Word: mao
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...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...
...Mao launched the great purge...
...whirlpool quickly engulfed the nation. Under the assault of the youthful Red Guards, Mao's fanatic shock troops, the party and government bureaucracies were badly battered and leaders like President Liu Shao-chi were humiliated and ousted. The economy ground down. Schools were closed for almost two years; when...
...discovered that there would be graduating classes this year and next-but none after that. No one seemed to know when enrollment would resume. Factional clashes became brutal; at one point in the struggle, corpses floated down the Pearl River from Canton and washed ashore in Hong Kong. Mao finally backed down and called in the army to restore control...