Email to Friends
Comment (MAO Zedong still looms over Beijing, betraying the tiniest hint of a smirk from his vast portrait gazing down from the Tiananmen Gate, across towards his own Soviet-style mausoleum. But Shenzhen, China's great new southern city, is dominated by a different figure: the diminutive Deng Xiaoping, forever striding forward in a huge bronze statue atop Lotus Hill Park.
Overall, it's no contest. This is palpably Deng's day, not Mao's. Everyone in China, and many people in the wider world who have become eager China watchers, will soon be focusing on what that means for the world, for Beijing is preparing to celebrate in style the 30th anniversary in December of Deng's launch of the kai fang (open door) era.
China began to modernise during the republican era following the overthrow, or the disintegration, of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century. Then Mao drove the country down a cul de sac of collectivisation.
With Mao gone to meet Marx, Deng launched...
