Word: mao
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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...
...Mao's death in September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four a month later cleared the way for Deng's return to power the next year. Once again he was required to sign a letter of contrition, which he did largely for expediency. Says Parris Chang, professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University: "Deng is a man who knows when to bow and bend...
...educated about what life in Sichuan was like before the province became a testing lab for Deng's agricultural reforms in the late 1970s. The country's most populous province, Sichuan is also its rice bowl, a jade-green paradise whose fertile valleys have fed China for centuries. Yet Mao Tse-tung's policies proved so debilitating that by 1976 Sichuan was importing food for the first time in memory. Deng had visited his home province the previous year and had been shocked by the destitution he found...