Deng said these words 20 years ago, not at a portentous party conference in Beijing but on his “southern tour” of the workshops of the Pearl River Delta. He was inspired by practice, not theory, having just visited a refrigerator factory in the delta that had expanded 16-fold in seven years. Even the word he used for truth (daoli, which is often translated as reason or rule) is more colloquial than the loftier term, zhenli, reserved for high truths like Marxism-Leninism.