In Xiaogang village
Anhui province
AS SOON as we turned off the main road, Deng Xiaoping beamed down at us from a giant billboard.
We were still about six smoothly-paved kilometres away from Xiaogang, but there was no mistaking Beijing's stamp of approval for the village taken as the birthplace of China's phenomenal economic transformation.
With China marking 30 years of reforms that have seen it morph from a hobbling has-been power held back by the Maoist-era command system into the world's fourth-largest economy today, the once-impoverished Xiaogang village has been very much in the spotlight.
This is where 18 desperate, starving peasants huddled together to press their thumbprints on an illegal, secret pact doing away with collective farming one cold night in December 1978.
Riding the winds of change, Xiaogang's rebels were not arrested but praised by then-leader of Anhui province Wan Li, who took a battering from other officials. But Mr Wan later won the ear of paramount leader Deng - and the rest, as they say, is history.
The rural revolution which raised grain production instantly then sparked gradual, incremental policy changes that put China on the road to a market economy - or 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' as Beijing still insists on calling it.
That story of how the farmers changed the course of China's history is told, panel by panel, in a museum in the middle of Xiaogang, which with its well-trimmed trees and picture-perfect landscaping is a bit of an abberation in the typically-scruffy Chinese countryside.
Daily bus-loads of visitors, guided by Chinese, English or Japanese-speaking docents, witness how local farmers' annual incomes have shot up an incredible 300 times in the past 30 years - from 22 yuan in 1978 to 6,600 yuan today.
'I never thought I'd see this day. When we decided we couldn't go on farming collectively anymore, we were just trying to feed our wives and children,' said Xiaogang farmer Yan Junchang, leader of the 'production team' at the time of the 1978 rebellion, chomping his way through a six-dish lunch before excusing himself for an afternoon mahjong session.
Doubtless, Xiaogang's early audacity has won it fame and favour. Its residents earned 40 per cent more than the average last year in Anhui, one of China's poorer, landlocked provinces.
Outsiders have come to the village bearing ideas and investment. A grape farming business has been running for some years, with 10 or so local households leasing their land to a commercial company.
In another corner of the village, big tents covered with grey blankets are blooming with mushrooms – another source of income for several of Xiaogang's farmers.
Yet, given its track record as a first-mover, Xiaogang's progress has not been all that impressive.
Other 'brand-name' villages, like Nanjie in Henan province, have already paved their path out of poverty for good: By turning farmers into factory workers, or owners.
Nanjie, which purports to combine the best of Mao Zedong's and Deng's philosophies, already looked a bit like Singapore's Jurong Industrial Park with HDB blocks thrown in when this reporter visited nine years ago in 1999.
That Xiaogang has not made that kind of stunning transformation must often come up in conversation around here. Local propaganda officials have a stock answer. One asked me: 'How can all of China's villages turn to industry and become filled with factories? Who will feed China then?'
Therein lies Beijing's tricky task now.
After the astronomical economic growth charted by turbo-charged cities on the coast since the 1990s, China is finally turning back to the countryside, where its modern day revolution began.
Beijing knows that if a big boost in domestic demand is going to power the Chinese economy to its next wave of growth - especially as export demand slides in the current global downturn - it is in the countryside that the answer lies.
And with an ever-widening rural-urban income gap triggering tens of thousands protests in the countryside every year these days, China know it has to help its rural residents - still 56 per cent of its population - earn more and live more comfortably.
On the other hand, with its paltry - and shrinking - per capita land resources, it needs to ensure the country can grow enough grain and crops to feed itself.
The Chinese leadership is now trying to navigate its way out of this conundrum.
Meanwhile, outside Xiaogang's museum, another giant billboard stands.
Holding taunt against the nippy winter wind, a freshly-mounted picture depicts a smiling President Hu Jintao among Xiaogang's villagers.
In late September, he made a widely-publicised visit to Xiaogang to deliver good news for China's 750 million farmers. He promised that their land leases, currently for 30 years, will be extended and that they will be encouraged to 'transfer' their plots to other farmers or companies so that they can earn a wage - or even pack off to the cities for higher-paying work if they so choose.
That, some observers argue, is what's needed to truly unlock the economic potential of China's farmers.
But first things first, says Remin University sociologist Kang Xiaoguang.
The long-running, institutionalised discrimination that prevents rural migrants from getting full access to housing, education and healthcare when they take on jobs in the cities and towns must first be removed.
'Before we can even talk about radical rural land reform, the biggest change needed is to open up the cities' doors to allow more rural people to really move there,' he said.
'They shouldn't be regarded as mere 'surplus labour' but must become migrants in the full sense of the word.'
And when they indeed do, academics argue, China will finally truly enter its next phase of modernisation.
Read Sim Chi Yin's full story in today's Straits Times Saturday Special Report.