Household responsibility system
농가생산책임제
The system under which collectively owned land is contracted to individual households, which keep what remains after the state quota and collective retention. It began with the secret division of land by peasants at Xiaogang village in Fengyang, Anhui, in 1978, was tolerated and spread by Wan Li and Zhao Ziyang, was officially approved in the No. 1 Central Document of 1982 and became universal with the dissolution of the communes in 1983. It produced the surge in farm output of 1978–1984 counted as the first success of reform, and its structure — ownership with the collective, cultivation rights with the household — persists today.
In depth
Contracting was not an invention of 1978. “Fixing output to the household” had appeared in famine areas in 1956, 1959 and 1962 and was condemned each time as the capitalist road. The contract that eighteen households at Xiaogang signed with thumbprints in the winter of 1978 divided the land at the risk of prison, and when the next harvest multiplied, the county and province looked away.
At the centre Hua Guofeng and the agriculture vice-premier Chen Yonggui opposed it, and the Fourth Plenum document of 1979 confined contracting to remote mountain areas. Policy changed as Wan Li became vice-premier and Zhao Ziyang premier: “Document 75” of 1980 allowed contracting in poor areas, and the No. 1 Document of 1982 legitimised it as “a production responsibility system of the socialist collective economy”.
By 1984, 99 per cent of households had moved to contracting and grain output rose from 300 million tonnes in 1978 to 400 million in 1984. Contract terms were later extended to fifteen and thirty years, and in the 2000s transfer of “land management rights” was allowed, but collective ownership remained. Small fragmented plots and the migrant-worker question are the other face of the system.