CPC's 105th founding anniversary and China's transformation

People try virtual reality (VR) headsets at the Hudiewan riverside Party-masses service complex in Jing'an District, eastern China's Shanghai, on June 2, 2026. [Photo/Xinhua]

On a winter night in 1978, in a mud-walled cottage in Xiaogang Village, Fengyang County, Anhui Province, 18 farmers gathered around a kerosene lamp and drafted a short handwritten contract dividing their commune's land into family plots, agreeing to deliver a full quota of grain to the state and keep whatever remained. Then, they pressed their fingerprints with red ink at the bottom of the contract.

The harvest that followed the secret contract was the largest the village had seen in a generation. Later, the approach initiated by Xiaogang farmers acquired a name—the household contract responsibility system—and within a few years it spread across China's rural areas. By the end of 1984, more than 99 percent of the country's farming collectives had adopted some form of this system.

It was a simple, profound social shift. Once a family was allowed to keep what it produced beyond the quota, work itself became worth the effort.

This is a fitting place to begin a story about China's transformation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) that celebrates its 105th founding anniversary this year—not with a slogan, but with 18 fingerprints. The most honest way to read a century of policy is through what it has changed in ordinary lives.

None of what followed would have been possible without the engine beneath it—the economy. In the late 1970s, China was among the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP of under US$200. Since the start of reform and opening up, the Chinese economy has grown at an average of around 9 percent annually, marking a sustained expansion with few parallels in modern history.

By 2010, China had overtaken Japan to become the world's second-largest economy. In 2025, its GDP stood at about US$20.28 trillion, with per capita disposable income rising to roughly US$6,192. It remains the world's largest manufacturer and goods trading nation. Yet a more telling shift is not in global rankings but in household living standards. A family that once saved up grain now amasses savings, school fees, and increasingly, holidays.

One of the clearest returns on that growth is poverty reduction. The World Bank estimates that since the late 1970s, China has lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, accounting for about three-fourths of global poverty reduction over the same period.

In early 2021, the Chinese government declared absolute poverty eliminated, reporting that 98.99 million rural residents, 832 counties, and 128,000 villages had been removed from the poverty register. That means that between 2012 and 2020, on average, one person was lifted out of poverty every three seconds.

Such numbers are difficult to grasp at scale. Up close, the story becomes more visible. The final push against poverty placed responsibility on named officials in named villages. By 2020, more than three million officials had been dispatched as first secretaries and resident officials to poor villages to live and work on site.

Behind the income figures hide slower, less visible gains. In 1949, the average life expectancy in China was around 35 years. By 2024, it had reached 79, a level that places the country close to high-income economies, according to the National Health Commission. In the same period, literacy rose from about 20 percent to near-universal.

Some of the transformation is visible from a train window. China's high-speed rail network did not exist two decades ago. Today, it spans roughly 48,000 kilometers—the longest in the world and about two-thirds of the global total—connecting more than 500 cities.

Journeys between the coast and inland that once required sleepless nights can now be completed in an afternoon. Each Spring Festival, the network carries a migration larger than the population of many countries and does so, for the most part, on schedule.

Meanwhile, the share of China's population living in cities rose from under 20 percent in 1980 to about 66 percent in 2023, one of the largest urbanization processes in human history.

Yet another dividend rarely appears in economic data—everyday security. According to Gallup's 2025 Global Safety Report, 94 percent of adults in China said they felt safe walking alone at night, placing the country third globally after Singapore and Tajikistan and well above the global average of 73 percent.

For most people, the reality is one of quiet streets, safe late-night journeys home, and lives stable enough to plan around. That sense of stability is easily taken for granted until it is absent, and it is a major factor that empowered the children of the Xiaogang farmers to think beyond the next harvest.

None of this suggests the work is complete, and official documents make it clear that development is an ongoing process. While China continues to advance, efforts are also focused on promoting more balanced regional development. At the same time, improvements in life expectancy reflect remarkable progress in public health and development capacity alongside new dynamics that are being fostered through long-term planning.

China has set the goal of making substantial progress in achieving common prosperity by 2035, reflecting its continued commitment to high-quality development. A transformation of this scale has naturally deepened public expectations for the next stage of progress.

The original Xiaogang contract still exists. Today, it sits behind glass in a museum in Beijing, as a national relic reproduced in textbooks and visited by tour groups gazing at its faded ink and red fingerprints. What followed the Xiaogang story in the arc of the CPC's history, especially the decades of reform and opening up, was a sustained process of turning lived reality into policy and policy into everyday progress. It is visible in quieter but enduring forms such as longer life expectancies, wider access to education, more convenient transportation, and a sense of stability that empowers ordinary people to achieve long-term goals.

The 18 farmers who pressed their red fingerprints on that contract could not have imagined the scale their act would eventually touch. Yet their story endures not only as the beginning of reform but as part of a broader national journey in which development has been closely tied to improving the conditions of everyday life, step by step and generation by generation.

In the end, this continuity defines the story most clearly: A country is measuring its progress less by declaration and more by the steady expansion of what its people are able to build, experience, and keep.

The author is an Indian journalist and commentator based in Beijing.