Word: deng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...these turbulent and momentous events and phenomena, however, only the ascension of Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership could eventually rival for long-range importance to the world the sweeping changes Deng is pushing through in China. But for all the panache he displayed on taking power and all the headlines and television time he and Reagan commanded at the summit, Gorbachev's impact on history by year's end was still far more potential than actual. The freshness and vigor of his personal style far outweighed the importance of any changes he had made in Soviet foreign or domestic policy...
Gorbachev, Deng and the heads of almost every Marxist country face the same fundamental problem. In a 1984 interview with the Italian Communist daily L'Unità, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, phrased it this way: "Since the October Revolution [of 1917, which enthroned Soviet Marxism], more than 60 years have passed. How is it that many socialist countries have not been able to overtake capitalist ones in terms of development? What was it that did not work...
That something has failed, and failed badly, is no longer seriously disputed, even by many Marxist experts. Before Deng, the failure was more starkly obvious in China. The average peasant or city worker was little better off, if at all, when Mao died in 1976 than he or she had been in the 1950s. But even the Soviet Union has long since had to forget Nikita Khrushchev's hollow boast that it would inevitably "bury" the U.S. by surpassing the American standard of living. Quite the opposite: the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate has slipped to about half the pace...
...Deng, shortly after emerging from his third period of disgrace and returning to power in 1978, faced squarely the heretical thought that the system of state control was itself the problem. He set about to replace it with a hybrid not quite like anything seen before. The Chinese system is still so new that it does not have an agreed name. Outside analysts often call it "market socialism," and some Chinese speak of creating a "commodity economy." Deng's formulation is a rather uninspiring "socialism with Chinese characteristics." But then Deng, a thoroughgoing pragmatist, has never been much for labels...
...animating spirit of Deng's reforms has been to liberate the productive energies of the individual, a daring concept not just for a Marxist but for a Chinese (the concept of individualism has a negative connotation in Chinese society). He began, appropriately, with agriculture, which had been collectivized by Mao to a degree extreme even for the Communist world. The land was worked by communes that grew what the state directed and turned over all food produced to the state for distribution. Pay was based on a system of "work points" that bore little relation to production: a peasant would...