Word: deng
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...public eye, was Party Chairman Hua Guofeng. Instead, the gathering's host was Secretary-General Hu Yaobang, 65, who has been rumored to be the man who would displace the missing Hua. Hu is a close ally of China's most powerful figure, Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping...
Foreign observers who examined the reasons for Hua's fall from grace reached varying conclusions. The Chairman-who still holds the title until the Central Committee takes it from him-had erred in disputing the breadth and speed of Deng's modernization program. Also a factor: his increasingly embarrassing connection with the discredited Cultural Revolution. It was Hua, after all, who as Premier suppressed a now celebrated demonstration against the Gang of Four in Peking in 1976. His slide from power may have been accelerated by the Gang of Four show trial, which concluded its hearings last week...
...special team of prosecutors accused her of a multitude of crimes. Among other offenses, they charged, she had slandered Vice Chairman Deng, incited Red Guards to persecute her enemies in the Cultural Revolution and ordered bands of hired thugs to ransack the homes of former colleagues in the Shanghai film world, presumably to find and destroy materials about her life during the 1930s...
Certainly the trial's credibility was not helped by elements like the charge that Jiang had "slandered" Strongman Deng Xiaoping. In fact, her only provable action brought out in court was sending emissaries to Mao to try to persuade him not to make Deng a Vice Premier, a perhaps imprudent act but hardly a criminal one. Also damaging to China's official claim that the trial was a "milestone" for its new legal system was the flimsiness of most of the evidence. The indictment, for example, declares that more than 34,000 people died during the Cultural Revolution...
...this week. Meanwhile, speculation swirled around a particular question: Why would Peking's current leaders have decided to step up the level of attacks on Mao even before the trial of his widow was finished? One possible explanation is that the ascendant faction led by Senior Vice Chairman Deng Ziaoping may not be opposed to an unofficial linking of the "mistakes" of Mao with the "crimes" of the Gang of Four. The pragmatic Deng seems to have decided that a thoroughgoing de-Maoization is going to be necessary...