Deng Xiaoping's Economic Reform in China

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The goals of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform were the ‘Four Modernizations’. This Four Modernization refers to the reform of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science technology. These reforms were to solve the problems of motivating workers and farmers to produce a larger surplus and to eliminate economic imbalances that were common in command economies. Deng Xiaoping felt that the quickest way to build a better China was to improve living conditions immediately, to give people the level of morale they need for further development. At that time, he realized that China’s economic need to reform; he found very effective ways to reform the China’s economic. His goals were to open up the China’s market to the outside world, breaking down the collective farms, getting rid of state-run enterprises and providing more jobs for people in the industry. He found that the most important thing was the modernization of agriculture because 80% of the population derived their living primarily from agricultural production. The new contract responsibility system allowed farmers to rent land for individual farming families. Farmers had to sell a certain percentage of their crops to the State with the State’s price, and they could sell the remaining for their own profits. This system had helped the rural income to be doubled (Benson, 47). It marked a successful modernization of agricultural. Besides the modernization of agricultural, in the Deng era, there was a shift from central planning and reliance on heavy industry to consumer-oriented industries and reliance on foreign trade and investment. Some of the new factories were purchased from other countries; some of them were built with local resources. Capitalist enterprise was ac... ... middle of paper ... ...ation, Chinese students were able to learn about the higher living standard and encountered a range of ideas that might become profoundly subversive influences. In the late 1970s, the USA established full diplomatic relations with China and terminated the mutual defense treaty that the USA and the ROC had signed in 1954. Also, the US opened its markets, and continued to restrict the export to China of technologies having possible military uses. But 1982, Chinese began to distance themselves from the USA to imrove their relations with the Soviet Union. But only a year later, after a substantial loosening of US restrictions on exports to China, the relationship between China and the USA began to improve again. Works Cited Moise, Edwin E. Modern China. Great Britain: Pearson Education, 2008. Benson, Linda. China Since 1949. Great Britain: Pearson Education, 20082.

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