Trade has been a very significant factor of the People's Republic of China's economy. In the twenty-five years that followed the founding of the Republic in 1949, China's trade institutions developed into a partially modern but somewhat inefficient system. The drive to modernize the economy that began in 1978 required a sharp acceleration in commodity flows and greatly improved efficiency in economic transactions. In the ensuing years economic reforms were adopted by the government to develop a "socialist planned commodity economy". This type of economy combined central planning with market mechanisms. The changes resulted in the decentralization and expansion of domestic and foreign trade institutions, as well as a greatly enlarged role for free markets in the distribution of goods, and a prominent role for foreign trade and investment in economic development.
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“The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”
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“Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.”
—Renata Adler (b. 1938)
“Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve, I’ve dreamed of havin’ my own things about me. My spinet over there and a table here. My own chairs to rest upon and a dresser over there in that corner, and my own china and pewter shinin’ about me.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)