Picture a country of one billion people with a GDP of approximately US$43 billion. Major banks have roughly 30,000 branches and savings deposits totalling $2.5 billion, about $2.50 per capita. Government revenues and expenditures are roughly in balance, at $13.5 billion each.
That was China in 1978, on the eve of economic reform. Throughout the preceding thirty years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, progress was made in achieving social and political stability, but robust economic growth had eluded China's leadership. Upon Mao's death, the first order of business was to restructure China's economy, creating what his successor and master of China's economic reform, Deng Xiaoping, called a 'Socialist...
