Word: deng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...liberal factions. China's hard-liners had tried for years to derail the economic and political innovations that Zhao had introduced; Tiananmen, Zhao demonstrates in his journal, gave the conservatives a pretext to set the clock back. The key moment in Zhao's narrative is a meeting held at Deng Xiaoping's home on May 17, 1989, less than three weeks before the Tiananmen massacre. Zhao argued that the government should back off from its harsh threats against the protesters and look for ways to ease tensions. Two conservative officials immediately stood up to criticize Zhao, effectively blaming the escalating...
...power structure described in the book is chaotic and often bumbling. In Zhao's narrative, Deng is a conflicted figure who urges Zhao to push hard for economic change but demands a crackdown on anything that seems to challenge the party's authority. Deng is at times portrayed not as an emperor but as a puppet subject to manipulation by Zhao or his rivals, depending on who presents his case to the old man first...
...inside the gate, Zhao was busy at work, taping the journal that now gives him a final say about what really happened and what might have been. It's a fitting final act for a man who made enormous contributions to today's China. Although Deng generally gets credit for modernizing China's economy, it was Zhao who brought about the innovations - from breaking up Mao's collective farms to creating freewheeling special economic zones along the coast - that jolted China's economy from its slumber. And it was Zhao who had to continually outflank powerful rivals who didn...
...country that is still struggling with Mao Zedong's legacy - where the official line quantitatively insists that Mao was 70% right and only 30% wrong - Hu Jiwei's views on Deng will no doubt be a hard one to accept. Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong-based writer who was imprisoned by Chinese authorities for almost three years for espionage, put this in rather blunt terms at the book event. "[China does] not dare to face its history," he says...
...very long after Hu Yaobang's death on April 15 - two years after Deng removed him from the leadership post - that members of this generation of activists gathered together. The meetings started on April 17, when 700 people went to Tiananmen Square. The next day, 1,500 students demonstrated in front of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound, and demanded that Hu's political standing - blemished by his removal from power - be rehabilitated. "By the time Hu's funeral came around, 200,000 students had settled in the large public square, a place that would remain the center of activities until...