The ironies occasioned by a coercive family planning program being carried out alongside a liberalization in the rural economy illustrate how difficult it is to assess how the peasantry may have evaluated the complex historical changes. Traditionally, peasants' ideas and feelings about the meaning of life and the fundamental dictates of morality had been textured, explained, and justified through an elaborate religious system. Patterns of work, community, and cultural life differed sharply between city and countryside. Peasants' evaluations of the changes in their modes of social life may have entailed less of a tension between positive and negative judgments than their evaluations of political and economic life, because the patterns of their social life did not change as drastically as their political economy. The Communists' attempts at socialist transformation were most successful precisely when they built their new organizations for collective agriculture closely around the traditional social ecology of the countryside.