Wenzhou Pays A Fitting Tribute To Deng Xiaoping

The city of Wenzhou, a capitalist pioneer in socialist China, has decided the best way to mourn paramount leader Deng Xiaoping is to make more money, residents said on Monday.

Without Deng, there would be no todays China and, especially, no todays Wenzhou, said advertising company manager Wu Hao.

Deng, who died on Wednesday aged 92, helped to steer China on its current economic course, wrenching it from purist Marxist policies that had brought the nation to the brink of starvation and industrial collapse.

Once a poor and backward city, Wenzhou has boomed since Dengs reform were launched in 1979, seizing new opportunities more aggressively than almost any other place in the country.

 

While top-level attention focused on four special economic zones such as Hong Kongs neighbour Shenzhen, which was created as a closely-monitored official experiment with capitalism, Wenzhou just went ahead and started making money.

Private firms in the city of seven million people on Chinas eastern coast, 350 km (217 miles) south of Shanghai, now account for 75 per cent of Wenzhous annual industrial output, compared to a national average of 10 per cent.

There is no way we could make as much money as we do, do so much business, if it had not been for Deng Xiaoping and the policy changes he pushed through, Zhou Ping, the owner of a small shoe factory, said in a telephone interview.

Another businessman in his twenties, asked about Dengs death, said getting rich was his top priority.

It (Dengs death) has nothing to do with my business, he said. What I should do is first make more money, then find a wife and finally have a son, he said.

Despite any possible changes in Beijing, there will be less control of the private sector at least in the short term, and there will be more opportunities for making money, he added.

Wenzhous brand of freewheeling capitalism was born of poverty and desperation.

The city sits on the coast facing Taiwan, home of the Nationalist government which in 1949 fled to the island, now regarded by Beijing as a renegade province, after losing the civil war.

Fearing a continuation of the war, the new communist government neglected coastal regions, including Wenzhou which for many years received less than half the level of state investment other cities did.

When Dengs reforms were launched, Wenzhou embraced them with fervour so much so that the city was criticised for following a capitalist road instead of a socialist one.