COLLECTIVE INCENTIVES 19 Chinese to expand productivity, the system could not surpass a rather limited plateau in its use of manpower and water-control and hence China could not break through into an even more intensive agriculture. The commencement of collectivization in the 1950s— the pooling of land as well as labour — permitted China to take more complete advantage of the concepts underlying the mutual-aid teams. It is doubtful whether this was indeed the principal reason why the Chinese Communist Party inaugurated collectivization, but the capacity to extend the mutual-aid team beyond its normal bounds did provide a boost to agriculture which could not have been accomplished under private means. By divorcing the peasantry from their special interests in small plots of land, it has become possible (a) to introduce more members into the cooperating work unit; (b) to diversify thereby the schedules for planting and harvesting to an even greater extent; (c) to reshape the irrigation schedule and even the physical contours of fields to permit a more complex and effective utilization of water; and (d) through all these it becomes possible to prolong the peak seasons, which enables the Chinese peasant village to transform excess slack-season labour into intensive labour power of considerable value. Collective Agriculture Comes to Chen Village • Such an advantage can accrue from collectivization only where a highly intensive agriculture exists, as in India and parts of southeast Asia. For such societies collectivization, when managed intelligently, does in this fashion hold promise of raising efficiency in the use of both land and labour. The demonstration of this can be observed in a peasant community in southern China's Kwangtung province called Chen village.2 There, through a vast effort during the slack seasons to improve the layout of the land and, during the peak seasons, through the precise coordination of sizable squads of peasantry which move from field 10 field as the crops ripen, it has been possible to secure three grain crops a year from village fields that used to yield two/ The reason in Chen village lies partly in improved irrigation and new technologies. But of equal importance, it seems, is that Chen villagers have been able to secure the control and flexibility in the use of manpower needed to cope with an increasingly intricate agricultural regime. One consequence has been that, through this judicious use of massed labour power, the several peak seasons in Chen village have been prolonged to a total annually of more than two months. The very ability of the village to devise an agricultural schedule so elaborate as to permit such extensions of the busy seasons demonstrates quite clearly that collectivization at least in Chen village works, and rather effectively. There is a price that the peasants pay for this, however. During peak seasons farmers ha\e traditionally laboured to the outer limits of their strength, but the arduous nature of this seasonal labour has now