But the community responsibility system provided the institutional scaffolding that made the expansion of trade possible.
Since decollectivisation and the introduction of Deng's "household-contract responsibility system", rural land has been held by individual families.
Quietly encouraged by Wan (who may have authorised Fengyang's initial move), the "household responsibility system" covered 90% of Anhui's villages by the end of the year.
First came the "contract responsibility system": state firms, once they had produced for the plan, could sell their surplus on the open market.
Eventually, in 1981, the party gave its explicit blessing to the "household responsibility system", as it called this once sacrilegious approach to farming.
The household responsibility system, also launched in 1978, allocated plots of collectively-owned land to individual families for as long as 30 years, allowing them to make production decisions and reap the profits.
One innovation in China's agriculture was the "production responsibility system," which allowed the commune to contract with its members for quotas of output; the members were free to sell the surplus on the open market.
"How," he asks, "could a creditor from one corner of Europe, for example, trust a debtor from another corner, about whom he knew little and who could avoid interacting with him in the future, to pay his debt?" The answer was the community responsibility system, in which every member of a community was liable for every other member's debts.
After collectivization and deregulation, leading to the household responsibility system, a new approach has been followed.
After collectivization and deregulation, leading to the household responsibility system, a new approach has been followed. .
Although the reform of the household responsibility system in Yongjia appeared to end in failure, the household responsibility system did not in fact die out in Yongjia and other places in Wenzhou.
