Deng Xiao Ping: Time's Man of the Year 1978
Stumbled across this terribly revealing article from Time in 1978:
The project is vast, daring, and unique in history. How could there be a precedent for turning 1 billion people so sharply in their course, for leading one-quarter of mankind quickstep out of dogmatic isolation into the late 20th century and the life of the rest of the planet? The People's Republic of China, separated so long from the outer world by an instinctive xenophobia and an admixture of reclusive Maoism, in 1978 began its Great Leap Outward, or what Peking's propagandists call the New Long March. The Chinese, their primitive economy threadbare and their morale exhausted by the years of Mao Tse-tung's disastrous Cultural Revolution, hope to have arrived by the year 2000 at a state of relative modernity, and become a world economic and military power. They may not arrive, or arrive on time, but their setting off is an extraordinary spectacle of national ambition...To accomplish the journey, Teng and his backers have embarked on what sometimes looks suspiciously like a capitalist road. The new doctrinal slogan might be formulated thus: "Let one hundred business deals blossom, let one hundred foreign investors contend." Although very few Chinese have acquired much individual freedom as part of the new enterprise, they are discarding, without ceremony, much of their old ideological baggage. Gone is the once sacred Maoist principle of national self-reliance and independence from outside resources. Chinese managers have heretically embraced such impure capitalist devices as meritocratic promotions and other special treatment for their best and brightest.
Well, has Deng's vision of "relative modernity" come true by the year 2000? Here's a list that recently made rounds of the Ten Things The Chinese Do Far Better Than We Do.
For the record, the author is spot-on about the airports -- they are gleaming, pristine, beautiful... and empty.
But the more important point of the article is that it shows that history is not impersonal forces and great social sweeps. One man makes the world, and in this case, Deng did single-handedly remake China so that rather than being a more dangerous and cumbersome North Korea, it is modern, modernizing, and a marvel.
