China Economic Reform and Opening: Some Evidents from Guangdong Province

In the late 1970s, China still a developing country three decades after a revolutionary regime change in 1949, was in dire need of systemic change. The decade-long debacle of the Cultural Revolution had just ended, leaving the economy dormant and the people physically and emotionally drained. At that time the new idea of opening the country to global contacts and influences after three decades of partly self-imposed isolation seemed a no less drastic measure to China’s leaders than the original policy of economic and social closure.
Other new ideas were emerging as well. Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China’s openpolicy and economic reforms launched in 1978, outlined a fundamentally new approach to gradual societal change.
Special zones established in 1979 and special economic zones were named in 1980. Before 1979, all the import and export products has to go to HK before enter in China.
China was one of the fastest growing economies in the 1980s. The average annual growth rate of GDP for China from 1980-90 was 9.5%. The corresponding growth rate for the world as a whole was 3.1 percent (World Bank 1992, 221,. table 2). The growth rate for China in 1992 was 12.6 percent.
The rapid growth in China is obviously related to its relentless pursuit of economic reform, which has unleashed productive forces previously suppressed by rigid central planning. One particularly important component of the reform program is China’s open door policy. Indeed, China is literally a textbook example of export-led growth.

In 1979, China decided to open up to the outside world. Since then, a few important steps have been taken in this effort: The government has decentralized decision making regarding exports and imports to local governments or regional foreign trade corporations because the