Word: deng
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...deepest dilemma is whether China can achieve even the relatively free economy Deng is trying to create without undermining Leninist control of politics and society. There are many Chinese, not all Chen Yun types, who doubt that, in the long run, economic freedom can exist without greater political liberty. They are already debating what course the nation will take if they are proved right...
That may be too much to hope for, at least anytime soon. The history of China in the 20th century has been one of repeated upheavals, of which Deng's own career is a prime example. But there is at least a chance that Deng will bequeath to his nation an economic system working well enough that his successors will not want to reverse it, and thus that China will also gain a measure of the political stability it has so long and so disastrously lacked. If so, the inventive energies of the Chinese, which gave the world tea, paper...
...Already Deng has changed the daily lives of his nation's citizens to a greater extent than any other world leader. Foreigners revisiting China after a lapse of only a few years can scarcely believe that they are in the same country: the free and well-stocked food markets, the neat little homes and humming village industries springing up throughout the countryside, the openness to foreign influences ranging from computer technology to rock music are like nothing they or their hosts have seen before. Neither is the willingness of intellectuals, like Deng impatient with ideology, to discuss how much...
...these turbulent and momentous events and phenomena, however, only the ascension of Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership could eventually rival for long-range importance to the world the sweeping changes Deng is pushing through in China. But for all the panache he displayed on taking power and all the headlines and television time he and Reagan commanded at the summit, Gorbachev's impact on history by year's end was still far more potential than actual. The freshness and vigor of his personal style far outweighed the importance of any changes he had made in Soviet foreign or domestic policy...
Gorbachev, Deng and the heads of almost every Marxist country face the same fundamental problem. In a 1984 interview with the Italian Communist daily L'Unità, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, phrased it this way: "Since the October Revolution [of 1917, which enthroned Soviet Marxism], more than 60 years have passed. How is it that many socialist countries have not been able to overtake capitalist ones in terms of development? What was it that did not work...