Word: communist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's something wrong with this picture: Fifty years of communist rule in China - and it faces the biggest unemployment problem of all time...
...communist system, after all, may be riddled with problems that make its collapse inevitable, but unemployment has never been one of them. Mao Zedong's promise of the "iron rice bowl" was the traditional communist guarantee of full employment. However decrepit the economy might be, everyone would always have a job, no matter how economically redundant. You pretend to work and we pretend to pay you. And yet on Friday, even as portraits of Mao were driven through the streets of Beijing, 100 million Chinese face the prospect of joblessness with no social safety...
...Unemployment, of course, isn't the only discordant element in modern China's claims to Mao's communist legacy. In 1979, then-leader Deng Xiaoping coined the rather novel (for a communist) slogan "To get rich is glorious." And today's China is anything but classless; in fact, its income inequalities are more pronounced than those of some of its avowedly capitalist Asian neighbors. Marx, Lenin and Mao would spin in their graves at what passes for communism in China at the end of the 20th century...
...China analysts and even many Chinese citizens outside of the Communist party debate whether Beijing's reforms will be doomed without a Western-style democratic system, or whether the modernizing authoritarianism begun in the Deng era is essential to prevent the wheels from coming off the world's most populous country in the speed wobble of the most volatile social revolution in history...
...Even as China's leaders become communist in name only, they have no intention of letting go of their tight grip on the reins of power. The experience of South Korea, Indonesia and even Taiwan shows that the expansion of prosperity under the tutelage of authoritarian regimes tends to cultivate the seeds of democracy. But the process can take decades. And it'll be a bumpy ride...