Word: deng
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...Angeles. While the American public regards him--if they regard him at all--as a cipher, until recently he was dismissed by some U.S. officials as a lightweight incapable of surviving the hardball intrigues at the top level of Chinese politics. But since the death of his mentor, Deng Xiaoping, in February, Jiang's reputation has been completely rewritten. He is now acknowledged as the man to deal with in China for the foreseeable future, a President firmly in control and committed to making a difference...
Jiang's main break, of course, was being chosen by Deng as his successor in 1989. It didn't hurt that Deng lived on for eight years as Jiang's protector or that he eventually grew too feeble to dump his protege--the fate of two previous heirs apparent. But there's also a sense in China that the relatively nonideological, technocratic Jiang may be the right leader for a China bursting with political, social and economic tensions, that what China needs now is an adroit, adaptable pol rather than a towering titan...
Compared with predecessors Mao and Deng, he enjoyed an easy revolution, and he had a far more worldly upbringing. "I wouldn't describe him as a closet Western-culture buff," says Kenneth Lieberthal, a China scholar at the University of Michigan, "but he has a more appreciative attitude than many Chinese." He once told an American visitor that he regretted not earning a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but one of his sons did get his from Philadelphia's Drexel University and worked for Hewlett-Packard in California before returning to China...
...Machine-Building Industry. It was an unimpressive-sounding title, but it was his first shot, at the age of 50, at the higher ranks of Chinese politics. He was part of the team charged with transforming Shenzhen, a sleepy village across the border from Hong Kong, into one of Deng's first boomtowns, and he eventually rose to Minister of Electronics Industry...
...Tiananmen episode, one of China's most divisive modern tragedies, was the turning point in Jiang's career. Three weeks after the protests were quelled with violence and bloodshed, Deng named Jiang the new General Secretary of the Communist Party. The choice was a surprise. Jiang's record in Shanghai was solid, if unspectacular, but in the prism of Chinese politics he had other things going for him. He was now a favorite of the Old Guard. During the early days of the Tiananmen protests, he had sacked the editor of a daringly liberal, independent newspaper in Shanghai called...