Word: deng
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...China 23 years ago. Then, as now, students marched in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, waving red flags and chanting slogans defying an entrenched political establishment. Destination: Tiananmen Square. Then, as now, the demonstrators vilified aging national leaders -- including, as he must have recalled bitterly last week, Deng Xiaoping, then Communist Party General Secretary, who at one point was paraded around Beijing wearing a dunce...
History, however, takes no reservations. The efforts of Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev to capture the world's attention were swept before them by one of those rare and indescribable upwellings of national spirit. Events within the Great Hall of the People, where the leaders set about mending a 30- year rift, received some note. But it was the events in Tiananmen Square, where a hunger strike by 3,000 students swelled to a demonstration by more than a million Chinese expressing the inexpressible -- a longing for freedom and prosperity -- that transfixed the eye. On Saturday, as government troops were...
...soldiers armed with AK-47 assault rifles. As military helicopters, a rare sight in the city, swooped overhead, people below looked up and shook their fists. Any attempt to disperse the crowds and end the demonstrations would seem to require massive firepower. The protesters waited, one minute hoping that Deng would come to his senses and call off the troops, the next minute dreading that the command might be issued to clear the streets no matter how much blood would be spilled...
These regimes have succeeded only in transplanting the peasant mentality to an industrial economy, creating a retarded form of industrial feudalism. It is that system that Gorbachev's perestroika and Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" seek to reform. But in China factory workers have shunned colleagues who earned incentive bonuses, or gone on strike to prevent introduction of such bonuses. Their proletarian comrades in the Soviet Union have reportedly downed tools for higher pay, while others burned a prosperous collective that raised pigs because it was too successful. In Poland the economic program of Solidarity runs directly counter...
...necessarily a loss for another, that long-term improvements may require short-term sacrifices, that some changes are for the good, that it is their responsibility to keep local authorities in line. Only that sociological change will make possible the economic and political reforms that Gorbachev, Deng and other reformers insist are necessary. Thus far, no Communist regime has found a way out of this dilemma. Lenin once said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." His political heirs are finding that it is a difficult task indeed...