Word: deng
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...Deng also supported Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1958, which called for enforced nationwide collectivism on the farms and a buildup of steel production in backyard furnaces. The campaign proved disastrous, producing a series of prolonged famines that starved some 27 million people during the years 1958 to 1962. By 1961 Deng and President Liu Shaoqi had realized the enormity of the miscalculation and set about correcting it. At a tense party plenum that Mao did not attend (so that Liu, Deng and others could gainleader ship experience prior to the Chairman's death), they announced measures reinstating private...
Defending the need for such liberalization, Deng coined the line that has become his thumbnail credo: "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." He also began suggesting that an individual's value in modernizing China lay less in his "redness," or Communist ardor, than in his "expertness," or technical skills. Though his own formal schooling ended early, Deng has repeatedly stressed that his vision for building a new China was bound inextricably to education and research...
...relations between the longtime comrades continued to deteriorate, the aging Chairman fell more and more under the sway of his wife Jiang Qing and her ultraleftist allies from Shanghai. At first Deng dismissed their growing influence as a passing phenomenon. "Young leading cadres have risen up by helicopter," he later scoffed. "They should really rise step by step." By 1966, however, the radicals had gained the upper hand and, with Mao's backing, plunged China into the frenzy of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deng attempted to backpedal politically, apologizing at a public meeting in Peking for having taken...
...Deng and many other political moderates, the Cultural Revolution was a nightmare. With his wife Zhuo Lin, Deng was exiled to southern Jiangxi province, where he was forced to perform manual labor in a tractor factory and wait on tables in a mess hall. Members of Deng's family were also punished for his political sins. His younger brother Deng Shuping, a city official in Guiyang, was hounded mercilessly by self-appointed Red Guard officials and in despair committed suicide in 1967. His elder son Deng Pufang, a 22-year-old student at Peking University, was crippled for life when...
Though not in physical danger himself, Deng was eager to protect his family. He eventually was allowed to bring his children to live with him in the two-story brick home to which he had been assigned. He spent his free time reading, listening to the radio and keeping fit. Deng Rong later told Author Harrison Salisbury (The Long March) that her father paced restlessly around the house's courtyard every afternoon. "Watching his sure but fast-moving steps," she said, "I thought to myself that his faith, his ideas and determination must have become clearer and firmer, readying...