When Mao Zedong stood on Tian'anmen Rostrum in Beijing to declare the birth of New China in 1949, a Herculean task stood before him and the Communist Party of China (CPC) that he led: feeding and clothing 540 million Chinese people, nearly 90 percent of whom lived in rural areas. "Poverty is not socialism," "socialism means eliminating poverty," and "we must keep abreast of the times; that is the purpose of our reform," said Deng Xiaoping, the visionary chief architect of China's reform and opening-up which began in 1978 when the country's incidence of rural poverty was 97.5 percent. Er...