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| Was he really god or not? |
This week we learned about how the central power of the CCP shifted from Mao to Deng Xiaoping during the People’s Republic of China. After Deng Xiaoping became the leader of the Communist Party of China, he led China to turn towards a market economy, into capitalism. He began transforming China by abolishing the rural commune and making the farm households participate in the “responsibility system” where land could be sold, bought, and inherited without allowing the farmers to own their land; farmers had to lease land from the collective. Farmers wanted to make as much money as possible, so they shifted to cash crops. Deng furthered his reforms by establishing special economic zones that enabled many different zones, like Shenzhen, to modernize by allowing a flood of foreign visitors in. Foreign firms were often offered incentives by these zones which included low taxes, new plants, and cheap labor force.
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| The Reformer (Deng Xiaoping) |
In an article about a Chinese woman, called Bai Di, who grew up in socialist China and who participated in the Cultural Revolution, she talks about the different environment people live in back in her days compared to modern day. When she was young, she only needed two sets of clothes to live—since she didn’t have that much things, so she felt that she has never needed more than she has then. But compared to present time under the capitalist society, more and more people develop desires for everything. Now, everything is about “money, money, money”. She continues to compare the Mao era to capitalism by emphasizing that individualism in a capitalistic society only allows you to think that you are the most important, that it would be a boring life as “your existence is irrelevant to others”. Since a capitalistic society involves fierce competition between companies and/or individual businessmen, so the whole society promotes individualism. The essence of uniting together equally to make profits, like communism, is gone. This was the start of an economic boom in China.
Deng Xiaoping was able to turn China from a poor and regressive country into a country with rapid economic growth. His reforms were successful and China was able to grow, it continues to grow today.
