12 Chocolate Fortunes
there. However, the one that could establish a culinary and
cultural bridge between its products and China’s emerging
consumers, successfully navigate the complexities and ambi-
guities of China’s rapidly transforming economic system, and
best understand consumers’ common experience through
their country’s recent history would be the one to establish its
chocolate as the preferred chocolate taste among China’s first
generation of chocolate consumers and could declare victory
in China’s chocolate war.
China’s Road from Communism to
Market Socialism
When Deng Xiaoping deftly managed his gradual rise to
power to become the de facto leader of the People’s Republic
of China in 1978,
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and began advancing his agenda of eco-
nomic pragmatism, ...