As I prepared to leave China in 2008, the Soviet-era airport had given way to a glittering megastructure designed by Norman Foster. And the first high-speed rail line opened between Beijing and Tianjin. Xi was a princeling - the son of one of Mao's lieutenants, Xi Zhongxun, who had been purged and later rehabilitated. Colleagues described the younger Xi as humble, self-disciplined and hardworking but otherwise unremarkable. Even on the eve of his elevation to general secretary of the Communist Party there was little hint of what was to come. http://irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru More recently, on October 5, the Saudi- and Russian-led OPEC+ cartel announced its plans to reduce oil production. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, maintains the decision was strictly about its financial and commercial interests, as well as market stability. In 1992, Deng - who had remained China's "paramount leader" - declared that the party should allow "some people to get rich first". It does not sound too dramatic, but it was another decisive break from Maoism. Revolutionary austerity had been shown the door. In 2005 I was handed a DVD smuggled out of a village called Dingzhou in Hebei province. It showed a pitched battle between local farmers and dozens of armed thugs, hired by a state-owned power company, to force them off their land. The farmers had dug deep trenches in their fields. The thugs attacked at dawn opening fire with shotguns and beating the farmers with steel bars. Six were killed. Nothing that Mao would recognise, Prof Karl says. How the algorithm works