Abstract: Based on the history of agricultural mechanization in Jiajiazhuang Village of Fenyang city in Shanxi Province, this paper focuses on farmers’ growing subjectivity in the process of agricultural mechanization and concludes that agricultural machinery played an “enabling” role with political implications. Agricultural machinery improved work efficiency, created agricultural modernization in the countryside and emancipated women due to its critical role in the genderdistinct labor division, thus becoming the driving force for the masses of farmers to emancipate mind and give full play to their subjective initiative. In a word, agricultural machinery empowered farmers the capability of “being their own masters” economically and politically. The political implication of the “enabling” role of agricultural machinery lies in the fact that in the manner of “overseas and local combination”, farmers integrated their own development into agricultural mechanization. In the process of agricultural mechanization which started with a nationwide massbased machinery reform, masses of farmers constituted the main body, so agricultural mechanization had traits of mobilizing social revolutionary. China’s development path to agricultural mechanization is the outcome of the dialectical thinking and the implementation of the mass line by the Communist Party of China based on national conditions in the 1950s. Taking agricultural mechanization as the starting point, this paper explores the ideological role of “technology” by trying to integrate both case studies of individual farmers and historical narration, in order to better understand China’s choice in the path to the popularization of agricultural science and technology and its historical significance. 

Key words:  , the enabling role of agricultural machinery, period of collectivization, farmers' subjectivity, social effect