HONG KONG — Wan Li, the Communist Party leader who helped end the failed Mao-era policy of collective farming, which had left rural Chinese in desperate poverty, died on Wednesday in Beijing. He was 98.  His death was reported by the Chinese state-run media.  Mr. Wan was the last survivor of the senior revolutionary veterans who pushed through China’s reforms under Deng Xiaoping beginning in the late 1970s, shaking off the socialist collectivism that Mao Zedong had imposed through communes, state control and top-down planning. The party’s obituary called Mr. Wan a “pioneer of China’s rural reforms.”  “Wan Li deserves every credit he gets for pushing the process forward,” said Frederick C. Teiwes, an emeritus professor of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney and co-author of a forthcoming history of the rural reforms. “He was willing to accept and push and support moves that would increase production and living conditions in the countryside, upon occasion taking risks.”  Mr. Wan said that the misery in villages in the years after Mao’s death had shaken his devotion to the revolution. He was appointed party secretary of Anhui Province, a rural part of eastern China, in 1977 and spent months visiting the countryside, where millions had starved to death in the early 1960s after Mao’s calamitous Great Leap Forward.  In one hut, historians and former aides have recounted, Mr. Wan found an old man and two teenage girls hiding under straw: they had only threads of clothing. In another, he found three naked children crammed inside a stove, seeking the residual heat. An emaciated farmer who had fought for the revolution told Mr. Wan that his innards had seized up from eating tree leaves.  “We’ve had so many years of development since liberation, but the ordinary people in this old revolutionary area still don’t have enough clothes to wear or food to fill their stomachs,” he said, according to an account of his visit to Jinzhai County in Anhui. “How can we show our faces to these simple country folk? This is shameful.”  Mr. Wan was born in rural Shandong Province in eastern China in December 1916. He plunged into revolutionary politics while studying at a teachers college, and joined the Communist Party in 1936. But as a rising official after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he focused on urban construction.  “He was terribly shocked by what he saw” in the countryside, said Ding Xueliang, a professor of Chinese politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who grew up in rural Anhui and saw the changes under Mr. Wan. “He didn’t have much experience in the countryside after 1949, so he wasn’t prepared for how bad it was.”  When drought blighted the countryside in 1978, Mr. Wan quietly began to encourage farmers in isolated parts of Anhui to slip from the strictures of Maoist communes. Bucking collective control, the farmers divided up tools, tasks and land among small groups and families, setting aside a share of the crops to feed themselves and sell in markets. Word spread, as did controversy.  “When the bumper harvest came in, it was even harder to keep it a secret,” said Yan Junchang, a farmer in one of the areas that furtively assigned farming to families.  Household contract farming, as it came to be called, was anathema to the precepts of Mao, and Mr. Wan ducked and wove politically to keep the policies alive. Deng waited until 1980 to give guarded support, though other reform-minded officials were skeptical and newspapers denounced the idea. But over time Mr. Wan and others became convinced that it was time to break with the past. A crucial ally was Zhao Ziyang, the future premier and party general secretary.  “What was condemned before is not necessarily wrong,” Mr. Wan told officials. “What was promoted before is not necessarily right.”  Growing numbers of villagers and party leaders became convinced that family farming would increase harvests and reduce the financial burdens on the government. By 1982, it was established national policy. Rural land remained under collective ownership, leased out to farmers, but the communes were dead, and small factories mushroomed in more prosperous parts of the countryside.  Mr. Wan was promoted to the party’s central leadership and made vice premier in 1980, and he remained a prominent proponent of economic liberalization. In 1988, he was appointed chairman of the National People’s Congress, the country’s party-run legislature. In 1989, liberals hoped that Mr. Wan would return to help defuse Deng’s confrontation with student protesters occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Mr. Wan was traveling in North America, and members of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee urged him to return and convene the Standing Committee to block the hard-liners.  But Mr. Wan flew back to Shanghai and a statement was issued in his name endorsing martial law, days before the armed suppression of the protests began on June 3, 1989. Mr. Wan was apparently kept in Shanghai to avoid political trouble, said Warren Sun, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at Monash University in Australia and Professor Teiwes’s co-author.  “There seemed little question about where Wan Li’s sympathies lay,” Mr. Sun said, “but politics is another thing.”  Mr. Wan retired in 1993 and stayed out of politics, devoting his time to his hobbies: golf, bridge and tennis. His tennis partners included Vice President George Bush.  Mr. Wan’s wife, Bian Tao, died in 2003. They had four sons and a daughter, but it is not clear if they all survive him.  A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2015, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Wan Li, 98; Revamped Farming in China. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Wan, a party secretary in a rural province, instituted agricultural reforms adopted throughout China after discovering that people were starving.