Chapter 9 discusses the implications of the fair process effect for how to deal with various issues of discontent in society and how we can open up ourselves to start overcoming these issues, at least to a certain extent. Based on what is learned in this book, the chapter notes that it could help when we learn to think differently and try to stay away from abstractions that may, in effect, make us more discontent about what is happening in society than is sometimes warranted or desirable. We also may need to train ourselves to accept that sometimes unfair things happen to us. This may lead us to accept the unpleasant feelings that come with these experiences. This also increases the chances of us being able to tolerate or even embrace dissenting opinions, which may turn out to provide the main impetus to real change. Increasing the level of genuine empathy for other people’s feelings is also among the core aspects that we may attempt to learn. Sometimes trying different behaviors than we are used to, and then observing the effects of these different behaviors, is among the more important lessons that we humans can learn and adapt ourselves to accordingly.

December 1978 was a political, economic and social turning point for China. As the balance of power within the top leadership shifted, a search for new policies began that deepened into what came to be called “reform and opening” and culminated decades later in a multistranded transition to a market-based economy. This new policy orientation was accompanied by a shift in development strategy that permitted China to take advantage of its factor endowments and structural conditions and dramatically accelerate economic growth. Thus 1978 marks not only the beginning of “reform,” but also the start of the Chinese “economic miracle,” a remarkable thirty-two-year period, through 2010, during which GDP grew at an annual rate of 10 percent. Chinese economic structure and Chinese society were utterly transformed. An extraordinary distance separates the vibrant upper-middle-income, predominantly market-based, economy that is China today from the troubled, isolated low-income country that was China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. This chapter builds its narrative around the systemic and structural changes that transformed China, especially in the thirty years between 1978 and 2008.