Word: ch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some other world leaders held different views. Nikita Khrushchev ignored him when they met, despite Mao Tse-tung's accurate advice that the "little man" had "a great future ahead of him." Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, despised him, and twice her radical supporters vilified him as China's most evil "capitalist reader." At one Politburo meeting in 1975, Mao asked all those in opposition to one of his proposals to stand up. When Teng did so, the Great Helmsman looked at him coldly and reportedly said, "Since I see nobody standing up, my proposal is unanimously adopted...
Still, Teng managed to survive until a power struggle broke out in 1966 between Mao and Chief of State Liu Shao-ch'i. Mao felt that Liu and his pragmatic allies, of whom Teng was foremost, had created highly bureaucratic "independent kingdoms" based on a system that was unresponsive to the needs of the party and the people. In 1965 Liu was denounced as a "renegade, scab and traitor," expelled from the Communist Party "forever" and sent to prison, where he reportedly died in 1973. (There are rumors in Peking that his reputation may be cleared posthumously...
...tail and give me a sound flogging. Perhaps you comrades would say that it was Chairman Mao who relieved me of my former jobs and dismissed me from office. As a matter of fact, it wasn't so. I would rather call it a decree of fate. Chiang Ch'ing used to laugh at me, saying that my head was bullet-shaped and couldn't wear official headgear securely ... As long as class struggle exists, there will be persons like the Gang of Four. Otherwise, there would be no class struggle...
...Kingdom returned home with tales of teeming millions, exotic landscapes, seemingly outlandish manners and morals. Even today some Americans have a vision of China that is a fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda posters as crude as comic strips; hundred-year-old eggs and gunpowder; opium dens and Buddhist pagodas; the imperturbable mandarin sage and the fanatical archcriminal Dr. Fu Manchu...
Still, the official moralistic ethic-it might almost be called Puritan-prevails. China's leaders inveigh against the licentious life-style of the imperial past. When Mao's widow Chiang Ch'ing first came under attack, she was frequently portrayed as a latter-day Empress Wu Tse-t'ien, whose career began in the 7th century as a 13-year-old court concubine and ended in an orgy of sex and assassination. Another execrated royal personage is the 8th century Emperor Hsüan Tsung, who was hopelessly enamored of a shapely concubine, Yang Kuei...