Word: deng
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Communist world. In the centuries-old Chinese debate between those who are eager to learn from the more modern world outside and those who shun it, Mao came down completely on the side of xenophobia and cut China off almost totally from foreign goods, money and culture. Deng has opened the country to imports of everything from machinery to the ubiquitous tape recorders and portable stereos. He has proclaimed an "open-door policy" toward foreign investment--unperturbed by the reminiscences the phrase evokes of an era early in the century when foreigners enjoyed extra-territorial privileges bitterly resented by many...
Early on, Deng's government began revising this system too. In 1979 it halted a Stalin-style Five-Year Plan that emphasized heavy industry, like steel mills, and redirected much investment into consumer goods: refrigerators, washing machines, TV sets. Some of the controls have been progressively loosened. In 1982 Peking stopped dictating all garment styles and freed the city's factories to adopt their own designs. Result: though perhaps 80% of any randomly assorted crowd are still dressed in baggy Mao suits, there is a generous sprinkling of blue jeans, Western-style business suits and coats, skirts and knee-high...
...Deng and his lieutenants think the time has come to take a much longer step toward a full-fledged market system. Under a plan that went into effect in late 1984, state industry is also run under a contract system. Central planners still set broad production goals, but they directly assign only a portion of raw materials and distribute at fixed prices only a set quota of a factory's output. Managers otherwise are allowed and even required to line up their own suppliers, decide for themselves what to make beyond the goods that must be sold to the state...
...people; the lazier the people, the poorer they are." Managers now are supposed to hustle in response to the same signals--interest rates, market demand, prices, profit--that guide Western businessmen. And just as the state will no longer take all profits, it will eventually stop subsidizing losses. Deng's planners bluntly assert that they are prepared to let inefficient state enterprises go bust...
...central bank, had to tell them to stop. Factory bosses, in contrast, widely complain that they are still waiting for confirmation from local party and government officials that they can begin exercising the new freedoms they supposedly were granted at the start of 1985. For the first time, Deng is proposing to crimp seriously the powers and privileges of tens of thousands of national, provincial and local party bosses who are accustomed to exerting life-and-death authority over the economy. Ominously but not surprisingly, many seem to be dragging their feet, if not blocking the reforms outright...