Word: reform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Attempts at economic and political reform in China, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries often seem to consist of two steps forward and one or even two steps back. In China the recent rash of student-led mass demonstrations is just the latest manifestation of deep public discontent over the price of economic reform. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev's position has been similarly threatened as the benefits of perestroika have thus far failed to match the short-term costs...
These regimes have succeeded only in transplanting the peasant mentality to an industrial economy, creating a retarded form of industrial feudalism. It is that system that Gorbachev's perestroika and Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" seek to reform. But in China factory workers have shunned colleagues who earned incentive bonuses, or gone on strike to prevent introduction of such bonuses. Their proletarian comrades in the Soviet Union have reportedly downed tools for higher pay, while others burned a prosperous collective that raised pigs because it was too successful. In Poland the economic program of Solidarity runs directly counter...
...happening. On that same day, West Virginia legislators completed a session unlike any other in the state's history. Democrats and Republicans pushed through a thick package of legislation that would trim the state's tangled bureaucracy, reorganize its disastrous finances and launch an ambitious program of educational reform. The measures were ramrodded into law by rookie Democratic Governor Gaston Caperton, 49, a man who is determined to upend the state's feckless political tradition and sell mountaineers something they haven't had in decades: hope...
ESSAY: Can reform work in China and the Soviet Union...
...rehabilitated the reputation of Imre Nagy, Prime Minister of Hungary at the time of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Kadar is said to have given evidence at the trial of Nagy, who was hanged for treason. Others say that the party, by breaking with "Kadarism," wished to underline its pro-reform stance...