Chinese leaders pay tribute to a pioneer of rural reform
Print Edition
THE body of Wan Li, former chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, was cremated in Beijing yesterday
President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang, and other state leaders attended the funeral at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, paying their respects and offered his family their condolences.
Wan was 99 when he died in Beijing on July 15.
He was chairman of the NPC Standing Committee from 1988 to 1993, and also served as secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and vice premier prior to being the top legislator.
Wan’s official obituary praised him as an “excellent Party member, a time-tested and loyal Communist soldier, and an outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the Party and the state.”
Born in 1916 in Shandong, Wan joined the CPC in 1936. He made an important contribution to defending China against Japanese invaders in Hebei, Shandong and Henan provinces, and was a leading figure in the civil war later.
After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Wan assumed a number of positions, including head of the urban construction ministry and deputy mayor of Beijing.
He was persecuted during the “cultural revolution (1966-1976),” but resumed work in 1973 and became a senior Party official with the CPC Beijing committee and later railways minister.
In 1977, he became the Party chief in east China’s Anhui Province, where he supported the contractual household responsibility system — a practice once deemed illegal but secretly used by farmers to resist the egalitarian agricultural system and raise grain production.
Major breakthrough
These efforts helped lay a new path for rural reform, said an official document released yesterday. It praised Wan’s efforts in Anhui as a major breakthrough in the rural economic system, and a successful trial for the socialist economic system.
Wan’s leadership of rural reform was recognized both by local farmers and the CPC Central Committee. Farmers in Anhui came up with the saying: “Want to have rice for dinner? Go find Wan Li.”
The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said China’s reform originated in the countryside and that Wan should take the credit.
Wan became secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, and vice premier in charge of agriculture, forestry, water conservation and labor in 1980.
From 1982 to 1986, he led the drafting of five No. 1 Central Documents, annual policy documents drawn up by the CPC and the central government.
They facilitated China’s rural reform, and Wan proposed institutionalizing the contractual household responsibility system by means of writing it into the Constitution.
Wan was also a major figure in economic reform, promoting change in political, science, education and cultural sectors.
He stressed respect for the “Law of Value,” developing a commodity economy and a merit-based distribution system as opposed to planned economy and egalitarian distribution practices.
According to the document, Wan also called for reform of the political system, urging democratic and scientific policy-making.
Wan became chairman of the NPC Standing Committee in 1988. He led the drafting of an amendment to China’s Constitution that was eventually passed by the top legislature in March 1993.
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