[0:05]Over the last 40 years, China has been transformed out of all recognition.
[0:14]The scale of its growth and the sheer speed of change is astonishing. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
[0:29]But as China rises, others will fall. In the 21st century, the balance of power in the world is changing. So how did an impoverished and backward Communist country become an engine of global capitalism? Just 40 years ago, China had a new leader, a five-foot tall chain-smoking veteran of the Long March with a reputation for pragmatism over ideology. Deng Xiaoping.
[1:04]Under Deng, China renounced class struggle and embraced the market. It saw the biggest lifting of people out of poverty that has ever taken place in human history. China became a global economic force, predicted to become the world's biggest economy in a couple of decades. But what actually happened 40 years ago, and how did China do it?
[1:43]China has 1.4 billion people, a fifth of all humanity. And for the last two centuries, they've been engaged in a long-running struggle over the different pathways to modernity. China was a leading nation over 1,000 years to the early 17th century. Then China began to close the door. We don't need this Western gadgets, you know, we are so powerful, we have everything on the earth. So from then on, China began to decline, China closed off and complacent. The Chinese call what followed the century of humiliation, and its memory has marked China to this day.
[2:41]It suffered colonial oppression, Japanese invasion and then civil war. 14 million Chinese people died in World War II alone. And in the countryside, the people were reduced to starvation.
[3:03]From 1840, the first opium war with UK, the longest continued stability for China with no more than 10 years. So China's modernization process was interrupted again and again and by foreign aggression, by peasant uprising, by civil wars. So the Communist triumph of 1949, they hoped, would bring peace. But soon economic disasters led to the Great Famine, and then in the 60s, the class struggles of the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao waged war on China's traditional culture. China had struggled with modernization because previously China had tried to modernize in keeping China's old traditional way of doing things. And the Cultural Revolution essentially was an attack on China's traditional way of doing things. By the early 70s, the country was traumatized and exhausted, its economy in ruins. The people were desperate for a new path.
[4:15]Most people, all ordinary people were fed up with this excessive, radical, ideological campaigns, one after another. So Deng Xiaoping personified this kind of demand for change.
[4:41]Deng had been a party stalwart from the time of the Long March and the Civil War. But in the Cultural Revolution, he was purged for criticizing Mao. Exiled to the countryside, he worked as a fitter in a tractor factory. Deng had been in the top leadership ever since 1949. And then he spent about three years in the countryside.
[5:11]A lot of the greatest leaders, uh, Churchill, de Gaulle, Abraham Lincoln, they all had been in a very high position, fell, and then had time to think.
[5:29]In the 1970s, China was an agricultural country, 80% of the people worked the land, and after three decades of communism, they were still poor. For most people, life was really hard. I didn't have any shoes, winter or summer, until I was 20. If you had a bicycle, you were considered very rich.
[6:03]When I was growing up, hunger always haunted me. Almost every day, the sort of finding something to eat was, was always there. The overriding priority was to lift the people out of poverty. And in 1976, when Mao died, the opportunity came. Deng Xiaoping returned from exile, determined to change China's direction. Deng had a vision, and it was that China should become more prosperous. He shared Mao Zedong's concept that the only way for China to become more prosperous was to have stability, and he believed, as did Mao, that the only way you could have stability was through one-party rule by a Communist Party that kept all of the power in its own hands. But Mao's concept was not really stability. It was permanent revolution. And Dong didn't accept that. So when Dong came back after Mao died, his vision was that get rich is glorious and that you do it in the most efficient way. But to achieve that, Deng first needed to outflank the hardline conservatives in the party leadership. And when he came back, he asked first to be put in charge of education. Modernization needs people with skills and back then China was particularly short of such people. So Deng immediately asked to be in charge of education and science.
[7:47]The first step was to undo the damage caused by Mao's war on the middle class.
[8:16]When I finished my high school, I went to a factory in Shanghai. I did not have any hope to enter university. A whole generation of China's youth had been sent to the countryside for what was called re-education through hard manual labor to learn what it was like to be a peasant. I was the the probably the last cohort of people from high school that, you know, have to go to the countryside to receive reeducation. I was thinking my life was just, you know, I stay there for, for my lifetime. Just going to be in that village.
[9:04]And then in summer 1977, Deng called a conference in Beijing on the future of education. High education department, Professor Liu Daoyu, he told me, you are the invited by the Deng Xiaoping to the great hall in Beijing.
[9:32]No people speak because at that time you know that after the cultural revolution, they are very fear, you know. People were scared to speak out.
[9:47]Then they said, you can take any opinion freely, comfortably. And did you speak? I proposed to the Deng Xiaoping, I have an opinion. I proposed 16 words for the entry of the university. Those 16 words would change modern China. Exams should start again as soon as possible. They should be free, fair, and open to all, not just the party. Deng agreed, and the first exams took place that December of 1977. When the news announced that actually we can take the examination to get into college, we just sort of, we're just so happy and we're just accelerated. It's just, you know, such a, uh, you know, life-changing, you know, sort of moment for us.
[10:51]It was very tough, 5.7 million candidates applying for the exam, only less than 5% were admitted. Ages varied from 18 to 35 in my class. I was 20 at that time.
[11:10]They were coal miners, they were farmers, they were soldiers, they were workers, young apprentice like me. So that exam changed life of many people.
[11:26]In a culture that had for so long believed in the value of education, it was a transformational moment. Coming from a family of teachers, I really understood the importance of education. I knew that studying was good for me. And obviously good for the country as well. I was strongly motivated to study. So your ambition was to be a teacher as well? Back then I wanted to become a professor. When I shared this hope, some people laughed at me. But later I did become a professor.
[12:05]For Deng, it was the first step in his path to power. The following year, 1978, he emerged as pre-eminent leader.
[12:19]He wasn't fully in charge. Hua Guofeng was still officially the top leader. But it was clear that he had been given the authority by his colleagues to be the dominant figure.
[12:43]He realized that all those people who had spent their lives working for Mao, including himself, who had started in 1922, that what they'd been thinking about was completely wrong. And to be able to lead that kind of dramatic change to get 700 million people to accept something quite new and quite different, uh, was absolutely necessary.
[17:11]This was Fengyang in Anhwei Province. A fifth of the county had died in the Great Famine in the early 1960s. And here the seeds of change were beginning to sprout at the grassroots. That winter of 1978, in the village of Xiaogang, desperate local farmers broke with the commune system of collective farming.
[17:47]It was against the law and the penalties were severe. But in this room, risking their lives, they put their thumbprints to what they called a life or death contract. Forty years ago, there were no bricks or roof tiles here. All the families lived in thatched houses with mud walls. People were so poor, they had to beg for food. My four children all went out begging, even the youngest. There wasn't enough food for sure. Life was hard, that's why we stamped our fingerprints to end starvation. What did you, what were the words that you put on the document? What was the agreement you made together? The document said: we will divide the land between the households. Each head must sign and stamp. Each household must meet the state's target and not ask for anything from the state. If the leaders are killed, the others will raise their children. That's what was written in the document. And were you were you scared that the the government might find out? Was it dangerous to, to do that? It was heartbreaking for us. If we didn't act we would starve to death. But acting also put us at great risk. Eventually we chose to go down this road. Even at the risk of prison or death we divided the land.
