^ BOOK REVIEW ^ and advocated an unconditional, comtinwd change in the social relations of production, which were not m harmony with the state of the productive forces. Xue begins with an ext^si^e documentation of the specific features of the transformaticm of the relations of production in agri^-culture and industry. In agriculture, the low per capita availability of land and the uneven distribution of production implements ictais^ diatety after radical land distribution, could not obviously sustain high rates of growth. This wlashrftialty olffset by "mutual aid teamsr^ exchanging labour for driaughfr animals. However^ the sjcatt€i)ed patches of land were still an impediment to raising agricultural produce tivity significantly through mechanisation and water management* Hence elementary cooperative^ were farmed, in whicii peasants retained private ownership of land and production implements. Th« transition to advanced cooperatives, with collective oyrnershi|p ^of land and production implements, almost immediately followed th^ formation of elementary cooperatives. While only 2 per cent of the peasant households were iQ advanded cooperatives in 1954^ aoootding to Xue, by 1955 tBb rose to 14*2 per cent and by 1956 it wa? -almost 96 per cent, Agricut^ tural cooperation, which ^hs completed by 1957, preceded mfcchani*-satidn and occurred faster and smoother than in tbe Soviet Vniom. This, the auther states, was Ncause of the Chinese Communist Palrt^n intimate association with th6 peasantry and the objective necessity for collectivisation fotced ©n the peasants by the low per capita availability of cultivable land. In 1958, there was ^ sudden transformation 6f the cooperatives into communes. While theoretically the commune was to have three levels of decision making, With the production team consisting^of 30 to 40 households as the^ basic accounting lAnit of production and distribution, in actual practice, the production brigade (aboit(t the size of a village) or even the commune (composed of many production brigades) was in fact made the basic accounting unit. This qualitative traasforoaatia©n of the level of public ownership waa, accotding to the author, riot in harmoriy with the development ofthfc ptodtetive forces in agriculture, since ability^ production implew»ts and ferlility between different production team& varied conrido^Nfe and these differencis ^ere scmgbt to be forcibly subsumed l?y tfit®&>-forming the commune into the balsic aocounting unit during tte €rr|Mt Leap Forward. This qualitative^ transformation of t;he level -of ownership iti agriculture was Mn iiap^ftant causal Cac^oi? in th^ ste^p decline in agricultural prochN?tjLon between 195& and 1961. Wjiile the "crisis^years" of 1958-1961 have generally been attributed to ad^ysie weather xlonditions (in fact the worst in China's recent Msto^), JCu^ squarely lays the blame on the ^policies of the Great Leap Forward. 1r