How did the household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output free hundreds of millions of Chinese from hunger?

Xiangyang Town in Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, which adopted the household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output relatively early, saw its total population exceed 60,000 last year, while its total industrial output value surpassed 10 billion yuan, and its national and local tax revenues reached 230 million yuan. This township, which has a relatively developed economy, rows of high-rise buildings, and a moderately prosperous life for its people, has also been rated as a "National-Level Ecological Township and National Hygienic Town." But 36 years ago, in this township, which was then mainly engaged in farming, as in rural areas across the country, many people could scarcely get enough to eat.

Poverty gives rise to the desire for change. In 1980, Xiangyang Town became the first in the country to take down the "People's Commune" signboard, opening the prelude to rural reforms including the local household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output.

Today, Xiangyang Town has developed from a small rural market into a pearl on the border of Chengdu City and Deyang City. With roads extending in all directions and high-rise buildings rising one after another, Xiangyang Town has completely bid farewell to the hunger and poverty that lingered 36 years ago.

The changes in Xiangyang Town can be called a microcosm of China's rural changes over the past 36 years. Zhong Min, born in 1970, clearly remembers that although she had a father who was a cadre, her family still could not put food on the table. The greatest shadow of her childhood was hunger, and she was so thin that she was called "Ganxian'er" (the dried-up one). It was not until 1981, when land was contracted to households, that she ate fried steamed buns for the first time in her life.

Zhong Min and others of the "post-70s" generation remember: the People's Commune, which combined government administration and commune management, was overly centralized in management and operation, and had serious egalitarianism in distribution, which was not conducive to mobilizing farmers' enthusiasm and led to relatively slow development of agricultural production and improvement of farmers' lives. In 1978, more than 100 million farmers in China had not solved the problem of food and clothing. Taking Xiangyang Town as an example, from 1959 to 1979, local grain production was on average lower than that of 1958, and the annual cash distribution to farmers was only 18.85 yuan.

After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Party, advancing rural reform, developing the economy, and improving people's livelihood became major tasks facing the Party at that time.

At that time, in order to solve the problem of food and clothing, farmers in some places boldly carried out reforms: Jinyu Township in Guanghan County implemented contracting production to groups in the autumn of 1978. In December of the same year, 18 farming households in Xiaogang Production Team of Liyuan Commune in Fengyang County, Anhui Province, pressed their fingerprints on a contract for all-round contracting. Rural reforms in Sichuan and Anhui quickly received responses from Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou, Henan, Shandong and other provinces. But there was a difficult obstacle ahead: what should be done with the "People's Commune"?

Xiangyang Commune first divided its cadres into three groups: administration, agriculture, and township enterprises, which in effect broke the system of the "People's Commune" that combined government administration and commune management. Then in April 1980, Xiangyang officially abolished the "People's Commune" signboard and restored the organizational system of the "Xiangyang Township People's Government."

In 1980, the central government clearly proposed establishing various forms of production responsibility systems in agriculture generally. By the end of 1983, rural areas across the country had basically implemented a two-tier management system based on household contracted management and combining unified and separate management. In 1984, the central government proposed that the land contract period should generally be more than 15 years. Thereafter, multiple central documents established farming households as the main body of agricultural management, granting farmers long-term and guaranteed land use rights and operational autonomy. The production enthusiasm of hundreds of millions of farmers was rapidly mobilized, and in just a few years agricultural production reached a new level.

It was precisely because of stable land use rights and operational autonomy that farmers were able to be liberated from the land and go to cities to work, which promoted the development of China's industrial economy and urbanization.

With the development of the times, the vast majority of villagers in Xiangyang Town have become urban residents, sharing in the dividends brought by rural reform and urbanization. Gong Doulian, an 80-year-old villager from Wadian Village, now lives in a new home for farmers, receives 1,300 yuan in social security payments every month, and used land compensation money to buy her son a car for transport work.

When the leader of the Chinese government spoke at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2014, he said with emotion: "More than 30 years ago, China's reform and opening up began with rural reform. Through reform, we achieved major agricultural development. Grain output increased from more than 300 million tons to more than 600 million tons, successfully solving the people's problem of food and clothing. On this basis, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty and reached the UN Millennium Development Goals ahead of schedule."

Rural reform, with the household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output as its main content, greatly liberated rural productivity and laid the foundation for reform and development in the industrial and economic fields thereafter. China has fed about one-fifth of the world's population with 7% of the land, creating a miracle in the history of world poverty reduction.