November 24, 1978

Household responsibility system

Xiaogang farmers make a secret household-farming compact

The compact provided that if its organisers were imprisoned or killed, the other villagers would raise their children to age 18.

A night meeting in Fengyang County

In the official commemorative account, 18 farmers or household representatives met secretly on the night of 24 November 1978 in Xiaogang, Fengyang County, Anhui, and agreed to divide collectively farmed land among households.

Most could not sign their names, so the written compact was marked with red fingerprints and a few personal seals. Each household undertook to meet its state-procurement obligations and to stop asking the state for grain or money.

Household contracting contravened prevailing collective-farming policy, so the document contemplated the cadres being imprisoned or killed.

517 mu and ten cattle

The allocation divided 517 mu of land among households by population and ten cattle at one animal for every two households; procurement and other obligations were split the same way. Yan Hongchang, the production team’s deputy leader, helped convene the heads and prepare the compact.

Xiaogang was an exceptionally poor team. Splitting its members first into four and then eight work groups had produced little improvement, and Anhui was under a severe drought.

The date itself is soft

Chinese commemorative accounts assert 24 November 1978, but one heritage account says the surviving compact was dated only “December 1978,” and a SOAS scholarly reconstruction places the meeting in December.

This was also a clandestine village compact, not a pilot programme launched by “China” that day. No provincial or national policy changed that night, and the arrangement stayed hidden.

The gains showed up in the next harvest: Xiaogang recorded 132,370 jin of grain in 1979.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Traditional date

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Traditional date. This date is the conventional one, not one fixed by a contemporary record.

What the sources leave uncertain

The exact day is not securely established by the compact itself. Chinese commemorative accounts assert 24 November 1978, but one heritage account says the document was dated only “December 1978,” while the SOAS scholarly reconstruction places the meeting in December.
Accounts alternate between “18 farmers,” “18 households” and “18 household heads.” The production team contained 20 households; a heritage account says two absent households were represented through guarantees or proxy marks.
Calling Xiaogang the absolute first household-responsibility experiment in Chinese history is disputed. Household contracting had earlier precedents, and responsibility experiments were also developing elsewhere.