In his endlessly interesting 1982 book China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, Fox Butterfield described a tragically backwards country. So primitive were even the relatively well-to-do cities like Peking that when lightbulbs went out, citizens had to take them to a central authority at which a functionary would check the bulb's serial number, then hand the subject one that worked. As for economic growth, there wasn't much of an economy to speak of despite false GDP statistics that indicated activity where there wasn't.
Interesting about all this is that by the time Butterfield's book was published, China was five or six years into economic reforms. That the country remained desperately poor spoke to reforms that were anything but. While China's leadership paid lip service to the notion of freeing up a country wrecked by communism, the actual changes plainly hadn't lived up to their billing.
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