Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chinese saying goes, "It takes more than one cold day for the river to freeze three feet deep." Among other achievements, four decades of communist rule succeeded to a great extent in suppressing the people's initiative and suffocating their independent minds. People felt that they were being maneuvered and betrayed, used and discarded. It was not only the disillusion resulting from economic failures that caused popular frustration, but also the constant spiritual abuse, which reached the most outrageous degree during the notorious Cultural Revolution...
This tradition of dissident speech in previous years paved the way for this current massive expression of protest. The students grasped the opportunity provided by the death of Hu Yaopang, the former chief of the Chinese Communist Party, to convey their grief as well as their indignation at the political system, the same as they had after the death of Zhou Enlai...
...were poised on the city's outskirts or headed for Beijing. The army, however, maintained an uneasy standoff with a reduced cadre of student protesters. The real drama took place in a walled enclave in the western hills outside Beijing, where members of the innermost circle of China's Communist Party met to resolve a bitter power struggle that had the capital aswirl with unfounded rumors and unanswered questions...
Though the army turned out to hold the balance of power last week, its influence has fluctuated over the past four decades. For the first three years after the 1949 Communist seizure of the mainland, China for all practical ; purposes was run by the military. After the transition to civilian rule in 1954, the army played a subordinate role, even though it had enough seats on such institutions as the Politburo, the Central Committee and the National People's Congress to guarantee its power base within the party structure...
...reconciliation between the two Communist giants may offer more trouble than Washington has acknowledged. That once pre-eminent danger -- monolithic Communism -- may be gone, but that does not preclude new and improved threats. Detente in the East will allow Moscow to cut some of its 45 divisions stationed along the Chinese border. That's good, but not if it relieves pressure on the Kremlin to reduce troops in Eastern Europe. For Cambodia, the relaxation has accelerated the pullback of Soviet-supported Vietnamese soldiers. That's good, but not if it eases the return to influence of the Chinese-backed Khmer...