Consistent with Victor Nee and Sonjia Opper’s central thesis in "Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China", Leslie Chang offers this observation of how change takes place in China:
I lived in China from 1998 to 2007, and the longer I stayed, the more I felt that governance was a frantic effort to keep up with what was happening on the ground. The economic opening championed by Deng Xiaoping was actually set in motion in 1978 by a group of Anhui farmers who illegally split up their communal farmland into individual plots, which led to increased efficiency and the dismantling of the communes.
Source: http://www.chinafile.com/many-china-one-child-policy-already-irrelevant