Please help me answer the 4 questions on the second page.
The Secret that the farmers had to gather in secret to discuss it. Document That One evening, they snuck n pr Transformed in one by one to a farmer's home. Like all of the houses Planet Money China in the village, it had dirt floors, January 20, 201211:55 AM ET mud walls and a straw roof. Heard on All Things Considered NPR No plumbing, no electricity. DAVID KESTENBAUM JACOB "Most people said 'Yes, we want do it,' " says GOLDSTEIN Yen Hongchang, another farmer who was there. Yen Jingchang was one of the signers of the secret document. Jacob But there were others who said 'I don't think this Goldstein/ NPR will work - this is like high voltage wire.' Back In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village then, farmers had never seen electricity, but they'd called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a heard about it. They knew if you touched it, you secret contract. They thought it might get them would die." executed. Instead, it wound up transforming Despite the risks, they decided they had to try China's economy in ways that are still this experiment - and to write it down as a reverberating today. formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it The contract was so risky - and such a big By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote deal - because it was created at the height of out the contract. communism in China. Everyone worked on the The farmers agreed to divide up the land village's collective farm; there was no personal among the families. Each family agreed to turn property. over some of what they grew to the government, "Back then, even one straw belonged to the and to the collective. And, crucially, the farmers group," says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in agreed that families that grew enough food would Xiaogang in 1978. "No one owned anything." get to keep some for themselves. At one meeting with communist party The contract also recognized the risks the officials, a farmer asked: "What about the teeth in farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were my head? Do I own those?" Answer: No. Your sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the teeth belong to the collective. group would care for their children until age 18. In theory, the government would take what The farmers tried to keep the contract secret the collective grew, and would also distribute food Yen Hongchang hid it inside a piece of to each family. There was no incentive to work bamboo in the roof of his house - but when the hard - to go out to the fields early, to put in extra returned to the fields, everything was different. effort, Yon Jingchang says. Before the contract, the farmers would drag "Work hard, don't work hard - everyone themselves out into the field only when the village gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. work." After the contract, the families went out before In Xiaogang there was never enough food, dawn. and the farmers often had to go to other villages to 'We all secretly competed," says Yen beg. Their children were going hungry. They were Jingchang. "Everyone wanted to produce more desperate. than the next person." So, in the winter of 1978, after another It was the same land, the same tools and the terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather same people. Yet just by changing the economic than farm as a collective, each family would get to rules - by saying, you get to keep some of what farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of you grow - everything changed. food, that family could keep some of the harvest. At the end of the season, they had an This is an old idea, of course. But in enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, communist China of 1978, it was so dangerous than in the previous five years combined. That huge harvest gave them away. Local https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/1 officials figured out that the farmers had divided 45360447/the-secret-document-that-transformed-china up the land, and word of what had happened in 2021-7-17 Xiaogang made its way up the Communist Party chain of command. At one point, Yen Hongchang was hauled in to the local Communist Party office. The officials 5. (2) How dangerous was their contract? swore at him, treated him like he was on death 6. (2) What really made the difference in output? row. But fortunately for Mr. Yen and the other 7. (3) Why would the government let them farmers, at this moment in history, there were continue even though it was technically illegal? powerful people in the Communist Party who wanted to change China's economy. Deng 8. (5) Write a paragraph summarizing the Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who would go on to importance of this Chinese village's experiment. create China's modern economy, was just coming You should. include some things that compare to to power. the economy in the US. So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders ultimately decided to hold them up as a model. Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China's economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China. Today, the Chinese government is clearly proud of what happened in Xiaogang. That contract is now in a museum. And the village has become this origin story that kids in China learn about in school But the rest of the story for the original Xiaogang farmers is more ambiguous. Our first day in Xiaogang, we asked to talk to Yen Hongchang, the farmer who actually wrote the contract. The local Communist Party officials told us he was out of town. It turns out that wasn't true: We went back to Xiaogang the next day and tracked Yen Hongchang down. He told us he had been in town the day before. Yen Hongchang told us he started a couple businesses over the years, but the local communist party took them away once they became profitable. He also said that the new factories springing up around Xiaogang these days are largely empty, and haven't created many jobs. Local officials say none of this is true. They say everything in Xiaogang is going great
