Thatched roofs were replaced with tiled ones,
dirt floors were replaced with concrete.
Floris, and in fact in the areas around major cities
a lot of peasants started to have two story and three story homes.
Now if you figure the rural Chinese make up about 18% of the world's population,
and if 80% of them significantly improved the quality,
upgraded the quality of their homes, then in fact rural reform helped
14.5% of the world's inhabitants to significantly Upgrade their homes.
That's just amazing, right?
That's the largest housing boom probably in world history.
So it's no doubt that had a big impact on people's support.
For the party and for the leadership, but moreover, the fact that so
much more money flowed into the countryside that the peasants were
in a position to demand a lot more consumer durable goods.
And that as they started to demand those consumer durable goods,
light industrial sectors.
I mentioned before there had been too much heavy industry.
Now all of a sudden there was a big demand for light industrial goods and
this table really shows some pretty amazing changes, some pretty amazing
shifts in the percentage of families that owned many of these consumer goods.
So this table is the Rural Household Possession of Consumer Goods.
Shift between '78 and 1995, right, per hundred households.
So, for example, in 1978 there would be 30% of
all the households in rural China had a bicycle.
Right?
So there were 30 bicycles for each 100 households.
Within seven years, that was 80 bicycles for every 100 households,
and by 1990, there was more than one bicycle in every household.
It had gotten up to 1.1 bicycles, or
1.2 bicycles for every household.
Wristwatches which could really drive a lot of light industrial factories.
Right? Only 27 wristwatches per 100 households
in rural China.
So each household, not that many households actually had watches
within seven years, again, more than one watch per household, right?
1.2 watches, 1.3 watches per household.
All of a sudden there were millions of watches, were now being manufactured.
And this would drive, this actually drove the urban economy,
and the suburban and, in part, the rural economy.
Just worth looking at here in terms of washing machines.
So by 1995, 17 Households out of every 100.
So 17% of households actually had, in the countryside, right,
this is rural, had a washing machine.
Which liberated women enormously.
It meant that so many fewer women had to stand there and
tediously just be doing the washing machine on
those wooden, scrubbing it on those boards right?
On those wooden boards.
And even here too in terms of colored TV sets,
17% of all the families in rural China.
By 1995 had a color TV set.
So one is the manufacturing.
You're talking something like 17 million I think I calculated.
Something like 17 million colored TV sets had to manufactured by this time for
this number to exist.
But it just improved dramatically the quality of people's lives in rural China,
whereas in the Maui or some of them felt so poor.
Now all of a sudden they had a lot more goods, and
can be much more positive about their lives.