Word: deng
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DENG XIAOPING 1978 Remaking China by outmaneuvering Mao's heirs...
...DENG XIAOPING 1985 Turning China's immense poverty into plenty...
...constructive engagement" with China. Wei was such a leading light of the dissident movement--and thus considered so dangerous by the Chinese government--that his supporters sometimes feared he would never go free. A former electrician in Beijing, Wei first gained notoriety with a 1978 essay advocating that Deng Xiaoping broaden his campaign to carry out "Four Modernizations"--of industry, agriculture, science and the military--to include democracy as a "fifth modernization." The next year, after writing a wall poster that accused Deng of being a dictator, Wei was arrested...
Even behind bars, though, he could not resist needling Deng in a series of letters that were smuggled out of jail and published overseas. "Your problem," Wei wrote Deng in 1987, "is that you have too much ambition, too little talent and you're narrow-minded." And on Nov. 11, 1989: "You say, 'We are not afraid of going it alone, and no one has the right to interfere in our domestic affairs.' You unscrupulous schemer! Do you think that treating the people of China as a joke makes you some kind of hero? It's time to loosen...
What Jiang's ringmasters have missed is that Deng's transforming moment was spontaneous, when he clapped a ten-gallon hat on his head in Texas and instantly conjured up the softer side of a regime the U.S. considered brutal, deceitful and threatening. Americans tend to judge countries in very human terms, so Jiang is going to have to find his own way to charm them into friendlier attitudes...