Word: rice
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Deng's reforms abolished the communes and replaced them with a contract system. Though the state continues to own all land, it leases plots, mostly to individual families. Rent is paid by delivery of a set quantity of rice, wheat or whatever to the state at a fixed price. But once that obligation is met, families can grow anything else they wish and sell it in free markets for whatever price they can get (though the state does set limits on how much some prices can fluctuate...
...results have been phenomenal. Freed to prosper by hard work, Chinese farmers have increased food production around 8% in each year since 1978, about 2½ times the rate in the preceding 26 years. Variety has increased along with quantity; besides rice and wheat, the Chinese are growing and eating more poultry and pork (China has the world's largest pig population, though many are scrawny beasts quite unlike the corn-fattened hogs of Iowa or Nebraska). The biggest payoff of all: Vaclav Smil, a Canadian geographer, calculates that in China, "today's diets appear to supply, on the average, enough...
Standing amid the lush bamboo groves and rice paddies of northwestern Sichuan province, the U-shaped farmhouse is typical of the local architecture, with a wooden frame, stucco walls and a gray tile roof. Ten families have subdivided the 16 rooms of the 100-year-old structure into 32 cubicles, and its courtyard is dotted with drying pepper bunches and ears of corn. In the center of these crowded communal quarters stand three rooms unused except by the 60 or so visitors who turn up daily to see the birthplace of Deng Xiaoping. But even the smattering of photographs...
...second revolution. In 1943 he launched a campaign called the "great production movement," aimed at boosting local harvests. It included a system of "rewarding the hardworking and punishing the lazy" by paying bonuses to model producers. Another feature was "contract work," committing users of public fields and rice paddies to turn over an agreed-upon production quota to the authorities and allowing those farmers to keep anything that exceeded it. According to a recent article in the Chinese journal Modern History Studies, Deng himself joined an army team in tending a wheat field...
Adults like Ru do not need to be educated about what life in Sichuan was like before the province became a testing lab for Deng's agricultural reforms in the late 1970s. The country's most populous province, Sichuan is also its rice bowl, a jade-green paradise whose fertile valleys have fed China for centuries. Yet Mao Tse-tung's policies proved so debilitating that by 1976 Sichuan was importing food for the first time in memory. Deng had visited his home province the previous year and had been shocked by the destitution he found...