In 1978, with the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping, China embarked on agricultural reform which sought to increase productivity. This book brings together a set of the theoretical and empirical analyses of the Chinese rural economy in the 1970s and early 1980s based on a local case study, that of Dahe Township in north China's Hebei province, placing these analyses in the context of China's modern rural development and of the state of knowledge based on other sources.