Sell up, move on

CHINA’S great lift-off began more than three decades ago in the countryside, when the Communist Party began loosening the rules it had used to ensure that farmers stayed in their villages and produced food at the party’s behest.Under Maoist madness, farmers were corralled into “people’s communes” where they toiled in abject poverty and sometimes extreme hunger. But from the late 1970s, farmers gradually gained yearned-for freedoms: to farm their own plots of land and sell their produce privately, and eventually to move into cities to work in factories. These changes were a liberation; they helped to transform the country from basket case to economic powerhouse. But they did not go far enough. The remaining vestiges of Maoist control are deeply unfair and hold back the country’s economic development at a time of slowing growth. China needs a new wave of reform.