Like the Chinese, however, the Vietnamese communists are trying to liberalize the economy without opening up politically.
"Look, there were two ways to influence the electorate," said Leonid Radzikhovsky, a journalist who wrote speeches for Lebed and tried to "liberalize" the General's image.
After Rafael Trujillo's assassination in 1961, Balaguer tried to liberalize the government, and the Organization of American States OASS) lifted the economic sanctions that had been imposed during Trujillo's dictatorship.
Weighed down by a behemoth public sector, an influx of nearly two million Iraqi refugees and falling oil production, Syria's leaders are trying to liberalize their economy in hopes of avoiding a financial meltdown.
When Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubček tried to liberalize its communist system in 1967 68, Brezhnev developed the concept, known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the right of Soviet intervention in cases where "the essential common interests of other socialist countries are threatened by one of their number".
Mr. Wickremasinghe's tenure was also marked by his attempt to liberalize Sri Lanka's economy.
"The attempt to liberalize after the revolution was largely a fraud.
The United States has certainly tried to help liberalize Russia's economics and politics, but considering the size of that country and the history of its problems -- and when compared to the initiatives of the 1940's and 50's in Europe and Japan -- these efforts have been weak and halfhearted.
Hospitals should try to humanize their ICUs by liberalizing visiting hours, providing educational materials about the ICU and critical illness, and making lay or professional counselors available to families [ 19].
When the Japanese government was trying to figure out ways to liberalize its highly regulated economy in the 1980s but didn't want to take the political heat from outraged domestic constituents, it conspired with the United States to get the US to demand certain changes that Japan's bureaucrats were secretly calling for.
