Word: deng
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With the establishment of the People's Republic, Deng began a rapid rise. From 28th in the communist pecking order in 1945, he became General Secretary of the party and one of Mao's 12 Deputy Premiers in 1956. That was the year Khrushchev came to power in Moscow and denounced Stalin at a secret Soviet party congress. Learning of this indictment of a "personality cult," Deng commended it to his own party--a move used to discredit him in the following decade by the Mao-worshipping Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. In truth, Deng was still loyal...
...immense archipelago of unproductive communes racked by famine. No one had clean hands--not the urbane Premier Zhou Enlai, who, though skeptical of collectivization, kept a polite silence; not the gentlemanly President Liu Shaoqi, who withdrew to the island of Hainan to avoid bringing up the subject of famine. Deng himself sycophantically proclaimed high expectations for grain harvests: "We can all have as much as we want." His own home county would be ravaged by hunger...
...that the whole world will get a big laugh out of it." By 1961, however, not only were people dying by the millions but the state was on the verge of collapse. By then President Liu decided the time had come to make a leap in another direction--and Deng collaborated with Liu's economic reforms. During a visit to Guangzhou, Deng declared, "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." It was his way of arguing that any method could be tried as long as it meant the people could...
...continued to ordain idiotic agricultural experiments, but Liu and Deng sidetracked the policies. The strategy--a sort of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare--exasperated the Great Helmsman. Presented with new Deng directives on communes, Mao sputtered, "What emperor decided these?" Finally, even Mao recognized that China was famished and dying. He made a strategic retreat and allowed Liu and Deng to restore order and the food supply. But he never forgave them for showing him up. Increasingly paranoid, he accused Deng of refusing to sit next to him at meetings. In 1962 he attacked Liu and Deng, screaming, "You have...
With big-character placards crying BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS! revolutionaries attuned to Mao took over the party and ousted Liu and Deng. Mao's wife, the ferociously radical Jiang Qing, had been biding her time to get at Deng. He had scorned some of her extreme efforts to "reform" Chinese culture, such as turning traditional opera into perfervid propaganda spectacles. "I support wholeheartedly that Beijing opera should be reformed," he said. "But I just do not feel like watching these plays." The croissant lover who had once commented that no one could be truly civilized without having dined out was despised...