Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
female infanticide, always a problem in a nation where baby boys are
valued above baby girls. The children in Chinese orphanages today
are overwhelmingly female, and an unnaturally high proportion of
males to females has developed in some areas of China. Many couples
in Chinese cities used amniocentesis to discover the sex of unborn
children and abort female fetuses, hoping to try again for a boy. Today
there are even disturbing reports of abortions being forced on women
who have already given birth to one or more children. Overpopulation
is one of China's most pressing problems today, and the implications
of both ignoring it and remedying it present vexing ethical questions.
Deng was in many ways an enthusiastic reformer, but the one thing
he was determined not to allow in China was democracy. China would
develop and modernize its economy and other aspects of its society,
but it absolutely would not tolerate challenges to the final authority
and power of the Chinese Communist Party. Communist doctrine, like
some varieties of ultraconservative political thought in the United
States, holds that the democracy practiced in the capitalistic West is
in reality a “bourgeois” democracy, in which the bourgeoisie or mon-
ied classes control the political system from behind the scenes and
manipulate it for the advancement of their interests, all the while fool-
ing the public into thinking that they actually have some say in the
selection of their leaders and policies. Of course, a more obvious rea-
son for Deng's refusal to allow democratization in China was that if
China's government were made directly accountable to the Chinese
people, Deng and other members of the Communist party might well
find themselves voted out of their jobs and power. Deng was deter-
mined that economic and social liberalization would not lead to politi-
cal liberalization. China would, in his words, “open the window but
not let in the flies and mosquitoes.”
This became quite apparent in 1978 with the appearance of the
“Democracy Wall” in Beijing, a place where the police allowed
big-character posters criticizing some aspects of the government's
policies to remain up for a time. Placing big-character posters on the
Democracy Wall became something of a craze for a while, but when
the posters began demanding democratization and authentic freedom
of expression, Deng shut the wall down. In early 1979 he announced
his Four Cardinal Principles, parallel guidelines that people would
need to keep in mind as they participated in Zhou Enlai's Four Mod-
ernizations, of which Deng Xiaoping heartily approved. These four
principles dictated that the Chinese people were not permitted to
question socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Communist
party's leadership, or Marxism-Leninism. In other words, China
