Challenge Magazine

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the world’s largest and most influential socialist nation. 

Prior to the founding of the PRC, China had suffered through the ‘Century of National Humiliation.’

Foreign powers seized…

vast amounts of Chinese territory and drove the Qing government into immense debt; Britain forcibly peddled opium into the nation, causing widespread addiction; and during the Second World War, Japan massacred millions and destroyed huge amounts of infrastructure.
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The founding of the PRC ended this period and marked the beginning of China’s road towards modernisation and prosperity.

Under the leadership of Mao Zedong from 1949 until his death in 1976, caloric intake doubled; GDP and literacy rates quintupled, gross industrial…
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output increased 40-fold; and life expectancy rose by 31 years, the fastest increase ever recorded in any major country.

Deng Xiaoping’s leadership from 1978 to 1989 ushered in the era of ‘reform and opening up.’
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Since then, almost a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in China.

Today, the nation is upper-middle-income and is home to some of the world’s most technologically advanced cities.
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The remarkable transformation of the People’s Republic of China proves to the people of the capitalist world that an alternative system is possible, where resources are used to uplift people rather than generate profit and fuel wars.
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