Word: deng
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...their country to open up its economy and to embrace something akin to capitalism. The monumental shift - China under Mao Zedong had been a centrally planned economic disaster - reflected the growing, behind-the-scenes influence of a man few in the West had then heard of: Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. China, the ruling Communist Party decreed back then, "required great growth in the productive forces." And Deng was smart enough to know that that could come in only one way. China would get on the road to capitalism...
...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...
...Read TIME's 1986 Man of the Year cover story on Deng Xiaoping...