Spirit of reform to live on

Wan Li, former chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the top legislature, died at the age of 99 on Wednesday, but his precious legacy will be remembered and carried forward forever by the Chinese people.

Many of Wan's deeds are worth praising. A particularly outstanding contribution Wan made was the extension of the contractual household responsibility system, a practice secretly invented by farmers in Xiaogang village in Anhui province to resist the egalitarian agricultural system and raise grain production, to the rest of the province in 1977, when he served as the province's Party chief. This actually started the rural reforms in China at that time.

Such reform, although a general consensus today, posed a huge political risk to the initiator in China in the late 1970s when the perception of society was rather backward and conservative. After conducting in-depth studies, Wan confirmed a production-focused principle, and villagers were divided into independent production units to get their labor remuneration based on agricultural output. The move was warmly welcomed by farmers who were plagued by grain scarcity and hunger.