Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
stewed about his restoration of “capitalism” in China, but their day was
now gone and they could do nothing about it but rant among them-
selves. Dengwas doing for Chinawhat Maowould never do—providing
a peaceful, orderly environment in which stable economic development
could take place. To the relief of millions of peasants, the last vestiges of
the communes and agricultural cooperatives were disbanded in the
countryside in the early 1980s.
Economic development proceeded most quickly along China's
eastern and southern coastal cities. In 1980 Deng announced the forma-
tion of four Special Economic Zones on China's southern and eastern
coastline where exports, joint ventures, and foreign investment would
be encouraged and facilitated. The largest of these was Shenzhen (north
of Hong Kong), today a thriving metropolis of crass commercialism and
unbridled capitalism. Other areas in the Chinese hinterland, away from
the prosperous coastal regions, lagged behind in economic develop-
ment and began to nurse a sense of resentment and alienation from
the rest of the nation.
University life was restored to sanity, and thousands of students and
faculty members returned to their studies and research. By the late
1970s and early 1980s, thousands of Chinese students were beginning
to go abroad for graduate study in North America and Europe, and
foreign students and teachers were invited to China and treated like
royalty when they did come. An entire generation of young people
who had suffered through the Cultural Revolution embraced China's
new openness with enthusiasm and abandon.
Probably the single most unpopular of Deng's reforms was the
announcement in 1979 of his one-child policy, which would, he hoped,
level off the rate of China's population growth sometime in the
twenty-first century. Mao possessed only a rudimentary grasp of dem-
ographics and adhered to a crude Marxist faith in the productive
capacity of the proletariat, which he expressed as the ability of two
handstofeedonemouth.ThemorepeopleinChinathebetter,he
believed throughout his life, and nobody could convince him that
China would ever face a crisis of overpopulation. Mao, after all, based
his career on his faith in, and affection for, China's peasant masses.
Deng and other more rational political minds, on the other hand, could
clearly foresee a demographic catastrophe for China if population
growth were not controlled. The outstripping of China's premodern
agricultural productivity by its burgeoning population was, after all,
one of the major contributing factors to China's decline in the nine-
teenth century. The one-child policy was more rigorously enforced in
the cities than in the countryside, however, and it contributed to
