Must-Read: Lucy Hornby: Du Runsheng, Chinese Farm Reformer, 1913-2015

Must-Read: Lucy Hornby: Du Runsheng, Chinese Farm Reformer, 1913-2015: “Du, who has died aged 102, drafted the ‘household responsibility system’…

…that replaced the Communists’ disastrous experiment with farm communes. ‘You could make a case that Du was one of the most influential economists to have ever lived,’ wrote Beijing-based Andrew Batson in an online tribute. ‘If you measure influence by the sheer number of lives affected, then it seems Du would have to rank pretty high.’ In the late 1970s as Deng Xiaoping took power, China was on its knees…. Du, a civil war veteran whom Mao Zedong had purged 20 years earlier when he challenged the shift to Soviet-style communes…. drafted the policy document that, while maintaining the appearance of Communist ideals, let peasants again farm their own plots. ‘An unfair pattern of holding resources had arisen, fostering the rise of vested interests. These interests tended to be conservative, holding back reform in the name of socialist ownership,’ Du wrote in 2006. To avert opposition from within the party, he did not propose dismantling the communes or restoring private ownership. He also agreed to pilot the programme in the poorest areas, where grain warehouses were already empty. The result was electric. Within two years, the most impoverished areas of China were feeding themselves….

Du mentored many current leaders including Wang Qishan, today’s anti-corruption tsar, and an aspiring young cadre in rural Hebei province named Xi Jinping. ‘My grandfather wasn’t just a cadre. He was more like a teacher or a scholar,’ says his grandson, Du Fan. ‘He believed in the long-term principle of a better life for the farmers.’… He was one of only four party elders to oppose Deng’s 1989 military crackdown on student and worker protests in Tiananmen Square. ‘I really respected him,’ says Bao Tong, the most senior official jailed after the protests, adding: ‘He lived life fully.’

At a ripe old age Du enjoyed tennis and was an enthusiastic adopter of the annual flu shot, his grandson says. ‘He really liked the western approach to medicine. He believed in keeping fit through exercise.’ Born on July 18 1913 to a modest family in Shanxi… benefited from the local banking elite’s practice of sponsoring… education… entered Beijing Normal University… moved to a remote guerrilla base in the jagged Taiheng mountains… led the local land redistribution movement. On his return to Beijing he belonged to a group of officials who backed western-style agricultural co-operatives over Mao’s Soviet-inspired communes.

Like many rehabilitated party elites, Du did not like to discuss the turmoil he had lived through, his suffering in the Cultural Revolution or indeed his own part in the bloody land redistribution of the early 1950s. ‘There’s no way he would talk about that,’ says his grandson…. But crucial to his ultimate approach was a belief that ‘in order to have a prosperous countryside, you needed peasants’ voluntary participation’, says Mr Bao. The household responsibility system, allowing farmers to grow what they liked for themselves as long as they met their grain quotas, proved Du right.