10 Yuan 40th Anniversary of Reform - Reform in Xiaogang Village

In December 1978, eighteen farmers in Xiaogang, a village in Anhui province, secretly divided their collective farmland among households and signed a contract — in blood, by some accounts — agreeing to care for each other's families if any signer was arrested or executed for the act. What they did was technically illegal under the commune system, yet their harvest that year exceeded the previous five years combined. Rather than prosecute them, Deng Xiaoping's government quietly endorsed the experiment, and the household responsibility system was formalized nationally by 1982.

This coin is one of five in the 40th Anniversary of Reform silver series, each commemorating a different episode in China's post-Mao economic opening.