This is the first monograph in English on how China's agricultural collectivization began. In 1953 the Chinese Communist Party launched a system of agricultural collectivization to lean the countryside toward socialism. It led to the Utopian Commune Movement in 1958 and was followed by the worst famine in human history. Surprisingly, its beginnings are poorly understood and often regarded as Mao Zedong’s imposition from above. This book challenges the conventional wisdom and explores how the national policy emerged from complex bureaucratic interactions among central, regional, local governments, and peasants.