Word: mao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...February of the preceding year Deng had been in the audience when Khrushchev delivered his celebrated "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's excesses. The parallels between Stalin's personality cult and Mao's increasing use of self-glorification seem to have made an impression on Deng. At the Chinese Communist Party's National Congress seven months later, Deng openly warned, in Mao's presence, that "serious consequences can follow from the deification of the individual." It was an extraordinary act of temerity, even for a rising star...
...Mao may have tolerated the criticism because Deng remained a loyal supporter in other matters. When Mao launched his Hundred Flowers campaign, encouraging intellectuals and professionals to offer constructive criticism of the party, he created a political crisis by unleashing much deeper resentment than he had counted on. Deng fully backed Mao in a retaliatory purge that sent thousands of educators and artists to jail and banished hundreds of thousands more to the countryside. Indeed, for all his departures from standard Communist doctrine in the economic realm, Deng has never veered from orthodoxy when it came to maintaining the party...
Deng also supported Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1958, which called for enforced nationwide collectivism on the farms and a buildup of steel production in backyard furnaces. The campaign proved disastrous, producing a series of prolonged famines that starved some 27 million people during the years 1958 to 1962. By 1961 Deng and President Liu Shaoqi had realized the enormity of the miscalculation and set about correcting it. At a tense party plenum that Mao did not attend (so that Liu, Deng and others could gainleader ship experience prior to the Chairman's death), they announced measures reinstating private...
...Jiang Qing and her ultraleftist allies from Shanghai. At first Deng dismissed their growing influence as a passing phenomenon. "Young leading cadres have risen up by helicopter," he later scoffed. "They should really rise step by step." By 1966, however, the radicals had gained the upper hand and, with Mao's backing, plunged China into the frenzy of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deng attempted to backpedal politically, apologizing at a public meeting in Peking for having taken "a bourgeois line." He added, "My recent errors are by no means accidental. They have their origins in a certain...
...Jiang Qing and three other leftists loyal to Mao, who became known as the Gang of Four, retaliated. In April 1976 they ousted Deng from all his offices, leaving him in the political wilderness for the third time in his career. This time he was in physical danger for a period. Deng was rescued by Military Region Commander Xu Shiyou, an old friend, who provided shelter at a resort near Canton...