[anigbrowl]

The Chinese coastal cities got rich in part by emulating Hong Kong, providing much of the capital required to further develop the interior (much of which remains quite poor, however). There was a news story recently which illustrated how Shanghai had changed over the last 20 years with two photos taken from the same vantage point in 1990 and 2010. Even as recently as 1990, Shanghai just looks like a low-rise town, nothing special. The 2010 photo looks like a spaceport. This was in large part the result of Deng Xiaoping saying that the government was OK with people getting rich and would no longer treat it as an economic crime.