Word: leap
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Beamon breaks the world long-jump record by almost two feet with a leap...
...given moment, says Stone, all 750 million Chinese obeyed a command to jump from 6½-ft. platforms, they could constitute a "geophysical weapon." How? Assuming that the average Chinese weighs 110 lbs., he calculates, the energy released by this great leap downward would be equivalent to an earthquake of magnitude 4.5 on the Richter scale, causing extensive damage in China. But if the Chinese were organized to jump roughly every 54 minutes-just when the peak of a barely perceptible natural ripple that continually sweeps around the earth's surface passes through China-they might...
...again once it's been cut." Mao's most recurrent metaphors refer to the digestive process, which evidently fascinates him. In his Lushan speech, in which he characteristically called on his colleagues to join him in discharging their feelings of guilt for the failures of the Great Leap, he concluded with this scatological flourish: "Comrades, your stomachs will feel much more comfortable if you move your bowels and break wind...
Under heavy attack at Lushan for the shortcomings of the Great Leap, Mao acknowledged that he had taken sleeping pills three times for tension. He was ready to shoulder the blame for his catastrophic scheme of building backyard steel foundries. Citing Confucius' Analects to the effect that the man who initiates something evil will be severely punished by God, Mao revealed that he had been struck down by the very punishment prescribed by the sage-the loss of his sons. He disclosed that one of his two sons had died in battle (presumably in Korea) and the other...
...there is a fervent tide. Our nation is like an atom. After the atom's nuclear fission, the thermal energy released will be so formidable that we will be able to accomplish all that we now cannot do." That was Mao's call to accelerate the Great Leap Forward, which soon turned into a great lurch backward. China is only now beginning to recover from the chaos created by the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. In large part its future depends on whether Mao's successors will be able to achieve his lifelong dream of harnessing...