The Nanxun Legacy and China's Development in the Post-Deng Era

In the spring of 1992, Deng Xiaoping made a historic tour of South China, popularly known as Nanxun or "southern tour". During the tour, Deng made several important speeches, boldly calling for more radical economic reform and the further opening up of China. This tour has since sparked off dynamic economic growth in China and drastically changed the political and social landscape of the country. The Nanxun has thus become a political landmark in the history of the People's Republic of China. But the development dynamism triggered off by the Nanxun is not over yet. It is therefore timely to have an overall assessment of the impact on China's development in the post-Deng era.

To this end, an international conference on "Deng's Nanxun Legacy and China's Development" was organised by the East Asian Institute (EAI) in Singapore in April 2000. The chapters in this volume are selected from the papers presented at the conference, with the aim of providing the reader an overall but coherent picture of China's post-Nanxun development.