Economic reform began in the Chinese countryside as a result of a grassroots' reaction from those enduring extremely poor living conditions. Between 1976 and 1977, a production team in Anhui province secretly initiated what was, in effect, a partial privatisation movement. The farmers in the team were so impoverished that they did not particularly care if they were caught and punished by the Party. They divided their team's land into equal-sized small pieces on a per capita basis, and each family member was given their share. The production team made contracts with each family. By the end of the year each family was required to pay an amount of grain as taxes to the central and local governments, and the amount of grain required for the so-called ‘collective accumulation’ for the production team, the brigade and the commune. In a radical departure from what had gone on before, the rest of the output was to be family income. Since both production and income distribution systems shrank to the smallest unit where each member's effort was directly rewarded, not surprisingly the total output of the production team more than doubled by the end of the year, and the farmers in the team had enough to eat. Many teams followed the year after, and were all successful at increasing output and family income. At last, the central government realised that this was the only way for Chinese farmers to escape from lifelong poverty and hunger.