About This Lesson
This activity has students try to fix the problems in China after the death of Mao Zedong. They must come up with solutions to these problems: damage caused by the Cultural Revolution, overpopulation, lack of foreign investment, bad foreign relations, the emerging democracy movement (the "Beijing Spring"). After students invent solutions to these 5 problems, they will be given the Four Modernizations handout and they should then explain if their own solutions were better or worse than what Deng Xiaoping came up with.
Great Activity for this unit on Nationalism in China.