Word: leape
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seismic changes Deng set in motion were daring, thrusting one-fifth of mankind in a Great Leap Outward from the crushing, dogmatic isolation of Maoism into a quasi-capitalist economic miracle. The China that comes after Deng will grow inexorably from the complex of roots he planted firmly in the nation's soil. Yet his work is unfinished, and the next China will have to come to terms with the fundamental contradiction in his hybrid creation. Even as the country embarked on a headlong pursuit of free-market economics, Deng insisted it be done under the iron fist...
...least 30 million, perhaps 40 million, Chinese died as a result of Mao's Great Leap Forward, his campaign to overtake the per capita industrial production of Britain within 15 years. It was Mao's attempt, by sheer force of will, to march a deeply impoverished nation into the front ranks of modernity. The Leap's unscientific agricultural practices and inane technologies turned China into an immense archipelago of unproductive communes racked by famine. No one had clean hands--not the urbane Premier Zhou Enlai, who, though skeptical of collectivization, kept a polite silence; not the gentlemanly President Liu Shaoqi...
...worst that will happen is that the whole world will get a big laugh out of it." By 1961, however, not only were people dying by the millions but the state was on the verge of collapse. By then President Liu decided the time had come to make a leap in another direction--and Deng collaborated with Liu's economic reforms. During a visit to Guangzhou, Deng declared, "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." It was his way of arguing that any method could be tried as long...
...hoary as the last Emperor of the Ming dynasty who hanged himself on Coal Hill, just east of Deng's home; the students gunned down outside Miliangku by a reactionary government in 1919; the many spirits of Tiananmen; the tens of millions who died of hunger in the Great Leap Forward. And finally there was that most troublesome shadow of all, Mao Zedong, Deng's friend and foe, his rival for the soul of a country so ancient it has had the misfortune both to forget its history many times over and to repeat it again and again. Only history...
...time Deng won his second Man of the Year nomination, in 1985, the effect of his "Great Leap Outward" was apparent to everyone. Deng had transformed the world's most populous nation into something like a capitalist country--albeit one still run with a heavy, communist-style hand. That cover story too followed an exclusive interview; this one included not only TIME journalists but also a group of U.S. civic, academic and business leaders who were our guests on a TIME Newstour of Asia...