[2] Producing steel to make military equipment became the highest priority and other economic sectors related to the improvement of livelihood of the people such as agriculture and light industry were undervalued.
[3] To regain power, momentum and consolidate his communist ideology within the party, Mao Zedong initiated the ten-year Cultural Revolution in 1966.
According to statistics from World Bank, the fertility rate of China peaked in 1966, with each woman giving birth to an average of 6.37 children.
As it was difficult to monitor the performance of each person, yields were equally divided among households, disregarding the different degrees of efforts individuals put in.
Farming tools and land were equally distributed among the households in return for delivery of fixed output quotas.
In 1980, Deng Xiaoping publicly announced his endorsement of such policy and this officially began the enforcement of the rural reform.
They were only required to submit part of the yield as taxes to the government and were entitled to sell the excess gains in the free market.
The increase in capital and the use of chemical fertilizers indicated the prevalence of commercialization and agricultural mechanization, which also explains the gradual decrease in farm labor after 1984.
As the agricultural production line was increasingly automated, the excess farming labor was released from the rural area into the city to aid in urban development.
Today and for the entire reform era, the percentage of social investment going to agriculture has been a fraction of the amount of surplus generated in that sector (and less than 2% of the total).