Word: deng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deeper question is whether Deng can bring himself, and lower officials, to free the market enough for it to work properly. Werner Gerich, 66, a West German manager who was hired to run a state-owned diesel-engine plant in Wuhan, found his factory, like many others in China, heavily overstaffed. "If I fired 700 people [out of a total of 2,140], we could make the same number of engines with better quality because we would have money," he says. But he quit in despair because party officials would not let him make that and other changes he considered...
...none produced coats?" The capitalist answer would be that a free price system would prevent that. The price of jeans would plummet, and the price of coats would soar; many jeansmakers would, so to speak, lose their shirts and be happy to switch to turning out coats. But Deng and his planners seem unwilling to let prices fluctuate freely enough to guide investment decisions in that manner...
...deepest dilemma is whether China can achieve even the relatively free economy Deng is trying to create without undermining Leninist control of politics and society. There are many Chinese, not all Chen Yun types, who doubt that, in the long run, economic freedom can exist without greater political liberty. They are already debating what course the nation will take if they are proved right...
That may be too much to hope for, at least anytime soon. The history of China in the 20th century has been one of repeated upheavals, of which Deng's own career is a prime example. But there is at least a chance that Deng will bequeath to his nation an economic system working well enough that his successors will not want to reverse it, and thus that China will also gain a measure of the political stability it has so long and so disastrously lacked. If so, the inventive energies of the Chinese, which gave the world tea, paper...
...Already Deng has changed the daily lives of his nation's citizens to a greater extent than any other world leader. Foreigners revisiting China after a lapse of only a few years can scarcely believe that they are in the same country: the free and well-stocked food markets, the neat little homes and humming village industries springing up throughout the countryside, the openness to foreign influences ranging from computer technology to rock music are like nothing they or their hosts have seen before. Neither is the willingness of intellectuals, like Deng impatient with ideology, to discuss how much...