Revisiting Collectivism and Rural Governance in China: The Singularity of the Zhoujiazhuang People's Commune

Zhoujiazhuang (周家庄) is singular, being the only de facto people’s commune in China today. A township in Jinzhou city (晋州), located fifty kilometers from the capital of Hebei province (河北), Zhoujiazhuang has a population of 13,922 persons from 4,506 families, with 8,270 working people over a land area of 17,860 mu (12.03 square kilometers). Today, Zhoujiazhuang maintains the political, economic, and social structure that has been essentially in place since 1956. For over sixty years—since ten years before the Cultural Revolution began and thirty-eight years after the dismantling of almost all people’s communes in 1982—Zhoujiazhuang has survived as an organizational unit over the same territory comprising the same six natural villages. This may not seem significant unless one is familiar with the turbulent history of China since 1949.