Word: shanghaied
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...reforms could fail in other ways too. Industry managers have never been trained in the complex skills needed to make a market economy work. Indiana University's Hans Thorelli, who served as a visiting professor of marketing in Shanghai and Dalian in the early 1980s, recalls being asked in all earnestness by his students, "What is a salesman?" There is always the threat, too, that population growth will swallow up any production increases...
...economic official in Shanghai gives this reason for retaining at least some production quotas: "Of course we cannot give each factory the right to decide what to produce. What would happen if all of our garment factories produced blue jeans and none produced coats?" The capitalist answer would be that a free price system would prevent that. The price of jeans would plummet, and the price of coats would soar; many jeansmakers would, so to speak, lose their shirts and be happy to switch to turning out coats. But Deng and his planners seem unwilling to let prices fluctuate freely...
...Peking assigned all raw materials and dictated all investments, told every factory manager what and how much to produce and where to sell it and at what price, set wages and assigned jobs, took all profits and subsidized any losses. As late as 1984, one factory manager in Shanghai says, he had a discretionary fund of only $33 that he could spend without getting permission...
...first half of 1985 alone, or almost as many as in all of 1984. Peking has even allowed 94 factories wholly owned by foreigners to be built. They include 3M China Ltd., a fully owned subsidiary of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corp., which has set up a factory near Shanghai to make insulation tapes and other products...
...relations between the longtime comrades continued to deteriorate, the aging Chairman fell more and more under the sway of his wife Jiang Qing and her ultraleftist allies from Shanghai. At first Deng dismissed their growing influence as a passing phenomenon. "Young leading cadres have risen up by helicopter," he later scoffed. "They should really rise step by step." By 1966, however, the radicals had gained the upper hand and, with Mao's backing, plunged China into the frenzy of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deng attempted to backpedal politically, apologizing at a public meeting in Peking for having taken...