Deng Xiaoping Opens China

Two years after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping began dismantling the command economy without dismantling the party that ran it — letting farmers sell surplus, opening special economic zones to foreign factories, and telling the country that 'to get rich is glorious.' Shenzhen went from a fishing town to a city of millions. Over the next forty years roughly 800 million people rose out of extreme poverty, the largest reduction in extreme poverty ever recorded, while political control tightened rather than loosened — a combination that Western observers had confidently assumed was impossible.