of the main slogans for communism: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was supposed to provide job opportunities for everyone. The CCP's promise to the Chinese people was crucial because almost half of the urban labor force was experiencing unemployment when the party took control. Due to the Japanese invasion and the Civil War directly afterwards, the Republic of China (ROC) suffered from hyperinflation from 1948 to 1949. Money became worthless and the basic life of the urban population became unsustainable. The adoption of the iron rice bowl provided security for people. Even though employment was high during the Great Leap Forward period (1958–62), after its failure, many projects that were proposed then were shut down. As a result, the government needed to remove around 20 percent of the labor force. The size of the iron rice bowl was shrinking. When Deng Xiaoping began his labor reforms in the People's Republic of China in the 1980s to boost economic productivity, the government iron rice bowl jobs were some of the first to go. He transformed China from a centrally-planned economy to a more free-market economy, his supporters insisted that the iron rice bowl had to be smashed if China was to modernize. During the 1978 Rural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping implicitly set an end to the iron rice bowl with the implementation of a number of economic reforms that were meant to embrace free markets. These reforms included the replacement of the collective farming system with a "household responsibility system," under which households could contract land, machinery, and facilities from collective organizations in order to make independent operating decisions without losing the value of unified, collective management. This meant that farmers were able to personally benefit financially from their own crops, as households were able to get rid of surpluses in production as long as they were able to fulfill the collective quotas. The adoption of the contract system in rural China increased productivity and food supplies in those areas. Deng Xiaoping also introduced reforms that made prices more flexible and allowed them to rise above the government-mandated price floors. In 1980, the government sought to end the system of lifelong employment for workers in state-owned enterprises by using fixed-term contracts to hire new labor, which they hoped would allow companies to refrain from renewing workers' contracts if they were not qualified, efficient, or capable enough. Under this new system, workers were