Word: mao
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fired 700 people [out of a total of 2,140], we could make the same number of engines with better quality because we would have money," he says. But he quit in despair because party officials would not let him make that and other changes he considered essential. Mao's tradition of "the iron rice bowl"--that is, lifetime employment--dies hard...
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...
...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...
...build privately owned houses on their state-owned land. Roads all over rural China have been narrowed by piles of bricks dumped along the shoulders to be picked up by peasants who are erecting homes or even paying others to do it for them. Compared with the days of Mao, when many peasants were required to live in dormitories and eat in communal mess halls, the change in life-style alone is almost revolutionary...
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...