Zhao Ziyang,a former Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China and later General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, acted as a reformer of the communist system in China during the late '80s. He implemented a series of changes that helped move China from the centrally planned economy that was championed by the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward and ultimately led to famine, mass starvation, and horrendous human rights abuses, to a system more heavily reliant on markets. His reforms were no wear near comprehensive, but did manage to bring a large number of people out of food insecurity and into improved quality of life with programs like the open-door policy that had opened China to trade with foreign countries. He was later ousted by party leadership and labeled a traitor to the communist cause, spending the last years of his life under house arrest.

In his memoirs, he describes the reason he believed the reforms he introduced to be necessary, writing:

For many years, our economic development efforts yielded poor results. They demanded a great deal of effort while providing few rewards...

Consider agriculture, for example: if it is to achieve efficiency, the first principle should be to apply the strengths of the local land conditions. One should plant whatever is most suitable to the land. However, for a long period of time, we were not allowed to do that...

Another example was the northwest region of Shandong Province, where the soil had a high alkali salt content. Most of the region was suitable for cotton growing at considerably high yields. But for years, policy had prevented them from growing cotton, allowing only wheat. The result was that the more wheat they planted, the lower yields they got and the more likely the farmers were to be starving...

Local folklore held that "one mu of wheat will feed all, half a mu of cotton yields extra." Before, when they planted one and a half mu of wheat, they were hardly able to feed themselves; later, one mu of cotton was enough and they were even able to sell the extra back to the state.

Shandong and Lankao were able to plant what was suited to their environment because we were practicing the open-door policy and importing large amounts of wheat from abroad--as much as several tens of millions of tons annually during those years. So long as we allowed farmers to plant whatever was appropriate and had the highest yields, agriculture improved. Without the open-door policy, we would have been forced to produce everything ourselves, and if we remained fixated on self-reliance, nothing could have happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Ziyang

According to the passage, how did institutions (i.e. institutions as presented in your textbook) prevent or regress growth in China before the reform and opening-up period?

How did reform and opening-up change these institutions to help growth?

Using what you know and/or further research, what are some other ways that institutions could have been further reformed to help growth even more during this period?