Household Responsibility System

The household responsibility system was the reform that dismantled agricultural collectivization in China, beginning informally in November 1978 when eighteen villagers in Xiaogang, Anhui province secretly agreed to divide their commune' s land among individual households, each keeping any surplus produce after meeting a fixed government quota, and formally adopted nationwide by 1982 as part of Deng Xiaoping' s Reform and Opening program. Rural cadres reorganized China' s communes by assigning land parcels and output quotas to individual households rather than collective work teams, and China' s agricultural sector subsequently grew at an annual rate of 7.7 percent between 1978 and 1984, well above the 2.9 percent annual growth of the preceding collectivized period, with the reform credited with roughly half of that output growth.