Word: deng
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...them play their roles in real time. Li Peng, then China's Premier, was and is still known as a hard-line troublemaker. He comes off terribly in the papers: wheedling, whining, gleefully back-stabbing peers unlucky enough to have missed a meeting. Watch as he tries to manipulate Deng Xiaoping in an early conclave: "Some of the protest posters and the slogans that students shout during the marches are anti-Party and anti-socialist," he says. "The spear is now pointed directly at you and the others of the elder generation." And then watch Deng, 83, nibble...
...among other things. And the papers make clear for the first time how right the protesters were. Even though the highest government post he ever held was Vice Premier, Deng and a party of "elders" still made most of the country's decisions. But though a secret deal gave him almost unlimited informal power, he frets at one point in the papers about ending up under house arrest if he eschews decisiveness for discretion...
...denouement of the papers, when Deng decides to order martial law, occurs in a debate between him and Zhao Ziyang, the reform-minded General Secretary. "Of course we want to build a socialist democracy," Deng says. "But we can't possibly do it in a hurry, and still less do we want that Western-style stuff. If our 1 billion people jumped into multiparty elections, we'd get chaos like the 'all-out civil war' we saw during the Cultural Revolution... After thinking long and hard about this, I've concluded that we should bring in the People's Liberation...
...through tricky visa applications and advise them to elude the police by immediately boarding a train after blanketing a town with religious material. Evangelists are taught to speak in code, referring to the Bible as "bread" and God as "the boss." "You can't be too careful," says Joe Deng, who has made some 40 trips to underground churches in China over the past decade. "One wrong move, and you could get dozens of innocent people arrested...
...seat concert hall. The cultural overhaul has taken nearly a half-century to get under way: former Premier Zhou Enlai first conceived of a national stage in 1958, but plans languished during both the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and the no-frills practicality of the Deng Xiaoping era. It took President Jiang Zemin to convince the country's leaders that Beijing needed to replace its fraying theaters with a new cultural landmark. It is the city's biggest public cultural landmark since Mao Zedong's mausoleum was built...