Word: deng
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Those who dismiss Jiang as a transitional chief say he has no charisma, no military experience, no long career as a revolutionary fighter. In other words, he's not Deng. But none of the other members of China's collective leadership are either. Today's top Politburo members are bureaucrats and engineers. In Soviet terms, Jiang would not even be Nikita Khrushchev; rather, he's more like Leonid Brezhnev. The others are no different, and that works in two ways. They may have no more claim to greatness than Jiang, but now that Deng is gone they can easily...
...historian, therefore, Deng's death raises a different but also absorbing set of echoes and parallels to the past. The 15 years between 1978, when Deng returned to power after two major purges that failed to remove him from active contention for the leadership, and 1993, when his health obviously began to fail, have left him an ineradicable role in future accounts of China. These parallels seem to fit fairly neatly into two molds. One, familiar from several earlier dynasties, is the role of the man who has the delicate task of consolidating the work of an ambitious, tough, erratic...
...different historical sense, Deng replayed many aspects of the role of Chinese and Manchu statesmen during the waning years of China's last dynasty, the Qing, in the second half of the 19th century. Profoundly conscious of the advanced technological power of the West, these statesmen sought ways to graft elements of foreign technology and organizational skills onto their own economic and political infrastructure, so that they could achieve the delicate task of strengthening their country rather than undermining it from within. This selective and gradualist approach allowed China to keep at least a measure of faith that...
...Deng Xiaoping has left his successors with as delicate a balancing act as did these statesmen of a century ago. China now, as then, is a colossal country with a huge population, difficult to control from the center, uneven in economic growth and development, with wealth concentrated on the eastern coast. Regional interests and power bases are strong; there are massive disparities of income, and a decreasing willingness to contribute a requisite flow of taxes to the center in Beijing, since that center is often seen as both corrupt and ineffective. Periodic assertions of central police power can cow citizens...
...name, in the beginning, was not Deng Xiaoping. The eldest son of the county sheriff was given a two-character name that meant "first saint," perhaps a reference to his father's Buddhist piety. Only later, in France, did Deng Xiansheng become Deng Xiaoping, the two new syllables a prescient nom de guerre, literally meaning "little peace," an augury of both tumult and relief. In 1920, at the age of 16, Deng left his rural home deep inland in Sichuan for the port of Shanghai. There he learned basic French and won a scholarship for a work-study program...