Deng Xiaoping Opens China

1978 CE — East Asia, China

Today: China (the first zone was Shenzhen, beside Hong Kong)

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.

Worth knowing: Deng's reform began illegally: in 1978, eighteen starving farmers in a village called Xiaogang secretly signed a pact to divide the collective's land and farm it privately, expecting to be executed if caught. Their harvest was so large it could not be hidden — and the state, quietly, adopted their crime as national policy.

Pattern: Labor displacement — A new technology destroys and creates work faster than institutions and people can adapt, producing dislocation and backlash.

Entry 228 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.