"Going begging meant you had guts, which was regarded as a guarantee of feeding your family, a prerequisite to be accepted by a girl," Yan Lichang of Xiaogang Village recalled half-jokingly.

"I went out begging in my early thirties, almost every year," he said.

Before 1978, Xiaogang in east China's Anhui Province was infamous for its poverty. Most local families had to roam the countryside begging after the autumn harvest, Yan, now 64, said.

After the Communist Party took over in 1949, land was redistributed to farmers. But in the 1950s, the farmers had to work the land in collective farms.

The village had only 120 people before 1958 and 67 villagers died of hunger during the Great Leap Forward from 1958-60. In Fengyang County, where Xiaogang is located, one in four people perished, or 90,000 in all.

"Begging is humiliating and I never got much," Yan said. "Since I would have starved to death, I had nothing to lose by signing the agreement."

"The agreement" Yan mentioned was signed one night in November 1978, when 18 villagers of Xiaogang, including Yan, risked their lives to sign a secret pact that divided the then People's Commune-owned farmland into family plots.

This move, if seen as "capitalist", could have meant severe punishment. Thus, on that secret agreement covered with the villagers' seals and red fingerprints, there was a line saying: "If any word about this is divulged and the team leader is put in prison, other team members shall share the responsibility to bringup his child till he (or she) is 18."

Yan, a father of two, didn't even tell his wife and was frightened by every knock on the door.

History proved the villagers right, however. The "household contract responsibility system" fired the locals' enthusiasm for farm production.

The grains that a local farmer turned over to the state the very next year almost totaled the figure of the previous two decades, recalled Yan Hongchang, one of the 18 Xiaogang villagers.

Their practice was later supported by Deng Xiaoping, chief architect of China's reform and opening-up drive, and recognized by the government. Xiaogang has become known as the pace-setter ofthe nation's rural reform.

In the early 1980s, the contract responsibility system, modeled after Xiaogang village's program, came into being. The new system, which also allowed farmers to sell their excess produce in private markets after fulfilling their official quotas to the commune, wasa success that saw farmers increasing their incomes tremendously.

Thanks to the reform, China can finally feed 21 percent of the global population with less than 10 percent of the world's arable land.

Not without problems

In the mid-1980s, the system appeared to have exhausted its benefits as grain output hit a plateau. Also, because of China's large population and limited land, the land allotted to each household was tiny, about half a hectare per household.

"The small size of farms limited the use of advanced equipment," said Yan. "We decided to piece [farms] together, which never crossed my mind when we risked everything to divide them."

This time, "communing" is based on the farmers' own will. In 2003, the Rural Land Contracting Law spelled out in detail farmers' right to lease, assign, exchange and carry out other transactions on their contracted land, except sell or mortgage it.

The new law is aimed at encouraging the transfer of those rights to reduce the amount of idle farmland and increase large-scale, more efficient farming. The government has promised help for the development of large-scale farming by creating professionally managed cooperatives.

He Kaiyin, an expert on rural issues from Anhui, said it was reasonable to aggregate the land for better utilization, as much farmland remained idle and irrigation and other rural infrastructure deteriorated after farmers swarmed into cities.