Nixon visit

When Mao met visiting US President Richard Nixon in 1972 ?? an historic meeting which heralded the melting of 20-odd years of icy relations between the two countries ?? he negated China's "closed-door" foreign trade policy implemented during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

"You were interested in personnel exchange and doing a little bit of business, yet we were dead against it. For a dozen years, we insisted that if major issues were not solved, we would not bother with trivial things. I was one of them. Later on we realized that you were right, hence the ping-pong policy," Mao was quoted as saying.

Chen's memoirs, which have already been put into the permanent collection of the Olympic Museum, said that the deals cost China more than US$5 billion, equivalent to half of the year's total infrastructure construction investment.

The deals also helped China to nurture a contingent of people familiar with foreign affairs, to truly acquire advanced technology and learn methods of doing business with foreign countries, particularly how to raise funds by making use of the international capital market, Chen says.

By contrast, the equipment previously imported on a large scale in the 1950s from the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, was mostly based on American technologies from before World War II.

Though China formally embarked on the road of opening-up and economic reform in 1978, it was a bold step taken in the chemical industry that enlivened a corner of the Chinese economy by easing the pressure on fiber and fertilizer shortfalls, and thus clothing and grain crops.

The government's ambition for an explosive growth of steel output to secure its position as an industrialized power in the "Great Leap Forward" had also been rectified.

Following the Beijing Olympics, widely viewed as a coming-out party for China, curiosity has been piqued around the world about China's development marked by an economy growing at double the world annual average for more than a decade.

Chen recalls in his book that China's rise from poverty has been a bumpy journey, strewn with disputes, advances and retreats, successes and setbacks.

In the memoir, Chen, who is also former director of the State Commission for Restructuring the Economy and later head of the State Planning Commission, the top economic planner in the 1990s, reveals his first-hand impressions of Party governance and high-profile decision-making on thorny issues, especially macro-economic control.

When the retail price index surged to 18.5 percent in 1988, sparking serious inflation and panic in cities, detractors said moving to a market economy meant ditching public ownership, the Party leadership and the socialist system for capitalism.