Word: hua
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like a well-heeled tourist cashing in on the good will of the locals, China's Chairman Hua Kuo-feng seemed almost reluctant to end his sojourn in the Balkans. Both in Yugoslavia last week and Rumania the week before, the Chinese leader got a warm reception-and spent far more time per country than is customary for visiting heads of state. As if emboldened by the friendship he was finding at the Kremlin's doorstep, Hua missed no opportunity to cast calculated aspersions on Moscow. The Soviet press responded with a few choice phrases...
Moscow's misgivings were aroused by Peking's transparent attempt to present itself as an alternative to the Soviets in the squabbling Communist camp. Certainly Hua's choice of three countries situated on the Soviet Union's southern flank did nothing to quell Russian suspicions. For its part, China has been equally worried about Soviet expansionism in Asia, as well as in the Horn of Africa and South Yemen. Peking, in short, was anxious to cultivate friends who would be effective in helping to halt the tide of what it calls Soviet "hegemony...
Bucharest thus was a logical first stop on Hua's itinerary. With Albania lately at ideological odds with China, Rumania is now Hua's best ally in Eastern Europe. Relations between the two countries have been cordial since the early 1960s, when Rumania realized that the Sino-Soviet rift offered an opportunity to assert its own autonomy...
Fittingly, Hua was given a boisterous reception-although one that was carefully gauged not to exceed that given Soviet Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev on his last visit to Bucharest. After an open-air limousine ride into the capital amid crowds estimated between 250,000 and 500,000, Hua held private conversations with Ceauşescu, and was expected to visit the oil center of Ploesti, the Black Sea port of Constanta, and the Danube River port of Galati, which is within sneering distance of the Soviet border...
While Chairman Hua was cleaning up in Eastern Europe last week, his countrymen were having a little trouble with their own mop-up campaign back home. The press and radio-which normally tell only the good news-were reporting daily from the provinces that the long-running effort to wipe out the influence of the "Gang of Four" was encountering some unpleasant resistance. It was "shocking and intolerable," said one report, that a number of cadres had failed to root out all the allies of Mao Tsetung's wife Chiang Ch'ing and her cohorts. There were still...