Word: deng
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cinemas, free tickets are distributed for Baise Uprising, a new film extolling Deng's early military career, but even those who attend -- and most of the theaters are half empty -- talk through the movie or read. At work, employees protest by increasing their sick leave and slowing their production. At school, the results of an essay competition glorifying the army's role in Tiananmen are supposed to have been made public weeks ago. Perhaps too many entries reflect the view of an eleven-year-old girl whose grandparents I meet. Her short, three-page paper, reflecting the unpopularity of China...
...very willing to take to the streets again. But we elsewhere are more cautious. It's not that the propaganda campaign is working. Most of us know full well what went on -- if not the details, then the essence. It is that we have seen how far even Deng, who we thought was a good guy, will go to keep power. It may seem strange -- we are used to executions -- but ten years in jail just for talking sends a powerful signal...
Nonetheless, the professor wants to make one final point. What resonates for most Chinese, he says, "is when Deng and the others argue that permitting Tiananmen to run its course could have led to chaos and disorder, to another Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is the benchmark against which everything looks better, the one thing above all that we do not want again...
...exactly will the balance be struck? What is a controlled expression of opinion that does not threaten the party's authority? Thousands believed their criticism within bounds when Mao urged freethinking in the mid-1950s campaign known as "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom." Then Deng, whom Mao had / once described as "a needle wrapped in cotton," orchestrated a crackdown that sent many to prison for merely following the Great Helmsman's invitation to criticize...
...those nations offers the political freedoms available in the West, both are light-years ahead of China economically. Is that really where China is going, or will the new resemble the old, a return to the Stalinist economic system that even Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to abandon? Will Deng succeed in anointing party chief Jiang Zemin as his successor, and would Jiang, in power, affirm continued economic liberalism...