Word: deng
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
True, China is still a poor country by any measure. Deng's goal is to lift per capita income to $800 by the year 2000. That would compare with a 1980 level of $300 and would be sufficient to admit China to the ranks of middle-income countries. But as recently as 1982, average incomes in China were about equal to those in poverty-ridden Haiti. Travelers in Sichuan province note that many peasants still use wheelbarrows with wooden wheels and iron rims and till the fields with wooden plows--this in a country where museums display iron plows from...
...life is getting better, fast, for many Chinese. Industrial production has leaped along with food output. Early in 1985 it was increasing at an annual rate of 23%, a pace Deng and his planners judged too rapid. They ordered a slowdown to avoid shortages and worsening inflation. In Mao's days, Chinese consumers dreamed of buying the "three bigs": a bicycle, a wristwatch and a sewing machine. Now the three bigs are a refrigerator, a washing machine and a TV set. "Imagine," says a Western diplomat. "Some people living in the heart of Guizhou province now see the evening news...
...loan in eight months. Liang now clears about $1,660 a year from his business, which his wife Su Yongchang supplements with about $230 earned by raising rice and vegetables on a plot of a bit less than an acre. Su claims to know little about Deng or politics: "I only know that the policies now are good, so that we can get rich...
Consciously or unconsciously, she is echoing a line of argument often voiced by Deng and his supporters. In the name of economic growth, they are quite deliberately fostering a growing inequality of incomes. Says Deng: "Some people will become prosperous first, and then others will become prosperous later." But since honoring and emulating the rich goes against the Marxist grain, Deng and his allies have developed an elaborate justification: there is nothing wrong with wealth so long as it is earned by one's own labor rather than by the exploitation of the labor of others, which Marx condemned...
...Bolshevik Revolution. According to Lenin, Marx's call for a "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant that a tightly organized Communist Party was to be the exclusive dominating force in transforming society. Among the millions attracted by this prescription were two young Chinese, named Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping, who saw in it a way to change their country from a weak, backward state pushed around by foreign powers to a mighty modern nation. Deng has remained a model Leninist in the sense of countenancing no challenge to the Communist Party's role in leading society, even when portions...