China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep, for when he wakes he will move the world.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
The project is vast, daring, and unique in history. How could there be a precedent for turning 1 billion people so sharply in their course, for leading one-quarter of mankind quickstep out of dogmatic isolation into the late 20th century and the life of the rest of the planet? The People's Republic of China, separated so long from the outer world by an instinctive xenophobia and an admixture of reclusive Maoism, in 1978 began its Great Leap Outward, or what Peking's propagandists call the New Long March. The Chinese, their primitive economy threadbare and their morale exhausted by the years of Mao Tse-tung's disastrous Cultural Revolution, hope to have arrived by the year 2000 at a state of relative modernity, and become a world economic and military power. They may not arrive, or arrive on time, but their setting off is an extraordinary spectacle of national ambition.
The Chinese venture acquired a fascinating new dimension at year's end. The U.S. and the People's Republic ended seven years of gingerly courtship that began with the Nixon-Kissinger initiatives. In simultaneous communiques from Peking and Washington, Chairman and Premier Hua Kuo-feng and President Carter announced that the two countries would exchange ambassadors and begin normal diplomatic relations. The normalization opens potentially lucrative avenues of trade and new perspectives on world politics, even though it will be a long time before Peking joins Washington and Moscow as a capital of first-rank global power.
The motive force behind the campaign to get the world's oldest continuous civilization to the 21st century on schedule is not Mao's titular successor, Hua Kuo-feng, 57, but Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, who also holds the titles of Vice Chairman of the Communist Party and Army Chief of Staff. Although he ranks only third in the Peking Politburo (after Hua and ailing Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, 80, the figurehead Chief of State), Teng is the principal architect of what has become known in Chinese rhetoric as the Four Modernizations—an attempt simultaneously to improve agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense. Because of the tremendous enterprise he has launched to propel the nation into the modern world, Teng Hsiao-p'ing (pronounced dung sheow ping) is TIME'S Man of the Year for 1978.
Tough, abrasive, resilient, Teng, 74, has made more political comebacks than Richard Nixon. Twice, at Mao's behest, he was purged by his radical enemies, and his last rehabilitation was only 17 months ago. Teng commands a broad power base among the senior officers of the People's Liberation Army as well as wide support among China's bureaucrats, technocrats and the intelligentsia. The last two were precisely those elements of Chinese society that, like Teng, were the chief victims of the Cultural Revolution. Besides his constituency, Teng has extraordinary energy and executive skills. As a party member for more than 50 years and a veteran of Mao's original Long March, he also possesses a moral authority that no other Chinese leader can command, an authority based partly on his refusal to bow before the political winds of the past two