China Conducting Fewer Local Policy Experiments Under Xi Jinping

Come December, it will be 40 years since the Communist Party endorsed Deng Xiaoping's proposal for reform. What followed was an economic transformation on a scale and at a pace that had never before been witnessed in human history. One of the secrets of Deng's success was his encouragement of experimentation (see China section). He did not dismantle Mao's disastrous “people's communes” in one go. He did so over several years, allowing different places to try different methods. He turned a blind eye when local authorities allowed peasants to farm their own plots and sell their crops. When output soared, he made this official policy. In 1980, to the horror of Maoists, he set up “special economic zones” along the coast to carry out free-market trials. These too proved a success, and were eventually replicated nationwide.