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| 1977, July |
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| Deng Xiaoping returned to power a second time, gaining back his position as vice premier as well as his seats on the politburo and the Military Affairs Committee. Beginning in the following year, he would grow to be the most powerful man in China. | 1 |
| U.S. president Jimmy Carter proposed normalizing Sino-U.S. relations; the next year bilateral meetings were held in Beijing. | 2 |
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| 1978 |
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| China began gearing up for a major reform program, known as the “Four Modernizations.” In addition to building new educational and technical institutions in China, students were selected for overseas study in the U.S., Japan, and Europe, primarily in technical fields. | 3 |
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| Oct. 23 |
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| Japan and China signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship. | 4 |
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| Nov.–Dec |
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| The “Democracy Wall” movement began. Large wall posters called for democratization of the political system to accompany modernizations in other areas. On Dec. 5, a poster written by Wei Jingsheng (b. 1949) on Democracy Wall explicitly called for a “fifth modernization”: democracy. The government retaliated in Jan. 1979. Wei was arrested, tried (March 1979), and sentenced to 15 years in prison. | 5 |
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