Word: chou
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world, and messages of condolence started pouring into the Chinese capital. In a rare gesture of sympathy and respect, the flags at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong and at the staid, very British Hong Kong Club flew at half mast, as did all the red banners in China. Chou Enlai, for a quarter century Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China and the able administrator of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's policies, was dead of cancer at the age of 77. A memorial service, with no foreign dignitaries present, was announced...
According to the official obituary issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, he had been suffering from cancer for almost four years. It had been widely thought that Chou had had heart attacks; the obituary was the first official word that cancer prompted his virtual retirement from public life in June 1974 to a secluded hospital in Peking. Chou apparently played a role in some major policy decisions up until the last few months of his life, but most of his responsibilities had already been entrusted to First Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping, who will almost certainly...
...Chou's death raises important questions about China's future. How long will the succession he so patiently stage-managed endure? Will Teng and his fellow bureaucrats carry on Chou's moderate policies? Most important of all to those outside of China, will Chou's belief in cautious détente with the U.S., Japan and Western Europe, and his unremitting hostility toward the Soviet Union continue to guide foreign policy...
...long as Chou remained alive, even gravely ill on a hospital bed, the policies pursued by Teng Hsiao-ping bore the stamp of the Premier's authority. For many world statesmen?notably including Henry Kissinger?Chou personified what they would like China to be: reasonable, flexible, nonaggressive (see obituary, page 30). With the Premier's death, China lost half of the remarkable team that symbolized the People's Republic both to its own people and to those outside. Now only Mao remains, mentally alert at 82 but frail, slack-jawed and slurred of speech...
Teng has impressive credentials as a wily politician and a pragmatic administrator. Yet he lacks the almost spiritual aura enjoyed by Mao and Chou as architects of the New China. Moreover, Teng does not enjoy a large power base of his own. His leadership depends on the approval of the aging chairman and the apparent consent of factions within the party whose often bitter quarrels were effectively stilled by Chou...