Word: deng
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Adults like Ru do not need to be educated about what life in Sichuan was like before the province became a testing lab for Deng's agricultural reforms in the late 1970s. The country's most populous province, Sichuan is also its rice bowl, a jade-green paradise whose fertile valleys have fed China for centuries. Yet Mao Tse-tung's policies proved so debilitating that by 1976 Sichuan was importing food for the first time in memory. Deng had visited his home province the previous year and had been shocked by the destitution he found...
Much of the credit for Sichuan's transformation belongs to Premier Zhao Ziyang, a Deng protégé who served as the party's provincial secretary from 1975 to 1980. Zhao helped introduce the contract-responsibility system, the bedrock of rural reforms, in 1977. Families and individuals were assigned plots in return for promising to meet harvest quotas. Surplus crops could be sold to the state at higher prices. Eventually, peasants were also allowed to sell the extra grain at market. The experiment worked so well that it was adopted as a national policy in late...
...China's leaders, however, the instant city has not been an instant success. Shenzhen is still booming, to be sure, but not in the direction envisioned by Peking. Last summer, Deng Xiaoping expressed caution about the city's future. Instead of proclaiming Shenzhen's progress, as he usually did, Deng described the city as an "experiment" that "could fail." Said he: "We hope it will succeed. But if it fails, we can draw lessons from...
...Chinese officials intentionally built up Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong's New Territories, to serve as a symbol of how freely things would be run in the colony after 1997 and thus reassure skittish investors there. To that extent, Shenzhen instills confidence. But Shenzhen also provides fresh ammunition for Deng's critics. They charge that Shenzhen is a brain drain on the rest of the country and aptly illustrates the "cultural pollution" they claim is emitted by the new reforms. To keep eager Chinese nonresidents out of the zone, the government has built a barbed-wire fence, complete with...
...central government chose Jiang because it was deeply frustrated with Shanghai's sluggish response to Deng Xiaoping's economic dreams. Almost three years ago, at Deng's urging, the city was given extraordinary freedom to handle foreign trade and investment. No longer was prior approval from Peking necessary to launch export programs. The city could enter into joint ventures with foreign countries, raise international capital and invite bids for construction projects. If all went well, Shanghai, already responsible for one-sixth of China's foreign-exchange earnings and one-eighth of its industrial production, would emerge as a sort...