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Witness History: China opens up to capitalism

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China opens up to capitalism

10/05/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - Witness History, China opens up to capitalism

How China's Communist rulers established the country's Special Economic Zones in May 1980

How China's Communist rulers established the country's Special Economic Zones in May 1980, allowing capitalist activity for the first time since the 1949 revolution.

In May 1980 China allowed capitalist activity for the first time since the Communist Revolution, in four designated cities known as the Special Economic Zones. The most successful was Shenzhen, which grew from a mainly rural area specialising in pigs and lychees to one of China's biggest cities. In 2017 Lucy Burns spoke to Yong Ya, a musician who has lived in Shenzhen since the 1980s, and to ethnographer Mary Ann O'Donnell.

PHOTO: A giant poster of Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen, the first of China's special economic zones (Getty Images)

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