Word: mao
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...Deng met and married his third wife, Zhuo Lin. While Mao's romantic life was tumultuous, Deng and Zhuo's marriage was beyond scandal and produced a family of three daughters and two sons. But the civil war, which was soon subsumed into the bloody conflict with invading Japanese forces, provided little time for family and certainly no time for home. In fact, Deng was too busy proving his worth to Mao to return to Paifangcun in 1940, when his father was killed and beheaded by unknown attackers. After Japan's defeat in 1945, Deng was instrumental in driving...
With the establishment of the People's Republic, Deng began a rapid rise. From 28th in the communist pecking order in 1945, he became General Secretary of the party and one of Mao's 12 Deputy Premiers in 1956. That was the year Khrushchev came to power in Moscow and denounced Stalin at a secret Soviet party congress. Learning of this indictment of a "personality cult," Deng commended it to his own party--a move used to discredit him in the following decade by the Mao-worshipping Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. In truth, Deng was still loyal...
...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...
...Mao refused to believe reports of famine, at one point joking that "even if there's a collapse, that'll be all right. The 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...
...Mao continued to ordain idiotic agricultural experiments, but Liu and Deng sidetracked the policies. The strategy--a sort of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare--exasperated the Great Helmsman. Presented with new Deng directives on communes, Mao sputtered, "What emperor decided these?" Finally, even Mao recognized that China was famished and dying. He made a strategic retreat and allowed Liu and Deng to restore order and the food supply. But he never forgave them for showing him up. Increasingly paranoid, he accused Deng of refusing to sit next to him at meetings. In 1962 he attacked Liu and Deng, screaming, "You have...