Word: deng
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There are many other signs that Deng's innovative policy has begun to undermine the values of both history and ideology. Peasants are reluctant to join collective projects or to tend such communal needs as village irrigation when they can make more money by tilling their own fields. Self-sufficiency has prompted others to evade the law. To curb population growth, the government has forced women to use birth-control devices, agree to be sterilized or undergo abortions, while also decreeing that those with more than one child must lose 10% of their income for at least five years. Some...
...victims of the political flip-flops: the 20 million Chinese who by virtue of being educated are considered to be "intellectuals." Though the new regime is undoubtedly less merciless than Mao's, it has shown a frightening propensity for relapsing into violent bouts of puritanism and dogmatism. In 1979 Deng released the country from the cultural straitjacket of the Mao era, admitting Shakespeare and Updike, Mickey Mouse and Muhammad Ali, the Beatles and the Boston Symphony. In the following year, however, he endorsed a brutal backlash. By 1981 leftist ideologues were publicly censuring Playwright Bai Hua, who had dared...
...months ago, Deng launched what may be his final attempt to put his own mark, and some irreversible spin, on the history of China. Frankly admitting that it was "currently beset with many serious problems," the Communist Party leadership announced a three-year plan to review the ideological credentials of its 40 million members. The drive is designed in effect to purge the party of around a million unregenerate leftists, the majority of them ill-educated Maoists who have been desperately clinging to power...
...perfected by Mao (who once declared, "Selfcriticism is like eating dogmeat: if you haven't tried it, you don't know what you're missing"). But the reformers have taken care to avoid the mass rallies, shrill tirades and media fanfare of purges past. Says a Peking party functionary: "Deng doesn't want this to develop into a movement that will create chaos and instill fear...
...remains an immovable object of orthodoxy. The staunchest Maoist loyalists are within the 4.2 million-strong People's Liberation Army, whose upper ranks have become a stagnant gerontocracy. The youngest of the nine men on the Central Military Commission is 70; three of its four vice chairmen, like Chairman Deng, have passed their 80th birthday. Even the People's Daily has been moved to complain that "some of our leading cadres are like document-reading machines, speaking rather than acting and just sitting there unless they get a push from above...