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The Rise of East Asia: Threat or Opportunity
It was clearly the case that Taiwan was a rambunctious free society. Those experiences invite for me three obvious questions.

What has happened in China and Taiwan over the last 2 or 3 decades?
Is China's development a threat, economic and political to the rest of us??
And is the political difference between China and Taiwan, the one a society with a Leninist political structure but with, on a whole, a Capitalist way of making and accumulating wealth, and the other, a genuine Pluralist society. Is that political difference likely to prove a political flashpoint and a threat to the region's security and to the whole world as well??

Mainland China has been transformed since the death of Mao Zedong. Forty years ago, thirty-eight million people died in the Great Famine. And the average caloric intake of the Chinese populations was the same as those held in Auschwitz during the Second World War.

China then survived the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, which deprived the whole generation of higher education and indeed in some cases, of any education at all. So China has bounced back, extraordinary successfully from ground zero. Indeed there are some economists who probably unfairly argue that China's progress should have been even greater than it has been, given the rubble from which the spectacular assent began. On Mao Zedong's death, Deng Xiaoping tried to consolidate his own political grip by implementing quickly the main priorities of the Ten-Year Plan.

He thought he could pay for it by them discovering oil, but unfortunately, China did not discover very much and what was found only yielded 10% of its potentials because of poor recovery rates. So in desperation, Deng turned to the agricultural sector to bail him and the economy out.

Peasants were allowed to produce more food for themselves and given half a chance to break free from Beijing's control, they bolted. So this first stage of the huge turnaround in China, the transformation of Maoism into the workshop of the world was created by local farmers and local government disobeying the center and doing their own thing. The partial liberalization of the economy wasn't planned, it just happened. What exactly has happened since then?

I would like to start by warming one's hands on some Gee Whiz statistic.

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