For the past three decades the mantra of “reform and opening up” – gaige kaifang in Chinese – has been the guiding ideology in nominally communist China.
The phrase comes from the policies introduced in the early 1980s by Deng Xiaoping, the diminutive, chain-smoking former guerrilla commander who pulled China out of its post-Cultural Revolution malaise with a mixture of market-oriented economics and autocratic politics.
“Reform” meant allowing private enterprise and market forces gradually to flourish while “opening up” referred to Deng’s policy of encouraging foreign investment into special economic zones that became the foundation for China’s enormous export manufacturing sector.