雪。
Agricultural crises and associated famines have long occupied the attention of scholars. While natural disaster has been a leading cause of many crop failures, Rosen (1999) and this study show that bad judgments can also be fatal. For the Irish famine that Rosen studied, erroneous
expectation on the productivity of seed potatoes provoked over saving, which delayed possible substitution of other crops and led to a sharp reduction in the following year’s food supply. Unlike Ireland, China had a diversified crop portfolio and a huge land mass. It therefore had natural hedges against natural calamities. But through collectivization and the imposition of central planning, the Chinese government introduced a systemic risk: As decisions became centralized, any policy failure would have nationwide repercussions. During the GLF, falsified statistics combined with the central planner’s fanciful vision (which encouraged statistical gamesmanship in the first place) led to massive diversion of resources from agriculture and excessive grain procurement with nationwide disastrous consequences. What makes the Chinese experience unique is that the GLF catastrophe was largely the result of a systemic failure in central planning.
农业危机及其导致的饥荒长期以来受到许多学者的关注，罗森1999年研究发现，虽然自然灾害为粮食减产的主要因素，但是对形势的错误估计有时也可能是致命的，如罗森在研究爱尔兰饥荒时发现，对土豆种子发芽率的乐观估计，再加上其他替代粮食的延迟导致了来年的食物供给的剧减。不象爱尔兰，中国拥有许多农作物组合和大量土地，因此可以使用正常的对冲手段来抵制自然灾害的发生。但是因为集体化生产和实行计划经济体制，在某种意义上来说中国政府面对的是体制（系统）风险，因为决策的高度集中，任何的政策的失败其影响可能是全国性的。在“大跃进”期间，虚假的统计数据加上中央计划者的急功近利心态才使得政策把农村大量资源的转移和加给农民过度的粮食负担，由此而导致了全国范围的重大损失和灾难。中国饥荒最独特之处就是“大跃进”过失主要是中央计划体制的系统风险所导致的。
II. Development Strategy and Rural Institutions 发展展览与农村制度
Devastated by a century of turmoil and wars, the China that the Communists took over in 1949 was a desperately poor agrarian economy with hardly any industrial assets. Nearly 90 percent of the population lived in rural areas, toiling on small plots of land using century-old labor-intensive farming technology. As the economy started to recover, the new government swiftly adopted a Soviet-style, heavy-industry oriented development strategy in 1952. To fund rapid industrialization,
most investable surplus had to be extracted from the vast peasant population. Agricultural productivity had to be raised quickly in order to free up resources for industrial development. In a speech on July 31, 1955, Chairman Mao drew the link between industrialization, grain production,
and collectivization:
经过一个世纪的动乱和战争的破坏，1949年中国共产党接手的是一个几乎没有任何工业基础的农业经济，接近90%的人口都住在农村，用着落后的农业技术辛苦地耕种着一小块土地。随着经济的恢复，1952年新生的政府立刻实行了苏联式的重工业发展战略，为了支援快速发展的工业化进程，从农村转移了大量的投资剩余，农业生产率的提高将极大地支援工业化的进程。在1955年7月31日的一次会上，毛主席做了《论工业化，粮食生产和集体化的关系》的报告：
[Some] comrades fail to understand that socialist industrialization cannot be carried out in isolation from the cooperative transformation of agriculture. In the first place, as everyone knows, China’s current level of production of commodity grain and raw materials for industry is low, whereas the state’s need for them is growing year by year, and this presents a sharp contradiction. If we cannot basically solve the problem of agricultural cooperation within roughly three five-year plans, that is to say, if our agriculture cannot make a leap from small-scale farming with animal-drawn implements to large-scale mechanized farming, . . . then we shall fail to resolve the contradiction between the ever-increasing need for commodity grain and industrial raw materials and the present generally low output of staple crops, and we shall run into formidable difficulties in our socialist industrialization and be unable to complete it. (Mao 1977, 5:196–97)
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