Word: deng
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Equally at risk are the political and institutional reforms which Deng has initiated over the past eight years. He had sought to put an end to class struggle in favour of economic development, the century-old search for national wealth and power. But a struggle between "bourgeois" and "socialist" ideas is now inevitable. Can it be contained by newborn and fragile "legal" norms? And how will Deng sustain his opening to the West, the alleged source of China's "spiritual pollution?" As important, Deng's preemptory behaviour in the present crisis has fractured the image of a new, un-Maoist...
...appointment of Premier Zhao Ziyang to succeed Hu ad interim is designed to symbolize a continued commitment to reform. For the moment Deng has only conceded the need to restore discipline among the students in particular and the intellectual community generally. But this means a reemphasis on ideological orthodoxy. The "hundred flowers" of intellectual diversity and academic speculation may be cut down, as they were 30 years ago in an "anti-rightist campaign...
...COURSE, THERE ARE profound differences between the programs of Deng and Mao which give Deng's a better chance for survival. The cultural revolution unleashed an orgy of violence and civil strife which Deng is committed to avoid, an understandable objective in a land of a billion people and hence Hu's fall. Moreover, Mao's call for the spiritual transformation of his subjects into selfless collectivists flew in the face of human nature and Chinese reality. Deng's agricultural reforms, by contrast, have unleashed peasant energies, generated massive increases in outputs and doubled rural living standards...
Moreover, widespread disillusion with Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as providing any kind of guide for China's modernization deprives the party of its basis of legitimacy and ideologues of any weapon in their fight for the soul of young China. Even Deng has had to mention force as a way of subduing the students, who have been, ironically, among his strongest backers. If he has to employ it, that would be a tragic denouement for the most hopeful period since Mao's revolutionary victory...
...maintain the strategic vision of his revolution, Deng will have to summon up all his reserves of political capital and tactical skills. At 82, will he have the time to deploy them...