参考译文：
China’s reform and opening up started in rural areas by adjusting the relationship between farmers and the land. Before 1978, hundreds of millions of the Chinese had no access to basic life necessities. Thanks to national development in the past decades, more than 700 million rural poor have escaped poverty. This has not only provided a solid foundation for the building of a well-off society in all respects, but also made a huge contribution to global development and poverty reduction.
In 1978, 18 farmers in Xiaogang, a small village in Fengyang County, Anhui province, took the lead in dividing communal land into family plots. In doing so, they inadvertently developed the household responsibility system and initiated rural reform across China.
With the removal of people’s communes and constraints of a planned economy, and the implementation of the household responsibility system, Chinese farmers could contract plots of land and grow crops as they might want, which encouraged them to engage in agricultural production with intense passion.
Rural reform laid a solid foundation for the next stage of national development. From 1978 to 1985, the transformation of rural economic systems provided a strong boost to China’s extraordinary economic growth and dramatic poverty reduction. During this period, 50% of the rural poor measured by the poverty standard of that time met their basic life needs. And by the latest poverty standard released in 2011, more than 100 million Chinese exited poverty over the same period.
