That’s right. The government basically concluded communism isn’t going to happen any time soon and shifted focus back towards gradual economic growth, and chaned lots of policies like opening more and more markets to private companies, letting state owned companies run in the same way as private companies, etc. (Before then, everything was owned and ran by the government). 1978 was just the beginning of the series of economic reforms
What’s different from many western economies though, is that government is investing and driving a lot of these changes.
So the content of the reforms themselves weren't really an accomplishment, but rather activity of the people that the previous policies had restrained?
> and that didn't happen because a bureaucrat flicked his pen, but because hundreds of millions of Chinese toiled for generations to make it happen.
To make what happen? Deng's reforms? Poverty reduction? The path was so circuitous and so driven by the ideology and policy of leaders that I'm not sure if much can really be said about the political intent of that toil by such a large group over such a long span of time.
What was the huge accomplishment of the 1978 reforms that Western people should recognize? From my vantage point, they were basically the abandonment of a lot of Maoist ideas in favor of something that was more in line with Western economic thought.