ABSTRACT
Land reform is a key part of contemporary China’s economic transition and development. The reform and opening-up process in China was initiated by rural land reform in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. With the introduction of the Household Responsibility System (HRS) in the early reform period, agriculture shifted from a collective-based farming system to a family-based one. This brought about robust growth in agricultural output and farmers’ income throughout the first half of the 1980s (Lin and Ho: 2003; Huang et al: 2008). The rural land reform also laid a solid foundation for the fast growth of township and village enterprises (TVEs) afterwards. Without the success of rural land reform as the first push, one cannot even imagine the subsequent reforms in urban China that has generated the nearly double-digit growth rate in the past three decades. One cannot also think of China capable of shifting from a closed plan economy to an increasingly open market economy.
