What worked, it turned out, was undoing many of the underlying structures and rules of China's Communist-era economy. Early on, Deng confronted a cornerstone of Mao's rural policies: the agricultural communes. During his rule, Mao had forced farmers and peasants - the vast majority of the population - onto large collectives in which all the output from the land went into a central fund. Deng eliminated the communes and gave individual farmers rights to use parcels of land. Hoping to boost production and encourage and spur individual enterprise, Deng told farmers that they could keep whatever they produced, beyond what they owed the state. The promise of individual gain had a big impact. "China was probably, at that point, about 85 or 90 percent peasants," says Lampton. "So he could energize 85 to 90 percent of the population economically simply by doing away with communes and drawing a link between, 'You work on this piece of land, and the more you get out of it, the more you'll keep.' "


A CONTINUING PROCESS
Slowly, through the 1980s to today, China has continued to reform its economy. In the beginning, China had very little capital to fund its transformation into an industrial economy, so Deng, ever cautious, allowed a small amount of foreign investment. "First they allowed Special Economic Zones near Hong Kong to deal with the outside world and set up a few state companies to trade and invest with foreigners," says Overholt, who is also the author of The Rise of China. When the first economic zones proved successful, cities around China clamored for the same opportunity to boost trade and lure investment. Through homegrown entrepreneurs, joint ventures with foreign companies, and now wholly foreign-owned ­ventures, new manufacturing plants - making everything from shoes to electronics - have popped up everywhere.