Transformational Leaders, Deng Xiaoping, Ronald Reagan, And Chinese Human Rights

As you might have already guessed, China’s explosive economic growth was set off by a transformational leader, Deng Xiaoping. More precisely, his momentous decision in 1978 to free the Chinese economy from the shackles of central planning — i.e. government bureaucrats deciding how much of what gets produced by which firm — and allow market forces to play a much bigger role in how resources are allocated. That unleashed the colossal entrepreneurial energy of the Chinese people which had been artificially bottled up for decades by Mao Zedong and his fellow comrades who were busy indoctrinating the masses with socialist — more accurately, Maoist or mass peasant egalitarian — ideology, wrecking the economy in the process. As noted earlier, the Chinese are by nature an exceptionally entrepreneurial lot, and this is probably the single most common denominator linking the Chinese and the Americans, another famously entrepreneurial lot. When Deng decided to endorse the profit motive and private enterprise by uttering the famous, game-changing dictum “To get rich is glorious,” the Chinese entrepreneurial genie was out of the bottle and the rest, as they say, is history, and the Chinese economy took off like a supersonic rocket…