Word: deng
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...France he learned to love the game of bridge, developed a passion for croissants and became a soccer fan; he once pawned an overcoat to buy a ticket for a match. But Deng had landed in a France mired in a deep postwar recession, with few opportunities for a student to support himself with part-time work. He spent most of the next five years working at various menial jobs: arms-factory worker, waiter, train conductor and rubber-overshoe assembler...
...member of the proletariat, he learned something else: communism, the doctrine spreading among French industrial laborers and the Chinese students among them. In 1922 Deng joined the Communist Youth League set up by his expatriate countrymen. With a practical mind for detail, Deng helped duplicate and distribute the party newsletter, a job that earned him the mock degree of "doctor of mimeography." He earned his true credentials, however, in Moscow, where he studied Marxist-Leninist thought in 1926. Then it was back to a strife-torn China to propagate the faith. Deng's first assignment, as ideological watchdog...
...almost at once. Though Mao's guerrilla strategy was in strong disfavor with the Moscow-influenced "internationalists" at Communist Party headquarters in Shanghai, Deng, who had become exasperated with Soviet-style conventional warfare, was convinced that Mao's tactics were right. From 1931 to 1935, as the two worked to establish a Red Army base in the south-central province of Jiangxi, a mutual affection ripened that was almost brotherly. When Mao was denounced and demoted by pro-Russian elements of the party as an "escapist" for advocating a hit-and-run campaign of attrition, Deng was ousted along with...
Amid this purge, Jin Weiying, Deng's second wife (little is known of his first), divorced him and married his chief ideological accuser. Subjected to psychologically brutal criticism sessions, Deng recanted--but only to an extent. He refused to give up his support of Mao. "I cannot say more," he told his tormentors. "What I say is true." He said enough, however, to preserve his life. Soon he was able to rejoin...
...Deng met and married his third wife, Zhuo Lin. While Mao's romantic life was tumultuous, Deng and Zhuo's marriage was beyond scandal and produced a family of three daughters and two sons. But the civil war, which was soon subsumed into the bloody conflict with invading Japanese forces, provided little time for family and certainly no time for home. In fact, Deng was too busy proving his worth to Mao to return to Paifangcun in 1940, when his father was killed and beheaded by unknown attackers. After Japan's defeat in 1945, Deng was instrumental in driving...