Word: deng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Deng was no student of the dismal science. He once said, "I am a layman in the field of economics. I proposed China's economic policy of opening to the outside world, but as for the details or specifics of how to implement it, I know very little indeed." But he knew enough to let others lead. The reforms that Deng blessed started in the countryside, where farmers were allowed to sell surplus produce and, in time, were allowed to farm their own land on long leases rather than as part of a commune. "Township and village enterprises" - small firms...
...more to the point - Deng's reforms improved the life chances of more people, faster, than has ever been done before in the history of humankind. To be sure, you can still find poverty in China. Traveling deep in rural Guizhou province this fall, I saw damp villages where the homes were mean huts and families eked a living from rocky hillsides. But everyone had shoes, and nobody looked malnourished...
...Modern China is not charming. Many of its towns and cities are desperately ugly and shoddily built, workers have few rights, and environmental disasters abound. As global demand contracts, China's export-led, manufacturing-heavy economy is now facing a sharp downturn. Moreover, the accepted narrative of China - that Deng opened up and modernized an old-fashioned and hermetic economy - needs much qualification. Recent historical research has stressed that China was modernizing and internationalizing fast, if imperfectly, in the half-century between the late Qing dynasty and the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937. And for all his twinkling...
...caveats, there is something stupendous about Deng's achievement. (This magazine certainly has long thought so; he is one of only four non-Americans to have twice been named TIME's Person of the Year.) A friend of mine in Hong Kong describes what is happening in China today like this: Think of a quarter of the world's population - with all its good and bad, beauty and ugliness - rejoining the mainstream of human development after centuries when it stood to the side...
...That is the great story of our time. It is our story, everyone's story - not just China's. And it is Deng's legacy...