Du Runsheng

Du Runsheng was a Chinese economist and government official known as the father of China's rural reform for his role in dismantling agricultural collectivization after the death of Mao Zedong. As deputy director of the National Agricultural Commission from 1979 to 1983 and then director of the State Council's Rural Development Research Center and the Communist Party Secretariat's Rural Policy Research Office from 1983 to 1989, he drafted the legal framework that gave the household responsibility system its standing in law, the reform that let peasant families contract and manage their own production plots rather than farm exclusively under collective direction. From 1982 to 1986 he authored the Chinese Communist Party's annual "Document No. 1" policy statements on rural development, which set the government's agenda for agricultural modernization and village development each year during that period. Born in 1913, he continued to advise on rural policy as a member of the party's Central Advisory Commission from 1987 to 1992 and lived until 2015.