Word: generality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wife Jiang Qing used General Chen's mutiny as an excuse to unleash the Red Guards against "capitalist roaders" within the military. Commanders were dragged from their camps and publicly humiliated until Mao ordered a halt to the attacks. Belatedly, he realized that the army was the only stable institution in a nation threatened with anarchy...
...they have had one shared frustration: arranging an orderly succession. First Liu Shaoqi and then Lin Biao disappointed Mao; Hua Guofeng, his last designated successor, held power after the Chairman's death, from 1976 to 1978. In 1980 Deng put his approved team in place -- Hu Yaobang as party General Secretary and Zhao Ziyang as Premier. Seven years later, Hu was forced from power as a deviationist. Now Deng is purging Zhao and other liberals who were the true believers in his reform program. And this, for China, could be the tragic Act III of its great political drama...
Gorbachev has not always been a champion of the kind of people power on display in Tiananmen Square. Early in his tenure as General Secretary, his understanding of democracy was closer to Deng's concept of limited managerial and entrepreneurial liberalization. However, the Soviet leader grew to realize that as long as the Communist Party maintains its grip on all aspects of society, significant reform is nearly impossible. The party is too conservative, too resistant to change. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, the party was the agent of cataclysmic change -- but on behalf of a conspiratorial elite...
...Soviet Union. Reformers can draw the lesson that perestroika must be accompanied by glasnost and demokratizatsiya or sooner or later the people will take to the streets. The conservatives can argue that glasnost and demokratizatsiya unleash anarchy and are a threat to the powers that be, notably including the General Secretary of the party...
...House subcommittee released a General Accounting Office survey that found air-traffic controllers were overworked and unhappy in their jobs. "Morale is horrible, traffic intolerable, management insensitive," an unidentified controller told...