Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

Today, China’s leaders are proud of its productive agricultural sector, but it did not change because of a top-down decision. It was started by a few brave peasants in the Xiaogang village in Anhui province in December 1978. The eighteen families of the village were desperate. The communist system did not supply them or their children with enough to eat. Some families had to boil poplar leaves and eat them with salt; others ground roasted tree bark to use as flour. So they met in secret late one night and agreed to parcel out the communal land among themselves. Every family would make its own decisions on what and how to farm and how much to work, and each family would be allowed to sell what they produced themselves, after the government took the share it demanded. They wrote it down as a formal contract so that everyone would be bound to it, and signed or gave their fingerprints by the light of an oil lamp. Now that it was down in writing, the stakes were incredibly high. If the document was found, they would be punished with the full weight of the regime. The villagers agreed that if word got out and any of them were jailed or executed, the others would raise their children. The farmer who had drawn up the contract hid it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house, and hoped that the officials would never find it. In the end, word of this secret privatization got out. The result was just too good to keep a secret. The farmers did not start the workday when the vi...