Word: deng
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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...
...Deng's reforms abolished the communes and replaced them with a contract system. Though the state continues to own all land, it leases plots, mostly to individual families. Rent is paid by delivery of a set quantity of rice, wheat or whatever to the state at a fixed price. But once that obligation is met, families can grow anything else they wish and sell it in free markets for whatever price they can get (though the state does set limits on how much some prices can fluctuate...
Private enterprise began as a kind of offshoot of the agricultural reforms. Mao's "people's communes," for all their faults, at least guaranteed everyone in the rural economy a job of sorts. Deng and his lieutenants feared that breaking up the communes would cause masses of jobless peasants to descend on the cities, where there might be no work for them either. So beginning in the late 1970s, individual farmers and village collectives were permitted to start sideline businesses and keep any profits...