Xiaogang Village () is a small village in
Xiaoxihe (),
Fengyang County
Fengyang County () is a county in north-central Anhui Province, China. It is under the administration of Chuzhou, a prefecture-level city. The county was home to 765,600 people as of 2013.
Administrative divisions
Fengyang County is divided into ...
,
Chuzhou
Chuzhou () is a prefecture-level city in eastern Anhui Province, China. It borders the provincial capital of Hefei to the south and southwest, Huainan to the west, Bengbu to the northwest, and the province of Jiangsu to the east. According to ...
,
Anhui
Anhui , (; formerly romanized as Anhwei) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the East China region. Its provincial capital and largest city is Hefei. The province is located across the basins of the Yangtze River ...
province in China,
not far from Nanjing. China's move toward reform has been traced to an agreement among farmers in Xiaogang to secretly subdivide their common farmland in December 1978, after which the production of grain increased dramatically.
The village was held up as a model for agricultural reform by China's new leadership after
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was a Chinese revolutionary leader, military commander and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After CC ...
came to power.
History
During the
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruc ...
, the Chinese Communist Party made a series of economic reforms, where the most disastrous of them was the collectivization of the administration of private property, specially, the rural lands. Fengyang County, along with much of the rest of the country, experienced a
period of famine, due to the inefficiency of the model. A quarter of the local county's population died from starvation. In Xiaogang village alone, 67 villagers died of starvation out of a population of 120 between 1958 and 1960.
In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yen Jingchang,
met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, a local
People's Commune
The people's commune () was the highest of three administrative levels in rural areas of the People's Republic of China during the period from 1958 to 1983, until they were replaced by townships. Communes, the largest collective units, were div ...
, into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves. The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old.
At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
After this secret reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined.
Per capita income
Per capita income (PCI) or total income measures the average income earned per person in a given area (city, region, country, etc.) in a specified year. It is calculated by dividing the area's total income by its total population.
Per capita i ...
in the village increase from 22
yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979.
This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership after
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC) ...
had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to
reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country. This led to the abandonment of
collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced ever since.
References
Further reading
*{{citation, author-first= Madsen , author-last= Pirie , author-link=Madsen Pirie , title= "''The document that changed the world''" , url= https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-document-that-changed-the-world , date= June 15, 2018 , publisher=
Adam Smith Institute
The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) is a neoliberal UK-based think tank and lobbying group, named after Adam Smith, a Scottish moral philosopher and classical economist. The libertarian label was officially changed to neoliberal on 10 October 201 ...
Chuzhou
Villages in China
Fengyang County