Word: deng
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Chinese capitalism was born in the rural farmlands when Deng permitted the provinces to dismantle their communes and collective farms. Peasants raced to divide up plots of land for private tilling, harvesting record crops and selling them in private markets. In no time, residents of tiny villages like Fenghuang in central Sichuan province had wrought a green revolution. By 1984 the village was producing more than $1 million worth of rice and a range of side products, including a famous brand of rice wine. The once impoverished residents were now earning close to $200 a year, enough to begin replacing...
China before Deng may have been poor, but everyone was equally in need. Now, around the corner from Shanghai's glittering Golden Age club, those forgotten by the economic boom gather under the eaves of the central railway station. There, a "floating population" of the destitute from far-flung corners of the nation arrives by the carload, hoping that Shanghai will be the land of plenty. Ran Yigang, a scruffy 23-year-old with the thick hands of a farm laborer, got off the train last week from Anhui, one of the poorest provinces. All day he searched in vain...
...Deng's commercial revolution is dangerously incomplete. "China is like a movie set," says Mineo Nakajima, one of Japan's leading Sinologists. "It looks wonderful, but it's all an illusion." Many of the most difficult issues were put on hold while Deng lived, but the new regime cannot hope to ignore these malignancies indefinitely...
...Deng always put revamping the armed forces last among his Four Modernizations, and he demobilized more than a million soldiers from the People's Liberation Army. But the 2.9 million left still operate more like a force trained to envelop an enemy with sheer numbers than one capable of responding rapidly with 21st century firepower. After watching a whole new way of warfare in the Persian Gulf, senior officers went on a buying spree. They came home last year with 50 Russian attack jets, two Russian destroyers, four diesel submarines and 70 fighter planes...
...Deng used that maxim to mean many things, but at its most fundamental it defines the base line of his blueprint for reform: a stubborn, inflexible resistance to political change. A hard-liner all his life, he was determined that economic liberalization would not sweep away the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He committed his successors to the relentless repression of democracy. Deng and some of the men now in power ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square in June 1989 to crush the nascent democracy movement beneath a heap of bloody bodies. Since then, virtually all of China...