Word: mao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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AUGUST: QUEMOY. When Red China's Mao Tse-tung conferred in Peking with Khrushchev, began bombarding the Chinese Nationalist offshore island of Quemoy, attempted in a U.S. congressional election year to scare off the U.S. with hair-raising war threats, the U.S. warned Red China that it intended to meet force with force (TIME, Dec. 29). Result: Red China backed down in a crushing loss of face, fired its army chief of staff. Year's score in Asia: Red China lost great face...
...throughout 1958 the U.S. was helped-inevitably to some, unexpectedly to others-by Communism's continuing demonstration, in the execution of Hungarian Patriots Imre Nagy and Pal Maleter, the persecution of Russian Poet-Novelist Boris Pasternak, the mass herding by Mao of millions of Chinese into communes, that Communism is by definition implacably and unchangingly sinister-hence vulnerable...
...enhanced prestige. Nikita Khrushchev, 1957's Man of the Year, had commanded the scientific resources to produce a Sputnik, but for all his promises and boasts, he could not solve or begin to solve his country's continuing agricultural crisis. In Red China, faced with his own agricultural crisis, Mao Tsetung launched 1958's most audacious political act, ordering his 650 million subjects into human anthills called "people's communes." But at year's end he was compelled to retreat, not because of popular resentment (which did not bother him), but because his scheme was not working at all well...
...usual, Mao blamed his troubles not on his policy or his own execution of it, but on the rank and file below. So far as anyone knew, he was still plainly in control. A trusted, aging comrade, most likely General Chu Teh, would probably get the job of head of state (the same sort of job held by Kliment Voroshilov in the U.S.S.R...
...Mao's own dislike of ceremony and his wish to "concentrate his energies on dealing with questions of the direction of policy" were the apparent reasons for his stepping down as chairman of the nation. Nonetheless, he had suffered a severe setback. The man who fancies himself the greatest living Communist theoretician was retreating from his boast of achieving true Communism ("To each according to his need") ahead of Russia, which had a 30-year head start and is still far from achieving it. Retreating from its great leap forward, the Central Party's resolution used the words...