Word: deng
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...eldest son of a well-to-do landowner, Deng grew up in a period of violent unrest, climaxed but not ended by the revolution of 1911 in which Sun Yat-sen brought down the imperial Qing dynasty. When Deng was about 15, his father enrolled him in one of the best secondary schools in the city of Chongqing. A hardworking student, Deng followed a curriculum that enabled him at 16 to enter a program providing an opportunity to work and study in France. Despite an anti-Western wave then simmering in China, Deng and many others of his generation jumped...
...When Deng and 88 other Chinese arrived in Marseilles in late 1920, they found jobs scarce and funds even scarcer. Nor was there any opportunity for formal schooling. Deng worked for a time at a Renault factory and at a rubber-footware plant in Montargis, south of Paris. Though he wore Western-style clothes and acquired a lifelong fondness for croissants and bridge, he associated almost exclusively with other Chinese, among them Chou...
...Deng's increasingly leftist ideas quickly brought him into contact with radical politics. Like many other Chinese students in France, he joined the French Communist Party, where he learned basic Marxist theory as well as the Internationale. (The Chinese Communist Party was not founded until 1921.) Later, as a member of the Chinese Socialist Youth League in France, Deng was assigned to mimeograph its journal, Red Light, a task he performed with such zeal that his fellow activists nicknamed him "Doctor of Mimeography...
...Deng left France to study at Moscow's newly established Sun Yat-sen University. He and other Chinese students attended classes in Marxist social evolution, the history of revolutions and basic military training. Among heroes of the Russian Revolution who came to visit were Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin. Whether or not it made an impression at the time, Deng's six-month stay coincided with the end of Lenin's New Economic Policy, which included a return to some private agricultural production and denationalization of much small-scale industry...
Back in China, Deng, frequently living underground began a long series of political and military assignments for the Communists, that carried him gradually, if not always smoothly, to higher ranks. His earliest misstep, resulting in a brief period out of favor, was to ally himself with a party faction that favored basing the drive to power on rural rather than urban insurrection, then a departure from orthodoxy. The leading advocate of that strategy was none other than Mao, who was working in another province at the time and therefore was spared the humiliation Deng suffered Deng was rehabilitated in time...