Status of MCH Services, P.R. of China. Strategies to Increase Capacities at Primary Level

These steps created the conditions for China subsequently to join the IMF and the World Bank in 1986 and be granted observer status to GATT in 1982. The value of the United States to China was increasingly evident during the 1980s: it became the most important destination for Chinese exports; growing numbers of Chinese students went to study there, including many sons and daughters of the Party elite; while the US model of capitalism came to exercise a growing influence. The collapse of the Soviet Union only served to accentuate that influence, and the US’s prestige was further enhanced by the economic dynamism associated with Silicon Valley and the internet. Increasingly during the nineties, however, there was a rising tide of nationalist sentiment directed against the US, which found expression in the bestseller The China That Can Say No and the demonstrations against the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. [431] American influence on China’s modernization, nonetheless, remained considerable. Even China’s own economic path and popular mood was to bear some of the signs of neo-liberalism: the worship of wealth, the embrace of entrepreneurs, acquiescence in growing inequality, the retreat of the state from the provision of public goods such as education and health, the rapid lowering of tariff barriers and the adoption of an extremely open trade regime [432] — all of which were closely associated with the reign of Deng’s pro tГ©gГ© and successor, Jiang Zemin ...»