The fading legacy of Deng Xiaoping

After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, it was clear to pragmatists in the Chinese Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, that Maoism had not worked.

By the late 1970s, food production had failed to keep up with population growth and nine out of ten Chinese were living on less than $2 a day. But the Party didn’t want to admit the inviability of communism, its raison d’etre. Instead, it dubbed the ensuing decades of privatisation, foreign investments and lifting of price controls ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.

So the country remained nominally communist, even though state-owned enterprises were liquidated en masse and the private sector made up the bulk of Chinese GDP by 2005. For hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese, like my family, reform and opening were keenly welcomed. My uncle was the first in the family to go to university; my mother found work in an international company in the city. When I came along, my childhood was not marred by hunger.