S7 Ep44: Fifty years of Chinese growth: The gradualist reform strategy explained

In 1978, a farmer in rural China could not sell a sack of grain above the state quota, choose an employer, or move to the nearest city without a permit.

In this week's VoxDev Talk, Kaiji Chen and Tao Zha (both Emory University and Atlanta Fed) explain how China dismantled barriers like this one at a time. Gradualist reform first gave farmers the right to sell surplus grain at market prices. Small state firms were privatised 19 years later, while the largest kept state backing. This style of reform powered two distinct growth engines: first, labour moving off the land, then a wave of capital into infrastructure and property. The result: half a century of unprecedented growth -- but it also produced the debt, inequality and trade tension now working against China's growth model.

The research behind this episode:

Chen, Kaiji, and Tao Zha. 2025. "China's Macroeconomic Development: The Role of Gradualist Reforms." Journal of Economic Literature 63 (4): 1331-62.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, Kaiji Chen, and Tao Zha. 2026. "Fifty years of Chinese growth: The gradualist reform strategy explained." VoxDev Talk (podcast).

About the guests

Kaiji Chen is Professor of Economics at Emory University and a research fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Center for Quantitative Economic Research. His research spans financial contracts, business cycles and China's macroeconomy, with recent work on housing policy, credit allocation and household consumption in China.

Tao Zha is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and executive director of the Center for Quantitative Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2017. His research spans macroeconomics, financial economics and econometrics, with a long standing focus on China's economy.

Research cited in this episode

The household responsibility system. Piloted in Sichuan and Anhui from 1978 and adopted nationwide by 1980, this reform kept land collectively owned but contracted it to individual households, who could sell output above a fixed state quota at market prices. It replaced work point pay with a direct link between effort and income, and the productivity gains it released freed the rural labour surplus behind China's first wave of industrialisation.

Township and village enterprises (TVEs). Rural, collectively owned firms that absorbed workers leaving agriculture through the 1980s and 1990s, often with local governments acting as guarantors for bank credit the firms could not secure alone. TVE employment grew from 28 million in 1978 to 135 million by 1997, and TVE output rose from under 6% of GDP to 26% over roughly the same period.