I am actually reading about the very important role played by the Towns and Village Enterprise and Urban Collectives during the early stages of "Reform and Opening Up" in Industrializing China. Many especially Western economists have not paid close attention to them and this is partly attributable to their later decline in 1990's.

This is actually very important from the point of view of developing countries who wish to increase agricultural productivity, incomes of farmers and reduce poverty through self management and to undergo the Industrial Revolution. Because they were owned by local governments there was considerable scope for competition and experimentation. The local governments encouraged these enterprises to borrow foreign technology and to focus on increasing output by linking pay to it. Successful practises of pilot zones would later be expanded nationwide.

World Bank estimates show that annual growth rate of TVEs from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s was about 25%. Many countries like my own (India) made a very big mistake in emphasizing Industry over agriculture leading to very heavy distress for farmers and making the country heavily dependent on foreign countries for aid as well as leading to deterioration of balance of payments.

Improved agricultural productivity also played a very important role in funding Industry. The improving incomes of farmers allowed them to save it and the Government reformed the banking system by breaking up the People's Bank of China into 4 Big State owned banks (i.e Agricultural Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China) that acted as both policy banks as well as Commercial banks. This savings allowed the banks lend out loans to Industry which was essential in securing it's development.

One strength of this approach was that these enterprises could be independent of the Government since they were not funded directly from the Government budget. There were 5 types of TVE's namely Responsibility systems (zerenzhi), Collateral or non-collateral contracting (diya chenbao), Joint ventures with foreign investment (heziqiye), Joint stock firms (gufen gongsi) and Publicly listed companies (shangshi gongsi).This allowed the mangers and workers considerable flexibility and allowed them to learn how to work in a market framework with a very important role played by Non Socialist Planning. Many mangers in these enterprises later went to become entrepreneurs leading to a ultimate private sector boom after the official declaration of Socialist Market Economy.

References:

Chinese Township and Village Enterprises: A Model for Other Developing Countries; International Economic Development Program, Ford School of Public Policy

It was colder than hell, one Christmas. There were three of us playing seven-up by a fire in the woods. When the deuces began to look like aces, I called to mind the feat of Rob Roy’s son in driving a dirk through a board, and forthwith stabbed at the box on which we were playing, with my hunting knife. But the box was much lighter than the Highlander’s board, and knife and fist as well crashed clear through it, ruining the game. The liquor was at all of us, and one was clear wild. In the grip of the obvious hallucination that he was John L. Sullivan, he began to swing haymakers at me whenever I reeled into reach. He was six feet two in height and as broad as a barn-door; besides, he had heavy cameo rings on each hand, and these rings sunk into my flesh unpleasantly. So I avoided him and sought to go elsewhere; I must have merely revolved about the glade, because eventually I found myself back near the fire, with my misguided friend grunting and swearing as he flailed his long arms about my ears. In desperation I caught him under the heart with my right and down he went. I remember pulling him out of the fire; and then for hours I remembered nothing, while I lay blind and senseless. But I remember the dawn that broke, cold, grey, leaden— full of retching, disgust and remorse. Uggh — those drab, brittle, grey woods! When we went to the town, we found the countryside in an uproar; for while we lay drunk, the “Santa Claus” gang that had looted Southwestern banks for more than a year, had swept into Cisco, 35 miles away and in an attempt to rob the main bank, had raved into a wholesale gun-battle that strewed the streets with dead and wounded. Two or three of them had gotten away into the brush and posses were beating the hills for them. To invitations to join the man-hunt, my friends and I laughed hollowly; we were in no shape to even lift a gun to our shoulders, much less confront a band of desperate outlaws.

Gad, the country buzzed like so many bees! The authorities sent south for the great Ranger captain Tom Hickman, and Gonzaullas — “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas — “Trigger Finger” Gonzaullas — “Quick Action” Gonzaullas — hero of more touchand-go gun-fights than I know, and already almost a mythical figure in the Southwest. But they were not needed; the fugitives staggered in and gave themselves up — haggard shapes in torn and muddy garments, caked with blood from bullet-wounds. It was the end of the last great robber-gang of Texas. Let me see; it was three — no, four years ago. It doesn’t seem that long. All the Southwest rang with the news. Their names were on all men’s tongues. Now I doubt not they are completely forgotten, except by the kin of the men they slew, except by the men who carry the scars of their bullets. Helms, the leader, went to the chair, roaring and cursing blasphemies, fighting against his doom so terribly that the onlookers stood appalled. Hill, the boy whose life was twisted and ruined in his boyhood when a ghastly blunder consigned him to a reformatory instead of the orphanage to which he should have been sent — he is serving a life sentence in the penitentiary, after an escape and a recapture. Blackie, the sardonic jester, dying with a rifle-bullet through him, gasped the names of respectable business men of Wichita Falls as his pals and accomplices, for a last grim jest. Ratcliff, who entered the bank clad in a Santa Claus robe and whiskers to avoid suspicion, feigned madness, killed his jailer, was shot down as he sought to escape by the jailer’s daughter, and that night a mob tore him, wounded as he was, from his bunk, and strung him up to a near-by tree, to sway in the shrieking blizzard. Eh — life is a strange fierce thing.

• Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, 13 July 1932, Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 2.384-385

Bob Howard's account of the Santa Claus Bank Robbery of 23 December 1927, where a gang robbed a bank in Cisco, Texas, one of the members - Marshall Ratliffe - disguised as Santa Claus. This is exemplary of REH's habit of Texan tall tale-telling...not necessarily wrong in all particulars, but the facts twisted into the narrative he wanted to tell; a number of Howard scholars have mentioned this tendency, which often sacrifices complete accuracy for a better story - and is something that has to be kept in mind when reading any dead folk's mail: just because they write something, doesn't mean it happened exactly as they said it did, or that they understood it quite as they related it. Biases and all that.