Household contract responsibility system allows hundreds of millions of Chinese to bid farewell to hunger

Xiangyang Town, Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, which implemented the household contract responsibility system earlier, had a population of more than 60, 000 last year, while the total industrial output value exceeded 10 billion yuan, and the national and land tax revenue was 230 million yuan. this town, which has a relatively developed economy, a large number of buildings and a well-off life of the people, is also rated as a "national ecological township and national health town." But 36 years ago, in this township where farming was the main industry at that time, as in the rural areas of the country, many people rarely had enough to eat and wear.

Adversity leads to prosperity. In 1980, Xiangyang Town was the first to remove the brand of "people's commune" in the country, opening the prelude to rural reforms, including the local household contract responsibility system.

Today, Xiangyang Town has developed from a small rural bazaar in the past to a pearl on the border of Chengdu and Deyang. Xiangyang Town, where roads extend in all directions and tall buildings rise, has completely bid farewell to the lingering hunger and poverty of 36 years ago.

The change in Xiangyang Town can be regarded as a microcosm of China's rural changes in the past 36 years. Zhong Min, who was born in 1970, clearly remembers that although she had a father who was a cadre at that time, her family still could not open the pot. The biggest shadow of his childhood is hunger, so thin is called "dry line". It was not until 1981 that he ate fried steamed buns for the first time in his life.

Zhong Min and other "post-70s" remember that the operation and management of the people's commune with the integration of politics and society is too centralized, and there is serious egalitarianism in distribution, which is not conducive to arousing the enthusiasm of farmers, resulting in the development of agricultural production and the improvement of farmers' living standards are relatively slow. In 1978, more than 100 million farmers in China failed to solve the problem of food and clothing. Take Xiangyang Town as an example, from 1959 to 1979, the average annual grain production was lower than that in 1958, and the annual cash distribution of farmers was only 18.85 yuan.

After the third Plenary session of the 11th CPC Central Committee, promoting rural reform, developing the economy and improving people's livelihood became a major issue faced by the Party at that time.

At that time, in order to solve the problem of food and clothing, farmers in some places boldly reformed: Jinyu Township in Guanghan County implemented a guaranteed production group in the autumn of 1978. In December of the same year, 18 farmers of Xiaogang production team of Liyuan Commune in Fengyang County, Anhui Province pressed handprints on the contract of Da Bao Gan. The rural reforms in Sichuan and Anhui quickly received responses from Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou, Henan, Shandong and other provinces. But there is a difficulty ahead: what about the "people's commune"?

Xiangyang Commune first divided the cadres into three groups: administration, agriculture, and township enterprises, which actually broke the system of the integration of politics and society in the "people's commune." Then, in April 1980, Xiangyang formally abolished the brand of "people's commune" and restored the system of "Xiangyang Township people's Government".

In 1980, the Central Committee made it clear that various forms of production responsibility system should be established in the agricultural field. By the end of 1983, the rural areas of the country had basically implemented a two-tier management system based on household contract management and the combination of unification and division. In 1984, the central government proposed that the period of land contract is generally more than 15 years. Since then, a number of central documents have established farmers as the main body of agricultural management, giving farmers long-term and guaranteed land use rights and management autonomy, and the production enthusiasm of hundreds of millions of farmers has been rapidly mobilized. agricultural production has stepped onto a big stage in just a few years.

It is with stable land use rights and management autonomy that farmers are liberated from the land and go to work in cities, which promotes 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 urbanites, sharing the dividends brought by rural reform and urbanization. Gong Doulian, an 80-year-old villager in Wadian village, now lives in a farmer's new house, receives 1300 yuan of social security every month, and uses the land money to buy a car for his son to run and transport.

In a speech at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2014, Chinese government leaders said with emotion: "China's reform and opening up more than 30 years ago began with rural reform." Through reform, we have achieved great development in agriculture, increased grain output from more than 300 million tons to more than 600 million tons, and successfully solved the problem of food and clothing for the people. On this basis, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty and reached the United Nations Millennium Development goals ahead of schedule. "

The rural reform with the household contract responsibility system as the main content has greatly liberated the rural productive forces and laid the foundation for the reform and development of the industrial economy since then. China feeds about 1/5 of the world's population with 7 per cent of its land, creating a miracle in the world's history of poverty reduction.