In the late 1950s Mao decided to make the countryside communist in the full sense, and what happened here in Xiaogang was documented three years after Mao’s death in an austerely titled report, ‘An Investigation of the Xiaogang Production Brigade’s Household Responsibility System in Liyuan Commune in Fengyang County’ – an account of the events in the village culminating in 1978, when the peasants refused any longer to work the commune system (a story told below page 507).
