Reform and Opening Up

China’s program of market-oriented economic reform and expanded engagement with the world, launched in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping. It transformed production, trade, investment, and everyday life while retaining Communist Party rule.

Household Responsibility System: A rural reform that assigned farm households production contracts while allowing them to sell output beyond state quotas. It replaced collective farming incentives with household-level responsibility and helped raise agricultural output.
Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee: The December 1978 Chinese Communist Party meeting that endorsed economic modernization as the central national priority. It marked the political turning point commonly associated with the program’s launch.
Foreign direct investment in China: Cross-border investment that gives foreign firms lasting ownership or control of businesses in China. Opening policies used such investment to bring capital, technology, and production links.
Chinese economic growth: The sustained expansion of China’s output and incomes that began accelerating after the late 1970s. Rapid growth is the program’s defining economic outcome.
Socialist market economy: China’s official model combining market mechanisms with Communist Party leadership and public ownership in strategic sectors. It describes the economic framework that developed from the reform program.
Special Economic Zones: Designated areas in China offering distinct policies to attract foreign investment, technology, and export-oriented production. These zones concentrated experimentation with market rules and overseas capital.
Deng Xiaoping: Chinese Communist Party leader who guided China’s post-1978 economic reforms and opening to the world. His leadership built support for experimentation and modernization.
China and the World Trade Organization: China’s integration into the multilateral trading system, culminating in WTO membership in 2001. WTO accession extended the program’s opening through trade commitments.
Poverty reduction in China: The large decline in extreme poverty in China during the reform era, driven chiefly by rising incomes and structural change. Economic expansion and rural transformation lifted hundreds of millions from extreme poverty.
Chinese Communist Party: The ruling political party of the People’s Republic of China since 1949. The party directed reforms and retained political monopoly as markets expanded.

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