The sight startled visitors. There, in the center of Longzhao, a prospering village on the outskirts of the city of Chengdu, were the crumbling remains of a mud-brick house, its thatched roof scattered around it like straw dandruff. The hut, obviously abandoned, was surrounded by freshly constructed brick-and-concrete apartments. The eyesore was cleared away a few weeks ago, but why had it remained so long? "We kept it there so that people would remember what it was like five years ago," explains Ru Furong, director of Longzhao's garment factory. "We used it to educate the young as to how bad things used to be."
Adults like Ru do not need to be educated about what life in Sichuan was like before the province became a testing lab for Deng's agricultural reforms in the late 1970s. The country's most populous province, Sichuan is also its rice bowl, a jade-green paradise whose fertile valleys have fed China for centuries. Yet Mao Tse-tung's policies proved so debilitating that by 1976 Sichuan was importing food for the first time in memory. Deng had visited his home province the previous year and had been shocked by the destitution he found.
Today, Sichuan is a national showplace for the policies of its homegrown boy. In a field where dozens of commune workers once listlessly toiled, a family now energetically tills the land. Villages whose fortunes once depended entirely upon crops now boast small plants that make products such as shoes, radios and billiard balls. Free markets enliven every town's main street, attracting peddlers from all around who bring their wares by bicycle. (What can be tied up and carried on two wheels would have amazed even Ripley: live pigs and goats and 20-ft.-long bamboo poles.)
Much of the credit for Sichuan's transformation belongs to Premier Zhao Ziyang, a Deng protégé who served as the party's provincial secretary from 1975 to 1980. Zhao helped introduce the contract-responsibility system, the bedrock of rural reforms, in 1977. Families and individuals were assigned plots in return for promising to meet harvest quotas. Surplus crops could be sold to the state at higher prices. Eventually, peasants were also allowed to sell the extra grain at market. The experiment worked so well that it was adopted as a national policy in late 1978.
Industrial development in Sichuan came next, spurred partly by the fact that most towns did not have enough farmland to go around. The 133 villagers in Longzhao, for example, realized they could not profitably divide the town's meager l½ acres. Looking for alternatives, several women banded together to mend clothing. Today that circle has grown into a 110-woman collective housed in a new, two-story concrete building. The clatter of 60 gleaming sewing machines plays syncopated rhythm to the strains of Chinese music from the stereo and the gossipy talk of the workers. Liao Zhureng, 30, who manages the workshop, rarely needs to exhort the women since they are paid by the piece.