The villagers who took on the might of the Chinese authorities when collective farming had failed – and lived to tell the tale
YAN LIXUE, A GRIZZLED, weather-beaten farmer from Xiaogang village in Anhui province in eastern China, lets a cigarette burn down between his fingers as he quietly, but with obvious pride, tells of how he and his neighbours sparked a rural revolution in China in 1978 that became the model for farming reform nationwide.
“We just wanted to feed ourselves. In the 1970s, Xiaogang was the poorest village in Fengyang County. After three years of natural disasters destroying the harvest, we had to do something as we were forced to beg for food,” said the bearded farmer, who brings out small wooden benches for us to sit on as we talk.
One in four people in the impoverished county starved to death during Chairman Mao Zedong’s failed experiment in collectivised farming known as the Great Leap Forward, including 66 in Xiaogang, and there was no sign of things getting better.
Yan and his friends in the village got together and signed a secret agreement to divide communally-owned farmland into individual pieces called household contracts.
This was in direct contradiction of one of the sacred principles of Communist ideology – collective farming – and Yan and his neighbours could have been executed for their counter-revolutionary actions. But a new era of pragmatism held sway in China in the late 1970s after the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, where ideology was taken to extremes and millions of lives were ruined. Rather than crushing their initiative, then-leader Deng Xiaoping saw the merit of the plan and it came to be adopted nationwide as a way of feeding China’s people.
Late last year, President Hu Jintao visited the cradle of Chinese land reform, a major symbolic gesture meant to underline his government’s latest land reform programme, which allows farmers to transfer or lease their land and effectively removes one of the last major elements of Mao’s collective revolution.
GETTING TO XIAOGANG is a three-hour drive from the Anhui provincial capital, a journey made hazardous by the rain which turned much of the road into sludge, and the route takes you through desperately run-down and poor villages, where you are forced to swerve to avoid the chickens running across the road.
Then the road picks up as you get on to the stretch built for Hu’s visit, and the village itself is a revelation – Xiaogang has been transformed from a rundown hamlet into a model village, with rows of houses and shops, plus a museum, in recognition of the place’s symbolic importance.
Yan’s recollections are of a far less prosperous era. Two daughters died in the 1970s because the family had no money to bring them to hospital, and his three surviving children have all known hunger.
Under the collective system, villagers worked the land and received “work points”, which were exchanged for food. Cadres were sent from the prefecture to oversee the production, meaning even more mouths to feed from meagre harvests. People lacked the enthusiasm for government work units and incentive was badly lacking. The focus was on ideological correctness rather than on producing decent harvests.
Yan, as a work unit leader, witnessed the failure of the plan and along with two friends decided to act, and a secret meeting followed in which they divided the farmland which was then owned by the People’s Commune, into pieces for each family to cultivate.
Under this individual household contract system, the 115 villagers promised that each household would deliver a full quota of grain to the state and to the commune, and keep whatever remained. Yan kept the books for the project and what the balance sheet attested to was a remarkable success. Grain output increased to 90,000kgs in 1979, over six times as much as the previous year. The per capita income of Xiaogang climbed to 400 yuan (€45) from 22 yuan (€2.50).
“We had peanuts, rice, potatoes – so many crops we harvested. We wanted to keep it a secret, and only planned it as a temporary measure, one we would stop when we had enough to eat,” said Yan.
It was too much for some people to bear, and the Xiaogang villagers were accused of “digging up the cornerstone of socialism”. The controversy started to go up the chain of responsibility. Some cadres stopped sending farm machinery and seeds to the errant village, and disaster threatened.
However, the Communist Party secretary in the Fengyang Prefecture seemed to recognise change was afoot in China and allowed the practice to continue, as long as it didn’t spread.
Later the system was given approval by the provincial authorities, and ultimately won the backing of the senior leadership when the central government introduced a land reform plan along the lines of the Xiaogang project in November 1978. Land reform based on the Xiaogang project was formally enacted by Deng Xiaoping at the Party Congress in 1979.
Deng Xiaoping had just been rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution and was keen for his reform-minded government to distance itself from the catastrophes of the latter part of Mao’s reign, particularly the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, where Mao’s disastrous effort to modernise the economy saw at least 20 million people die of starvation.
Former president Jiang Zemin visited in 1998, Premier Wen Jiabao has also been here, and President Hu pointedly chose Xiaogang for a high-profile visit when he introduced his own government’s land reform project, symbolically 30 years since Deng brought in the first land reform plan.
During his visit, Hu urged the villagers to “pursue deepened rural reforms”. Economists believe that giving a big shot in the arm to the rural economy is one way of mitigating the effects of a recession, as exports are expected to slow due to the global financial crisis.
CURRENTLY UNDER the Communist system, farmers are allowed to own the crops they produce, but they are not allowed to own the land itself. But faced with a slowing economy and rising discontent about unemployment, and trying to find a way to deal with 26 million migrant workers returning home to the countryside as jobs in the rich cities dry up, the government has set itself a target of doubling rural incomes by 2020.
As it stands, farmers lease their land for 30 years from their village collective, run by the local Communist Party secretary. Allowing farmers to transfer land-use rights is a major step toward privatisation. Implementing the plan involves major logistical problems and could take a long time.
Land reform goes some way to clarifying the messy issue of land ownership in China – some 80 per cent of new land projects are illegal, according to government data. Farmers have rioted on many occasions against local cadres who have sold their land to greedy property developers.
The reform is also aimed at introducing more efficient farming methods through larger farms and investment in farming technology, important steps in a country which has more than 20 per cent of the world’s population but only seven per cent of its arable land.
As we finish our conversation, a truck arrives with dozens of sacks of black beans which need to be unloaded into the front of Yan’s house where we are sitting. Farming is still productive in Xiaogang, and per capita annual income was around 6,000 yuan (about €600) in 2007, but the future is uncertain because it is the factories, not farms, that pay the highest wages in China these days, and most of the town’s young people have left for the big cities to work. The economic slowdown means many of these migrants are coming back, but they face a sdifficult time, as the farms cannot support them all.
In the town hall, Guan Youjiang, deputy director of the Xiaogang Village Commission, said the 1978 land reform plan helped stave off starvation, but development has been relatively slow since.
“The farmers have a reasonable standard of living, but it’s not great compared to other parts of China. So we’ve been talking to companies, trying to get them to move here,” said Guan.
One US company, GLG Group, is setting up a factory in the village which will use a large area of farmland – 1,000 hectares, almost 10 per cent of the total arable land there. Guan proudly displays the brochure. “We have lots of land, but this is the way to use it best,” said Guan.