This Fleeting World

86 This Fleeting World
of the economy. After Mao’s death in 1976 his successors cautiously reintroduced
elements of a market economy, and as entrepreneurial activity
spread in China, economic growth accelerated. Capitalism was never
entirely destroyed in China (as it had been in the Soviet Union), which is
why, despite the survival of its Communist government, its economy has
shifted with some success toward a competitive market economy.
Throughout the world economic growth and the many changes that
have come with growth transformed lifeways during this period. Mass
education was introduced in most of the world; thus, a majority of people
in most countries were introduced to the basics of literacy. More and more
people lived in huge cities as improved medical, sanitary, and educational
services and increasing opportunities for wage work lured people from
the villages.
For the first time in human history cities became healthier places than
villages, at least where they were supplied with the basic amenities of
clean water, sanitation, medical services, transportation, and electricity.
Improved medical care explains the astonishing fact that in just one generation
(1955–1990), the average life span of human beings increased from
about thirty-five years to fifty-five years.
Urbanization transformed gender relations as families adapted to an
urban world in which women’s salaries were as vital as those of men.
Women have become increasingly visible in government, in education, in
medicine, and in science. Yet, true gender equality, like economic equality,
still seems a remote goal. Worldwide in 1990 about eighty women
were in secondary education and sixty-five in tertiary education for every
hundred men, and only about sixty women were in paid employment for
every hundred men.
During the 1980s and 1990s new forms of electronic communications
and transportation and the reintegration of the Soviet Union (and its successor
states) and China into the capitalist world economy bound the world
together more tightly than ever before. This new pulse of global integration
has come to be known as “globalization.” Globalization stimulated
economic growth in most of the core industrial economies and many newly
industrialized countries, although many of the world’s poorer countries
found the costs of competition too high and fell further behind, particularly
in parts of Africa and Latin America. For better or worse, globalization
also brought the world’s many cultures into closer contact. As television