The advanced agricultural producers' cooperative (高级农业生产合作社, gaoji nongye shengchan hezuoshe) was the second and decisive stage of agricultural collectivisation in the People's Republic of China during the First Five-Year Plan (1953–57). It marked the transition from the "semi-socialist" elementary cooperative—where peasants pooled land but still received dividends on the land, draught animals and tools they contributed—to a "fully socialist" form in which all such assets were transferred to collective ownership without compensation, and distribution was based solely on labour performed. The model derived ideologically from Soviet kolkhoz practice and was authorised institutionally by the Model Regulations for Advanced Agricultural Producers' Cooperatives, adopted by the National People's Congress on 30 June 1956.
The advanced cooperative typically merged several elementary cooperatives, comprising on average 100–300 households (often an entire natural village). Land deeds were abolished, private plots were restricted to small household garden allotments, and members earned work points (工分, gongfen) credited to a household and settled at year-end after the collective met state grain procurement quotas and reserve funds. Management rested with an elected committee, though in practice party cadres dominated. The decisive political impetus came from Mao Zedong's speech "On the Question of Agricultural Cooperation" of 31 July 1955, which attacked colleagues for moving "like a woman with bound feet" and triggered a "high tide of socialist transformation." Whereas planners had expected advanced cooperatives to predominate only by 1960, the campaign accelerated dramatically: by the end of 1956 roughly 88 percent of peasant households—over 110 million families—had been enrolled in advanced cooperatives, completing collectivisation years ahead of schedule.
This breakneck pace produced both the celebrated statistical "high tide" and serious dislocations, including peasant slaughter of livestock to avoid surrendering animals and disincentives from severing reward from contributed property. The advanced cooperative proved a transitional form: in 1958 these units were amalgamated into the far larger people's communes (renmin gongshe) during the Great Leap Forward, which fused economic, administrative and militia functions. The collective framework endured—through the post-Leap retreat to the production team as basic accounting unit—until the Household Responsibility System (家庭联产承包责任制) dismantled collective farming from 1978–83 under Deng Xiaoping's reforms, formally ending the advanced-cooperative model of land ownership though collective ownership of farmland persists in Chinese law to 2026.
For the exam, the advanced cooperative appears in modern-Chinese-history and comparative-political-economy papers as the pivotal step distinguishing China's gradualist mutual-aid-team → elementary-cooperative → advanced-cooperative → commune sequence. Candidates should be able to contrast the elementary cooperative (land dividends retained) with the advanced cooperative (labour-only distribution, collective ownership), date the 1955 Mao speech and the 1956 Model Regulations, and explain why the 1955–56 "high tide" outran the original plan. Typical question angles ask candidates to evaluate collectivisation's speed and its causal link to the Great Leap Forward, or to compare the Chinese path with Soviet forced collectivisation under Stalin.
Example
In 1956, following Mao Zedong's 1955 call to accelerate cooperation, roughly 88 percent of China's peasant households had been merged into advanced agricultural cooperatives that abolished land dividends and paid members by work points alone.
Frequently asked questions
In an elementary cooperative peasants pooled land but still received dividends on the land, animals and tools they contributed. An advanced cooperative abolished such payments, transferred all means of production to collective ownership, and distributed income solely according to labour measured in work points.