China begins selling changes

Press, 23 October 1984, Page 6

China begins selling changes

NZPA-Reuter Peking China’s Communist Party, seeking to explain sweeping new reforms, said yesterday that the country must adopt a practical style of socialism rather than the Utopianism of the past. The official press urged the country’s one billion people to study the new line, which calls for industrial changes, a fresh look

at price subsidies, the relaxation of central planning, and better factory management. A long document on the radical reforms, described by the “China Daily” newspaper as a new landmark in . the development of the people’s republic, was published at the week-end after a meeting of the party’s central committee. The party’s resolution

publicly ditches the egalitarianism of the late chairman Mao Tse-tung and says that diligent workers should be rewarded and the lazy punished. The party’s official newspaper, the “People’s Daily,” said that the objective was to create a revitalised form of socialism that was moulded to China’s needs. It should get away from

“the fainted socialism” or idealism of the (past, but would still have basic differences to capitalism. In front page editorials, the “Worker’s Daily” and “The Guangming Daily,” the newspaper of the intellectuals, urged readers to study the document and understand its objectives as the press mounted a big campaign to sell the new approach. <