Tag: Deng Xiaoping

The Rise and Fall of the U.S.-China Economic Partnership

Media Library

For more than a quarter century, the fortunes of the United States and China were fused in a uniquely monumental joint venture. Americans treated China like the mother of all outlet stores, purchasing staggering quantities of low-priced factory goods. Major brands exploited China as the ultimate means of cutting costs, manufacturing their products in a land where wages are low and unions are banned. As Chinese industry filled American homes with electronics and furniture, factory jobs lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese from poverty. China’s leaders used the proceeds of…

Yan Mingfu, Who Tried to Defuse the Tiananmen Powder Keg, Dies at 91

Media Library

Yan Mingfu, the son of a Chinese Communist Party spy who became Mao Zedong’s interpreter and a negotiator who sought to defuse the standoff between the party and student protesters occupying Tiananmen Square in 1989, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 91. His daughter, Yan Lan, confirmed the death in a statement in the Chinese magazine Caixin. She did not specify a cause, but Mr. Yan had endured a succession of illnesses in old age. “Dad passed away peacefully, putting a full stop on a life filled with tumult…

China’s Rise Relied on the West. Xi Jinping Is Turning Away.

Chin@Strategy

In late 1978, China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping set in motion two major policy shifts that would change China and the world order in the decades to come. At a Communist Party meeting in December of that year, the leadership declared that China would turn its focus from political struggle to economic development. Within days, China and the United States announced that they would establish diplomatic relations. These two events marked the end of China as a hermit country where one billion people lived in extreme poverty and the start…

The Chinese Dream, Denied

Chin@Strategy

The narrow alleyways of Haizhu district have long beckoned to China’s strivers, people like Xie Pan, a textile worker from a mountainous tea-growing area in central China. Home to one of the country’s biggest fabric markets, Haizhu houses worker dormitories and textile factories in brightly colored buildings stacked so close that neighbors can shake hands out their windows. Once a smattering of rural villages, the area became a manufacturing hub as China opened its economy decades ago. The government had promised to step back and let people unleash their ambitions,…

Xi Jinping Faces Another Dilemma: How to Mourn Jiang Zemin

Chin@Strategy

The deaths of Chinese Communist leaders are always fraught moments of political theater, and especially so now with the passing of Jiang Zemin soon after a wave of public defiance on a scale unseen since Mr. Jiang came to power in 1989. China’s sternly autocratic current leader, Xi Jinping, must preside over the mourning for Mr. Jiang, who died on Wednesday at 96, while he also grapples with widespread protests against China’s exceptionally stringent Covid-19 restrictions. The demonstrations have at times also boldly called for China to return to the…

An Era Just Ended in China

Chin@Strategy

On the economic front, he faces smoldering crises, including an economy that is slowing sharply, a property sector meltdown and record-breaking youth unemployment. These problems have been exacerbated by the Covid controls and by Mr. Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign — a strategy for narrowing inequality and addressing monopolistic behavior by big tech firms and other private companies, which was punctuated by an abrupt and sweeping regulatory crackdown last year that has alarmed investors. The market backlash was intense: Within months, more than a trillion dollars in value at many of…

Revising China’s History, to Glorify Xi Jinping

Chin@Strategy

Xi Jinping’s drive to extend his formidable power for years ahead reached a new pitch on Tuesday, when the Chinese Communist Party issued a resolution on history that anoints him one of its revered leaders, hours after Mr. Xi held video talks with President Biden. Senior party officials approved the resolution last week, when some of its main points were released in an official summary of their meeting. But the government has only belatedly issued the full document, the third such summation of history in the 100 years of the…

Xi Jinping Is Rewriting China’s History

Chin@Strategy

The glowing image of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, greets visitors to museum exhibitions celebrating the country’s decades of growth. Communist Party biographers have worshipfully chronicled his rise, though he has given no hint of retiring. The party’s newest official history devotes over a quarter of its 531 pages to his nine years in power. No Chinese leader in recent times has been more fixated than Mr. Xi on history and his place in it, and as he approaches a crucial juncture in his rule, that preoccupation with the past…