Word: mao
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...southeast China, when the world she would inherit changed forever. It was 30 years ago this month - December, 1978 - when China's leadership decided the time had come for 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...
...Mao Zedong saw it, art was to be accessible to the masses and not the exclusive province of an intellectual élite. Painting and sculpture, as well as fiction, music, theater and ballet, were to reflect new common values, not individual ideas or feelings. The products of this "art for politics' sake" were mostly optimistic in spirit and patriotic in purpose...
What would the great men of old Communist China think of the ones leading today's quasi-capitalist boom? "If Mao were alive, he'd get rid of them all," the Dalai Lama said to a gathering of his followers today. The line got a big laugh and signaled a more forceful tone in the Tibetan spiritual leader's approach to China...
...Three decades ago, the Party approved another set of rural reforms, liberating a billion peasants from the collectivized farming imposed by Mao Zedong and allowing them to farm their plots for a profit. That decision is widely regarded as marking the start of China's stunning economic boom. But ownership of the land remained with the state; farmers had to renew leases every 30 years and their sale was forbidden...
...China Going Back to the Land The ruling Communist Party announced a major initiative to overhaul the country's land-use policies, still hampered by the unwieldy collectivization policies of the Mao Zedong era. The plan, unveiled Oct. 19, is an attempt to jump-start agricultural productivity and promote prosperity among its restive farmers, who have largely been bypassed by China's economic boom. Currently, farmers are entitled to the proceeds from their sales but do not own the land--a system easily exploited by corrupt officials and developers. Beijing hopes the reforms--enabling farmers to lease, swap, subcontract...