The long stretch of Chinese history was comparatively preindustrial until one Richard Milhous Nixon’s 1972 visit to one Mao Zedong, in what would prove a successful effort to turn Red China against the Soviet Union. The price for Chinese realignment was pretty straightforward: admittance into the American-led global Order. Some 800 million Chinese started down the route to industrialization, a route that was now less a newly blazed path, and more a fourteen-lane superhighway with double HOV lanes. Following the patterns established by much of the rest of humanity, Chinese mortality plummeted
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