Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mao Tse-tung...
...decades after Communist soldiers marched into Peking to climax Mao Tse-tung's takeover of China, the road still seems long and tortuous, the struggle unremittingly arduous. Like many another reformer, Mao has found that building a country can be at least as difficult as making a revolution. Thus, when thousands of Chinese mass this week in the capital's great Tienanmen Square to hail the 20th anniversary of Communist rule, their celebrations will be tempered by the awareness of problems that are as immense as the vast land and as numerous as its people. This...
...food distribution, establish a tax system and bring the people rudimentary health care. For the first time in anyone's memory, an efficient, honest administration was in charge-though it could also be ruthless and even inhuman in its desire to impose unity on the land. By 1952, Mao had used persuasion and purge to consolidate his power, and China was ready to transform its economy...
...Great Leap. With patience, some economists believe, Communist China could have been very largely self-sufficient by about 1967. But Mao, with his rigid dogmatism, was impatient. In 1957, he launched his Great Leap Forward-a single heroic burst that would overnight transform China into a modern nation. The targets were preposterous-e.g., a 33% annual increase in industrial production-and so were the demands made on the people. "In those days, the workers never went home," a factory manager told Austrian Journalist Hugo Portisch. "They stayed at their machines twelve, 14, 16 or 20 hours at a time...
...Mao was shunted aside in the intraparty battles that followed the failure. A group of more pragmatic men, led by President Liu Shao-chi, set out to repair the damage. They were on the way to succeeding when Mao began stirring again. "Those in China now under the age of 20 have never fought a war and have never seen an imperialist or known capitalism in power," he told American Author Edgar Snow in 1965. He feared that the young, without the rigors of revolution to test them as he had been tested, were getting soft. The ideological split with...