How Deng Xiaoping Changed China Forever

it is 1978 the chinese economy has barely functioned in decades tens of millions of people have died because of chairman mao zedong's disastrous economic and social policies people on the countryside are starving with our footing with your hair life was so desperate that in rural zhao gang 18 present farmers did the unthinkable foreign [Music] they defied the communist system of collective agriculture and divided the land so that each family could farm its own plot it sounded very much like what mao called the capitalist road kind of foreign they actually signed a pact in blood certain that if discovered they would all be punished for their treachery and their leader yen junchong could be executed they were discovered but no one was sentenced to death no one was even punished instead they were hailed as revolutionary heroes in xiaoping's emerging era of reform eighteen peasant farmers in a remote lonely village lit the spark that inspired xiaoping and ignited one of the most extraordinary economic transformations in history xiaoping guided china from an impoverished rural country to an urbanized world leader in a single generation by the time he stepped down as paramount leader in 1989 and retired from politics in 1992 he had led the country through unprecedented change this is the story of how he did it and it is the story of people whose lives have been transformed by his open and reformed policies [Music] dunn cited the old chinese saying that he crossed the river by groping for stones balancing openness and control one step at a time adapting ancient systems to modern problems westernizing china while still affirming he was continuing mao zedong's revolution dung didn't leave the maoist vision behind university of british columbia professor timothy brooke edited the harvard six volume history of imperial china he tried to leave that in place to some extent this this idea that the state should control everything and then enliven that and perhaps enrich that with a recognition that commerce actually doesn't take wealth out of the economy it brings wealth into the economy dung understood that principle very well dung was a fellow revolutionary at mao's side but they were very different leaders while mao was vain idealistic and mercurial dung was modest pragmatic and steady in 1978 a few years after mao's death dung began methodically to reinvigorate china's once prosperous economy i think he was influenced by certain ideas about the greatness of china and about the strength of history ezra vogel is the author of deng xiaoping and the transformation of china he'd been through a lot and he was tough by the time he came to power he was so knowledgeable and had been through so much and that five feet tall didn't seem like a person suffering from inferiority complex he was fully confident and ready to go chairman mao had his little red book deng xiaoping turned the page he was prepared to say nuts to ideology um what matters is does it work dr stephen davies is with the hong kong institute for the humanities and social sciences dhonix knows that china has squandered the first 50 years of the revolutionary government through insane experiments by martadong something has got to change he knows he's got strong opposition from hardline leftists he has to come up with something that he thinks is going to open china to the way the world is going and he comes up this brilliant idea of the special economic exams the first special economic zone was the area neighboring the capitalist haven of hong kong the traditional southern gate to the west creates these replicas of the old treaty ports in which china's own rules don't strictly apply in order to create a routine for capital innovation in order to kick-start china's own accumulation of wealth which can then get it rolling on the developmental road opening up to business meant bringing in businessmen tan xiaoping gave me all the freedom to lay down all the conditions of the free zone in shenzhen alan lau was the first at that time shenzhen the population only 21 000. it's like a village that's hardly to have any business there because no material no food nothing the modest footbridge between shenzhen and hong kong was more of an impassable fence than a gate when dung opened it people and capital flooded back and forth sunshine is considered the stepping stone what started in shenzhen spread when dunn rose to power 80 of china's population lived in a million small villages now more than half the population live in cities he initiated nothing less than the greatest human migration in history this was not the capitalist road it was the capitalist highway but dunn was leading a communist country with a collective mindset he led but stayed in step he was at once progressive and autocratic open-minded and iron-fisted a reformer and a revolutionary mao compared himself to the great emperors a founder of a new dynasty dunn did not consider himself a son of heaven but he knew uncontrolled urbanization could threaten the order and his mandate so we continue the old system of household registration called hukou who co-ties an individual to his or her place of origin without local huko one loses the right to subsidized health care education and welfare the huco system was firmly in place in the 14th century everyone had to be registered within a unit the who is the household the co is the individual within the household the benefit is that the state always knows where everybody is dunn used huco as both an accelerator and a break he needed more workers in the cities but not all at once that he feared could create chaos he felt and i think he was correct they would just overwhelm schools they would overwhelm the food supply they couldn't allow it his view all during the period of his rule from 78 to 92 was that you could gradually increase the population coming in cities but you can't do it too fast plays a powerful role in the ma family's daily life majin yuan was only five years old and his sister was two when their single mother uprooted them they moved from qinghai province one of the poorest areas in china to the city of hamil where there was family support move had dramatic consequences they weren't registered in their new province [Music] the only way her children could get an education was for their mother to pay higher tuition fees eventually the school would issue their mother an ultimatum only one child could stay in school she chose her son when ma's mother finally got a better paying job the teachers allowed her to pay the tuition fees by installments so ma's sister could go to school too but without loko hukou ma's prospects remained limited if he wanted higher education he couldn't stay you know enrolled in applied science at minzu university in beijing china's top university for ethnic minorities he joined the army to help pay for his education [Music] epitomizes the new china the heavy hand of huco holding him back but the prospect of an education potentially freeing him up during the cultural revolution in the 1960s chairman mao closed the universities he urged his followers the red guard to ridicule and persecute intellectuals dunn knew education was the lever of change china has traditionally honored education dung tapped into a hunger to learn and succeed majin huang grew up in shanghai before his mother moved the family to hamil both far from china's economic recovery pang lai is a wealthier city on the coast east of beijing that's where anna huang lives anna's from the new middle class her father is a civil servant as an only child banna is the center of her parents world and their ambitions anna is an example of life in china under xiaoping's controversial one-child dun xiaoping's one child policy was authoritarian draconian and effective under mao zedong the idea was that chinese should multiply as quickly as they can in order to make china even bigger and stronger than it was the demographic effects were a disaster so under deng xiaoping china implemented the one child policy because china's population growth was occurring at a rate that was basically eating up all possible surplus that the economy could generate the one child policy was essential for getting the chinese economy back on track combining his new one-child policy with huco dun required that pregnant women go to a government office to apply for a certificate to give birth a second child would either mean severe fines or that child would not be given co-registration my judgment is that he was right that if you had allowed more children to be born you didn't have enough food they already had a billion people when he came to power and a lot of people were really very short of food the one child policy stayed in effect throughout dung's leadership it began to be phased out in 2015 18 years after his death population control and opening up the economy in one generation xiaoping lifted about 600 million people out of poverty in 1978 no one was poorer than the farmers of zhao gang that's why the 18 farmers defiance of collective agriculture was so significant they inspired others to follow in their paths you're foreign deng xiaoping's policy of gatihu built off what the 18 farmers initiated gatihu literally means individual household enterprises done was encouraging the creation of small family businesses he knew that in china there was untapped ambition [Music] several hundred million young people were out of work the communist state couldn't hire them so many young people had been sent down to the countryside to labor during the cultural revolution none was ready to let them come back and when they got back they didn't have jobs so he said we have to worry about what these people are going to do in the cities to have them unemployed is going to be terrible we're going to have to let them open up their little shops by themselves and to allow little private enterprise gong bing was a poor farmer tied to fields and working in a struggling government factory until goody who loosened the bonds and gave him a chance to friends in shenzhen and the special economic zone alan lau spent the 1980s in the glow of success and mounting riches it was his time i'm the first house project first hotel first shoe factory first street factory aside from that i have also many other factories in china what was the total investment in shenzhen back then 200 million u.s you know the foreign currency back at 200 million and 100 million i borrowed from the bank but lao was getting cocky building infrastructure but moving too fast making a fortune but getting showy too showy for some hard-line communists i'm the first one who'll drive in to san juan the first car is my limousine extra long like them in lebanon in the airport there's an old chinese saying the bird that flies at the front of the flock is the one they shoot i want to be the pioneer i want to show china that i can make it [Music] gong hang bing tried several businesses from children's toys to women's clothing before he settled on silk flowers an enterprise which chinese artisans and entrepreneurs have engaged in for centuries even deng xiaoping briefly worked in a plastic flower factory when he was young gong started his silk flower business with his wife and they still work together it was this flower in a model's hair that foreign me university life ramad jin yuan in beijing is going well he's in his final year but barely has enough money to get by the subsidies he receives from his army service help but he sends a lot of money home to his family soon he must decide what to do when he graduates fielding calls from home [Music] her parents have diligently guided her studies anna's parents are determined that their only child pursue a career in the civil service that's what her father did that's what is expected of her you surrendered foreign a prestigious secure job in a dizzying vortex of change it's appealing but the civil service candidates must face an incredibly difficult series of examinations a million compete every year and only a tiny percentage pass it is one of the most competitive exams in the world deng xiaoping made it clear he wanted to create a meritocracy like so many of deng xiaoping's initiatives bringing back the civil service exams seemed new and innovative when in fact he was reaching into the past reinstating the traditional but almost forgotten imperial examinations the imperial examination system was shut down in 1905 and that left educated chinese puzzled to know what their role was going to be in the future the response with the coming of the people's republic of china was to give those jobs to members of the communist party that was discovered to be good at one level in terms of the loyalty of this cadre to the party but it was also found not to be so great in terms of attracting the best and the brightest and so deng xiaoping brought in a much more meritocratic examination system the civil service examination was a way of recruiting smart people from every level of society [Music] he will take the civil service exams [Music] magazine in 1985 if you want to bring the initiative of the peasants into play you should give them the power to make money he could have been talking about gong bing when he was given the opportunity there was nothing stopping him from chasing riches he is now a multi-millionaire businessman with 400 employees and a sales staff that stretches across china [Music] nothing exemplifies dung's famous declaration that it's glorious to be rich like the canton fair in modern day guangzhou the canton fair is expansive and extravagant as only a chinese fair can be the exhibit space is more than one million square meters there are more than sixty thousand booths with business transactions over twenty eight billion dollars um at the canton fair west meets east as it has for centuries canton was where swashbuckling trading companies from the west once thrive if you want to do business in china this is the best place to start the west has knocked on china's doors before with disastrous results the cannons facing out to sea are vivid reminders of gunboat diplomacy and bullying the opium wars of the 1800s between britain and china were defining moments in chinese history western merchants eager for chinese tea selling opium to the chinese importing it for home use and making fortunes on the backs of the people the symbol of the brutality of imperialism is on display at the once glorious old summer palace it was sacked looted and set ablaze during the second opium war it lies in ruins just north of beijing and the crumbling rocks seem to whisper never again china decides to take on the western world and loses in a humiliating way and then it does it a second time and loses in a humiliating way yes you can tell the narrative that way that is the narrative every chinese school child learns that china endured a century of humiliation then the humiliation of the peace settlement at the end of the first world war where china just gets shafted by the western allies that peace settlement the treaty of versailles led to the famous protests of may 4th 1919 students gathered at tiananmen gates china had been on the road to democracy but these disillusioned youth would set it in a new direction the protests and fury spread across the country and included a 14 year old revolutionary deng xiaoping so when he reached power dung was determined that china not be humiliated again he would write the rules how business would be conducted how boundaries would be honored how the courts would function and how human rights would be practiced he would demand autonomy and respect today shenzhen is a thriving city looking more and more like nearby hong kong the skyline soars with high-rise office buildings in the early days of open and reform policies alan lau opened the western style hotel the first hotel is bamboo garden because i want to take the advantage of the low labor course i was very very happy because i gave me a lot of freedom to manage the bamboo garden hotel he's still proud of the hotel its success and his rather rigid hiring policies have you fired anybody yes i did i find more than 100 staff in bamboo garden hotel because they don't follow my instructions but a communist country is supposed to have full employment this eager capitalist was not in line with the collective alan lau was making enemies in beijing the day after he decided to take the civil service examinations majin yuan got the process started from [Music] the civil service examinations involve a face-to-face interview and a written exam ma is studying up to 16 hours a day if he passes he and his family will gain in another way another anna huang has quit her job in pong lai and enrolled in the shangju cramming school to prepare for the civil service exam full-time her parents are paying for this it is her second try of these exams she's expected to pass this time the mock interview is designed to test her ability to think on her feet she has only 15 minutes to answer her questions the cram school is pressure packed so anna has gone to the temple at shangdong for inspiration one of confucius's main principles guides anna's life obey your parents and do right for your family [Music] under mao confucius's teachings were reviled as reasons for the feudalism that held china back but deng xiaoping understood that its core principle of harmonious relations in the family and among citizens obedience and obligation could work well in a modern ordered chinese society i think dung was affected by two formative influences one would be confusion influences of hierarchy and deference and so forth but he also learned a great deal from soviet communism he understood that the way in which a communist party succeeds is to impose a very tight control over its members and then in turn over society as a whole so confucianism and communism actually fit together quite nicely as long as the communist party feels that it's not going to relinquish ultimate control [Music] confucius might smile on gong hangbing who is hardworking diligent and also dutiful he shares his house with his in-laws and his mother and what a house it is three stories of marvel and gold with an elevator gong also believes as confucius did in the power of education he never got through high school but his children are being educated in the united states no civil service dreams here this is an entrepreneurial family i like my father's business after graduate i think i will do some internship and after that i will take over my parents business firstly i have to get understand of my father's business secondly i will take business into the internet point pioneer businessman alan lau was always more comfortable with western entrepreneurs than communist countries politically china have two parties left party and right party i belong to the right party thank you is the right party you know capitalism and the other party is communist lao helped guide shenzhen from a backward small town to a modern metropolis he did so with the permission and encouragement of deng xiaoping but the old school communists never approved of his plans nor of his bravado people started spreading rumors the rumor said china is not supporting me left is us against me the banks became skittish and his businesses failed the bank wants me to pay back the money which i cannot pay right away i went bankrupt after you went bankruptcy did you tell them joking about this no he's only laid down the policy and also given me the right to exercise the capitalism that's all we are not afraid this is business alan lau seems sanguine about his rise and fall maybe he always knew that open and reform also meant control oh [Music] [Music] the government has built a museum to honor the 18 farmers they are part of modern chinese legend it's living history in the museum amidst artifacts and reconstructions you can imagine their desperate straights their midnight pact in blood you can share the drama and daring even meet a real life hero but townspeople complain that other communities have profited more from the open-end reform policy than they have they don't want to be relics in china's great transformation they want to participate no matter how immortalized is not the modern china in action the new china involves massive investment private contracting and state spending power privilege and temptation corruption in business and within the civil service has become one of the most serious problems confronting modern china by focusing on growth at any cost dunn ignored emerging corruption and a suffering environment i think dung understood that he couldn't control everything that was going on and that to bring about change in the way in which the people's republic ran its economy was going to require a certain amount of rewards going to the people who were doing it and maybe not always according to the the highest ethical standards and he was willing to tolerate a small amount of corruption as the cost of lubricating change i think he felt at the time when they were starting to form so many party leaders had suffered so much that if the local official found a way to get things done and start the economy and put a little bit in his pocket that was not such a disaster the important thing in his mind was can that local official do something it takes an extremely brave person to stand up to china's bureaucracy magazine journalist luo chang ping exposed massive corruption in the national energy administration eventually the deputy minister leotiennang was convicted of taking about 6 million in bribes and sentenced to life in prison after more than a decade in power dung was threatened by corruption a massive population and an impatient youth movement demanding democracy the demonstrations that started in tiananmen square in april 1989 were initially a challenge to corruption it ends up being called the democracy movement because the students want some kind of say in where the future of their country lies and they felt they weren't being heard at the height of the protests 400 000 people assembled in the square and then the fateful night of june 4th it was a massacre by morning light the state was back in control but hundreds of protesters were dead and deng xiaoping's reputation lay in ruins dung xiaoping by this point is somewhat too distant from what's going on out in the streets to understand what's at stake and as the movement grows he becomes anxious that his project to build a wealthier and more powerful shine is going to be compromised so when push comes to shove he decides i have to shut the movement down and i will use the military to do it the tanks the soldiers the defenseless students images of that night are seared in western memory though not in china you can bet nothing about this protest will be on this generation's civil service exam examination day has arrived the students join hundreds of thousands across the country success will launch their careers a position in society and perhaps make their families proud [Music] okay finally the civil service exams are over when the results come in once again anna did not pass she now works at the legal department at a state-owned company in panglai but her parents still push her to do better his diligence has paid off he too failed the civil service exams but he was offered a job at the beijing school of economic management and it comes with a coveted beijing foreign at the first opportunity ma takes the long trip home to share the news about a success [Music] ah has not seen his mother for many months his mother hosts a family feast in celebration yes them [Music] [Music] has accomplished everything he dreamed of his world is serene but his focus still [Music] lives in vancouver now and he has been vindicated in 2003 he was awarded a gold medal by the chinese government he went back to shenzhen to receive the award the nicole battle is given to me the pioneer special zone looking back on his time in shenzhen he may be forgiven for saying i told you so i made a proposal to done shopping then the population could be jumped up to 10 million that particular proposal went to all the chinese leaders is that that is impossible to put that into perspective shenzhen's population was only 21 000 when he predicted it would rise to 10 million now shenzhen population already appeared more than 60 million [Music] leader of the 18 farmers can look back on a life well-lived the chinese government remains at times rigid and unyielding corruption is still corrosive but china's economic awakening has been astonishing and there's no denying that deng xiaoping was its architect in the last century no leader guided a country from third world despair to superpower as effectively as dung shall be no one raised so many people out of poverty embalmed body lies in tiananmen square an emperor's tomb in an extravagant mausoleum deng xiaoping was 92 when he died his eyes and internal organs were donated to science his body cremated and his ashes cast out to sea his memorial is alive still diligent people who've been given a chance young people who aspire to greatness proud people who defy humiliation a miraculous transformation [Music] you

Channel: TRACKS - Travel Documentaries

Views: 154,706

Keywords: Asian Economy, Asian economy, China's economic prosperity, China's modernization drive, China's rise, Chinese Leader, Chinese market economy, Chinese modernization, Deng Xiaoping impact, Deng Xiaoping strategy, Deng Xiaoping's wisdom., Economic Development, Economic Progress, Economic Reforms, Economic Revitalization, Economic Turnaround, Modernization, TRACKS - Travel Documentaries, economic development, political stability in China, socialism in modern China

Id: QvgCRPzSwq0

Length: 51min 24sec (3084 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022