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Emancipation
“Reform and opening” started from the top with the seminal leadership transition from Mao to Deng. Deng Xiaoping heralded China’s boom in late 1978 when he called for experiments with “economic democracy” and “emancipation” from orthodox ideas. But the boom was not simply a top-down, state-orchestrated phenomenon. In fact, the biggest contribution of the state, especially in the first phase of growth, was to get out of the way. Farmers were liberated from collectives, sparking a wildfire of capitalism in the countryside. Urban markets and industry were freed to “grow out of the plan,” making profits on surplus production and creating powerful incentives for rapid growth. |
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People Who Fall Behind Will Be BeatenPeriod: Emancipation (1978-84)
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Click to expand So, at that time, the Chinese government made a big move, and that was to announce that people who fall behind will be beaten. This slogan was posted everywhere, it was an acknowledgement that China was behind, to awaken the Chinese people to the enormous economic development and technology gap between China and the West, to face a hard reality, that China was still being beaten. Because China was beaten, for 100 years, beaten by the Eight Allied Forces, beaten by Japan, beaten so badly that a lot of people embraced socialism. Because, finally, we could rule our own country, the country was peaceful, there was no foreign troops living inside this country. Whenever we look at Japan, we think its economy is well developed, but there are still American forces stationed there, and the same was true of Taiwan. So, Chinese people were very proud of this point. So, for the government to announce this distance between China's technological and economic development in this manner, using the slogan "people who fall behind will be beaten," was something that really woke up a lot of ordinary people in China.
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