Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

In no place has this happened on a larger scale than in China, a country where three generations around a dinner table can tell the whole rags-to-riches story, from hunger and subsistence agriculture to programming computers and making cosmetics. At the start of the 1980s the city of Guangzhou, in the south-east Chinese province of Guangdong, had two buildings of more than ten floors. This was one of the poorer provinces of a desperately poor China, with neither capital nor resources for development. But farmers and villagers had started small businesses and began to improve production. As we saw in the case of the farmers in Xiaogang, they often did so without official recognition, but it inspired the leadership to think differently. In its efforts to raise the country out of its abysmal poverty, the Chinese communist party learned from the Asian ‘tiger’ economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, but also from local experiments with private farming and township enterprises. So it allowed special economic zones in Guangdong from 1980, which were exempt from the rules of the command economy. Production was mostly based on market forces, international investments and technologies were welcome, and they could engage in international trade. Business there combined investments from Hong Kong and Taiwan, received workers from northern provinces and sold to Western markets.