One of the major changes in Chinese Government policy since the death of Mao Zedong has been the new emphasis on the need for stability and regularity in everyday life, to be achieved by the systematic codification of laws and the strengthening of institutions for administering them. Since 1978 much legislation has been enacted with this end in mind, but the significance of this legislation is not self-evident. What the new laws minimally represent is a set of rules promulgated by the government which purport to govern social relationships in specified areas. Whatever else they might mean – that is, what social effects will follow from the declaration of particular rules – needs to be understood through a study of the individuals and institutions that will have to deal with these rules. Fundamentally, this is a matter of asking whether and why violations of “the law” should matter, and who has the power to find a violation and to remedy it.

There are 13 nationalities currently dwelling within the boundaries of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), China's most westerly and largest unit at provincial level. The most populous nationality is the Uygur, a Turkic people, who at the end of 1982 numbered about 5,986,800 out of Xinjiang's total population of 13,159,000. Others include the Han, at 5,287,000 people, the Kazakhs (913,900), the Hui (575,500), the Mongolians (117,200), the Kirghiz (114,200), the Xibo (27,500), and Tajiks (27,100).

Rather than considering the possible ramifications of each clause of Document No. 1, 1984 separately, this comment will focus on aspects of the document which are consistent with Chinese development strategy in the 1980s and those which acknowledge the principal vulnerabilities of the strategy as they pertain to agriculture. Much of the document is concerned with: (1) consolidating the gains achieved since the late 1970s in transforming rural organization via the production responsibility system and the attendant liberalization of rural markets; (2) extending the current areas of profitability in terms of increased production and the sale of farm goods that have become available through this transformation and especially in terms of reaping the rewards from specialization, hitherto untapped; and (3) more effectively setting the stage for future growth by attempting to generate confidence as to the durability of these organizational, and other critical policy changes.

H. F. Schurmann observed in his classic work Ideology and Organization in Communist China, “economics in a Communist country means political economics hence administration.” This observation directs our attention to two specific aspects of Document No. 1, 1984: first, the possible political consequences of decentralization and secondly, some administration reforms that have accompanied the adoption of the agricultural responsibility system. A close relationship obviously exists between the two aspects, the emphasis here being placed on the political side.

For peasants who have been collectivized for nearly three decades, the national campaign initiated by the Party Central Committee's Document No. 1, 1984 to promote the reparcellization of collective farmland, by extending the peasants' leasehold right to over 15 years (para. 3–1), is certainly not less spectacular than the land reform of 1949–52, when land was confiscated from the rich for redistribution among poor peasant families. This “second land reform” has now firmly consolidated the long-fought policy of Deng Xiaoping for a decentralized approach towards rural management. All the cats – “black or white” – seem to have now been totally unleashed to run after their best catch. This stands in sharp contrast to the uneasy equilibrium of the “two-line struggle,” which existed throughout the entire 20-year period following the abortive communization drive of 1958/1959. Nevertheless, while probably no Chinese leader today can afford to play the role of Mao's Liu cum Deng, one wonders whether, for economic reasons, the present rural institutional solution as envisaged in Document No. 1 will mark the end of the perennial Chinese search for an “optimum” level of decentralization. In a way, the agricultural reform of recent years has begun with the drastic increases, decreed in 1979, in state farm procurement prices, averaging 25 per cent. For a regime very much obsessed with the value imperative of modernization, the farm price increases should clearly be construed as income incentives for promoting agricultural production to ease the economic constraints on industrialization. This is nothing new but is exactly the policy developed by the prominent Chinese economist, Ma Yinchu, some 25 years ago in his then much condemned “balanced growth model” for China. Thus the strategy fits in well with a western analytical model formulated by Chiang and Fei in 1966, for a “maximum-speed development through austerity.” The model postulates that under socialism, a consumption policy which imposes an “optimum” rather than maximum degree of austerity, may induce greater labour effort and thus an output growth more than proportionate to the required marginal consumption expenditure. It follows that not only will the rate of capital accumulation not be depressed by increased consumption, but it may even accelerate and thus help to sustain a higher overall income growth rate.