Word: deng
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hong Kong -- Aged Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who finally made an official appearance in Shanghai last week after being out of the public eye for almost a year, is the focus of much silly gossip over what seems to be a battle between him and rival Communist Party elder Chen Yun to see who can maintain his faculties longer. A source close to Deng's inner circle tells this story: the 89-year-old Deng can no longer write but can walk 50 steps; the 88-year- old Chen can write but can walk only 30 steps. Says the source...
When Fidel Castro and Deng Xiaoping die, Communism's last major scions will be gone. No successor in either Cuba or China has the same personal sway these two rulers have wielded. In China, by far the more important of the two nations, Communism appears to have devolved into a heavily regulated, semi-legal form of capitalism. Only North Korea, whose development program for nuclear weapons makes the news every week, can take the role of menacing outpost of Communism. Still, more nations than the United States would want to have a hand in the quelling of a belligerent nuclear...
...effects of Deng's economic revolution are astounding. In Mao's time, leveling was the rule, and everyone aimed at a drab, fanatical egalitarianism. The nation dressed in rumpled blue tunics that made it difficult to tell men from women, and waxed so proletarian that even army officers removed their badges of rank. Today the society is brazenly materialistic, roaring through cycles of boom and bust that have made millions rich. The free-for-all has also left hundreds of millions in the dust but still eager to get theirs. "People are thinking only about money," says a Chinese professor...
...years since Deng abolished the agricultural communes and opened the door to cooperative business and private enterprise, China's economy has mushroomed, growing an average of 9% a year, doubling the size of the economy every 10 years. In 1992 gross domestic product increased 12.8%, and this year it is growing at 13% despite a series of austerity measures. Though per capita income is only about $380, by some calculations of purchasing power China has the third largest economy in the world (after the U.S. and Japan) and could become No. 1 in two decades...
...Deng says, "To get rich is glorious." That is undoubtedly true for people like Li and Wang, but for the vast Chinese nation getting rich is a mixed blessing. The rigid discipline of the party and its apparatus is slipping, and crime is on the increase. Corruption -- payoffs and connections -- is the rule at every level. Wealth is growing unevenly: very fast in the special zones, in big cities and along the seaboard, but slowly in the great agricultural interior. Both rural and urban incomes have increased significantly in the past 15 years, but farmers still average less than half...