Yeah, from what I've read on them they were more of a temporary thing functioning like the Civilian Conservation Corps but on a larger scale. The plan was to organize the peasants into hierarchical battalions for 3 years and use their labor to develop infrastructure in the countryside. It worked, but not as well as expected and led to some primitive accumulation through the commune hierarchy and a massive wage/quality of life disparity between the urban proletariat and the peasants. There's a reason the model was never applied to the cities. The need for that type of productive unit is pretty much gone now as China has developed their productive infrastructure massively through foreign investment (for better or worse) and it wouldn't need to be re implemented unless something truly catastrophic happened and their infrastructure just disappeared. You don't need a million peasants to dig a canal when you can just manufacture 5,000 backhoes.
Yeah, from what I've read on them they were more of a temporary thing functioning like the Civilian Conservation Corps but on a larger scale. The plan was to organize the peasants into hierarchical battalions for 3 years and use their labor to develop infrastructure in the countryside. It worked, but not as well as expected and led to some primitive accumulation through the commune hierarchy and a massive wage/quality of life disparity between the urban proletariat and the peasants. There's a reason the model was never applied to the cities. The need for that type of productive unit is pretty much gone now as China has developed their productive infrastructure massively through foreign investment (for better or worse) and it wouldn't need to be re implemented unless something truly catastrophic happened and their infrastructure just disappeared. You don't need a million peasants to dig a canal when you can just manufacture 5,000 backhoes.