http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/3507064/Chinas-Communist-led-reforms-continue-to-hold-peasants-back.html
Three decades after a group of peasants risked prison to launch China's capitalist revolution, the limits of the Communist-led reforms remains an ever present constraint on their lives.
After two decades of poverty and a famine in which 60 of the 175 villagers starved to death as Chairman Mao's commune system went disastrously wrong, 18 villagers signed a secret oath, embarking on an illegal experiment in private farming in Xiaogang village, Anhui province.
In a move that would soon be held up as an example for the rest of the country to follow, the peasants vowed to abandon the commune, farm their own land and look after the children of anyone sent to prison or killed for daring to challenge Marxist orthodoxy.
"The decision was one of hopelessness," said Yan Junchang, one of the two men whose idea it was. "We divided the land to save each others' lives. If we hadn't, we would have died of hunger."