How did China make their economic great leap forward? Lest we forget, it's only those in Special Economic Zones that are direct beneficiaries. The majority do get some tax revenues from them but little else.
Deng Xiaoping's "open door" policy began two years after Mao's death (1976). Deng ruled from 1976 to 1997 and formed the core of the so-called "second generation" Communist Party of China leadership.
"The overall result has been a virtual dismantling of many Maoist institutions and practices and the beginning of a movement toward a more open society. The analogy is striking between China since 1978 and the Soviet Union of the 1920s, under the New Economic Policy (NEP). China today resembles the pre-Stalinist system in the Soviet Union rather than the Stalinist or post-Stalinist one. . . The scope of change has varied considerably from region to region within China. And just as the Soviet NEP was eventually replaced by Stalinism, so too the Chinese 'NEP' may ultimately give way to a harsher system."
The words are by Donald S. Zagoria in a Foreign Affairs, Spring 1984 article, China's Quiet Revolution.
In the 1920's the Soviets had the same question. Like today, American useful idiots lined up to deliver technology and money. Soviet "nepmen" became forty percent of the Soviet economy, lives were improving. Marxist ideologues were fretting.
IMO true capitalism comes from a free people's social contract. It is not "permitted" to happen by a one-party system. IMO it is not an invisible hand that is moving the Communist Party of China's leadership. They intend to be the super power by 2049, their 100th year.
Just hours before tanks squished people in Tiannaman Square our network airheads relayed glowing adulation about a kinder, gentler China. Not quite. It's the same harsh system as Mao's in that respect.
We had, in fact, hit the wall. You always do hit the wall with the Chinese when the National Question comes up. It makes no difference if you are talking with Communists or Nationalists, old or young, government flacks or dissidents. I found QingLian formidably articulate. She defended her opinions with the force of a strong intellect.
This experience is very familiar to me. You are sitting there kicking ideas around with some friendly, witty, well-educated, and worldly people. Then the National Question comes up, and suddenly the façade of reason and sophistication drops away and you are confronted by something cold, hostile, and atavistic-the reptilian brain stem. The attachment of the Chinese to every inch of the territory of the old Manchu empire is rooted so deep, it cannot be touched by reason or argument.
The same applies to the resentment the Chinese feel for the humiliations inflicted upon them in the nineteenth century by Japan and the European powers. To an outsider, this seems a little unfair. By far the larger part of the Chinese people's sufferings these past 200 years has been visited on them by their own countrymen. The greatest calamity to afflict China in the nineteenth century was not the depredations of foreign imperialism, but the Taiping Rebellion, an entirely Chinese phenomenon.
Similarly, if there is a prize awarded in hell for murdering Chinese people, the easy winner for the twentieth century division is Mao. All this is forgotten in the fixation on foreign wickedness. A well-adjusted Chinese citizen is expected to have "moved on" from the horrors of Maoism (1949-76) but to be fuming with great indignation at the Opium Wars (1839-42).
The usual reaction of foreigners to this massive sense of national grievance is to grovel. Yes, indeed, we foreigners did very wicked things in the past. I used to take this line myself, but no longer do. To respond in this way, I believe, is to feed a dangerous psyhosis. For all their veneer of sophistication and modernity, the Chinese are trapped in a pre-modernity, almost prehistoric view of their own nationality-a view that has been cultivated very carefully by the Communists. The modern history syllabus of mainland schools is more or less constructed around it. ***
Derbyshire: SORRY STATE (Communist, Nationalist, and Dangerous)***OBSTACLES TO EMPIRE - The grand project of restoring and Sinifying the Manchu dominions has unfortunately met three stumbling blocks. The first was Outer Mongolia, from which the Chinese garrison was expelled following the collapse of Manchu rule. The country declared independence in 1921 under Soviet auspices, and that independence was recognized by Chiang Kai-shek's government in 1945, in return for Soviet recognition of themselves as the "the Central Government of China." Mao seems not to have been very happy about this. In 1954, he asked the Soviets to "return" Outer Mongolia. I do not know the position of China's current government towards Outer Mongolia, but I should not be surprised to learn that somewhere in the filling cabinets of China's defense ministry is a detailed plan for restoring Outer Mongolia to the warm embrace of the Motherland, as soon as a suitable opportunity presents itself.
The second is Taiwan. No Chinese Imperial dynasty paid the least attention to Taiwan, or bothered to claim it. The Manchus did, though, in 1683, and ruled it in a desultory way, as a prefecture of Fujian Province, until 1887, when it was upgraded to a province in its own right. Eight years later it was ceded to Japan, whose property it remained until 1945. In its entire history, it has been ruled by Chinese people seated in China's capital for less than four years. China's current attitudes to Taiwan are, I think, pretty well known.
And the third stumbling block to the restoration of China's greatness is…….the United States. To the modern Chinese way of thinking, China's proper sphere of influence encompasses all of East Asia and the western Pacific. This does not mean that they necessarily want to invade and subjugate all the nations of that region, though they certainly do want to do just that to Taiwan and some groups of smaller islands. For Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Micronesia, etc., the old imperial-suzerainty model would do well enough, at least in the short term. These places could conduct their own internal affairs, so long as they acknowledged the overlordship of Beijing, and, above all, did not enter into alliances, nor even close friendships, with other powers.
Which, of course, too many of them have done, the competitor power in every case being the U.S. It is impossible to overstate how angry it makes the Chinese to think about all those American troops in Japan, Korea, and Guam, together with the U.S. Seventh Fleet steaming up and down in "Chinese" waters, and electronic reconnaissance planes like the EP-3 brought down on April 1 operating within listening distance of the mainland. If you tackle Chinese people on this, they usually say:
"How would you feel if there were Chinese troops in Mexico and Jamaica, and Chinese planes flying up and down your coasts?" Leaving aside the fact that front companies for the Beijing regime now control both ends of the Panama Canal, as well as Freeport in the Bahamas, the answer is that the United States is a democracy of free people, whose government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, so that the wider America's influence spreads, the better for humanity: while China is a corrupt, brutish, and lawless despotism, the close containment of which is a pressing interest for the whole human race. One cannot, of course, expect Chinese people to be very receptive to this answer.
Or, indeed, to anything much we have to say on the subject of their increasing militant and assertive nationalism. We simply have no leverage here. It is no use trying to pretend that this is the face-saving ideology of a small leadership group, forced on an unwilling populace at gunpoint. The Chinese people respond eagerly to these ultra-nationalist appeals: That is precisely why the leadership makes them. Resentment of the U.S., and a determination to enforce Chinese hegemony in Asia, are well-nigh universal among modern mainland Chinese. These emotions trump any desire for constitutional government, however much people dislike the current regime for its corruption and incompetence. Find a mainlander, preferably one under the age of thirty, and ask him which of the following he would prefer: for the Communists to stay in power indefinitely, unreformed, but in full control of the "three T's" (Tibet, Turkestan, Taiwan); or a democratic, constitutional government without the three T's. His answer will depress you. You can even try this unhappy little experiment with dissidents: same answer.
Is there anything we can do about all this? One thing only. We must understand clearly that there will be lasting peace in East Asia when, and only when, China abandons her atavistic fantasies of imperial hegemony, withdraws her armies from the 2 million square miles of other people's territory they currently occupy, and gets herself a democratic government under a rule of law. Until that day comes, if it ever does, the danger of war will be a constant in relations between China and the world beyond the Wall, as recent events in the South China Sea have illustrated. Free nations, under the indispensable leadership of the United States, must in the meantime struggle to maintain peace, using the one, single, and only method that wretched humanity, in all its millennia of experience, has so far been able to devise for that purpose: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. ***
Full articles at LINKS.