Word: deng
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began the first week of 1985 for the world's most populous nation. Six years after Deng Xiaoping, in an attempt to shape China into a powerful, modern nation, introduced some of the most daring and far-reaching reforms ever attempted in a Communist country, the winds of change are blowing as strongly as ever. Like Mao Tse-tung before him, Deng, now 80, is trying to imprint his notion of what China should be upon the country before he dies. However, unlike Mao, an eternal revolutionary, Deng is a shrewd pragmatist whose economic reforms have proved popular, at least...
...Deng actually delivered those remarks at the October meeting of the Central Advisory Commission, a grouping of the Communist Party's elder statesmen, but the full text had not been published before. In what was clearly a dramatic effort to give the reform movement even greater momentum, the country's press carried the speech on front pages. "No country can now develop by closing its door," said Deng, in a spirited defense of his policy of building ties to the West. "We suffered from this, and our forefathers suffered from this. Isolation landed China in poverty, backwardness and ignorance." Only...
...Deng's campaign moved forward on several other fronts last week. A pamphlet containing Deng's major pronouncements over the past two years went on nationwide sale at 10 cents a copy. Titled Building China with Socialist Characteristics, the 72-page booklet stressed productivity as the solution to China's ills. According to Deng, every worker must "find a thousand and one . ways to make the country prosperous," because "when our state is powerful, all will be well." A day later Premier Zhao Ziyang announced in a speech that the rigid wage system for government workers would be loosened...
...Deng's efforts are now focused on extending the reforms from the countryside, where they have worked extremely well, to the cities. Shortly after he emerged as China's supreme leader in 1979, he established an incentive system for peasants that allowed them, once they had turned over a share of their crops to the government, to sell the rest on the open market. Despite sniping from diehard Maoists, the innovations were a smashing success: the grain harvest, for example, rose from 320 million tons in 1980 to a record 400 million last year, and average peasant income more than...
...boom, however, did not extend to the cities, where most of the large but inefficient state-owned industries are located. At a party meeting last October, the delegates approved a Deng-inspired resolution detailing an ambitious package of reforms aimed at reinvigorating the urban economy and giving industrial workers some incentives. The program called for virtual autonomy for state-owned enterprises, the levying of corporate-type taxes and a radical cutback in central planning. Most important, the plan looked toward price reforms on goods subsidized by the state. Deng envisioned removing the subsidies, which account for nearly half...