Word: mao
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Deng's sweeping vision for China is all the more remarkable for his lack of intellectual pretense. Unlike the late Mao Tse-tung, his mentor and eventual nemesis, Deng has never claimed to be either a scholar or a Marxist theoretician. Nor does he possess the studied mandarin sophistication of the late Premier Chou En-lai, another longtime comrade-in-arms. Not that Deng lacks for a keen intelligence or a world view. But what he has consistently sought to impose is a preference for gradual rather than sudden change and for pragmatism over doctrine. In discussing China's second...
...higher ranks. His earliest misstep, resulting in a brief period out of favor, was to ally himself with a party faction that favored basing the drive to power on rural rather than urban insurrection, then a departure from orthodoxy. The leading advocate of that strategy was none other than Mao, who was working in another province at the time and therefore was spared the humiliation Deng suffered Deng was rehabilitated in time to join the Long March to northern Shaanxi province beginning in October 1934, and continued to support Mao's approach, eventually becoming political commissar of the 129th Division...
...member of the Central People's Government Council, he became secretary-general of its Central Election Committee and helped draw up plans for the reorganization of the central government. Made a Vice Premier in 1952 and a Politburo member in 1955, Deng began appearing in public with Chairman Mao and Premier Chou. When Mao visited Moscow in late 1957, he drew Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev aside and pointed to Deng. "See that little man there?" Mao said. "He's highly intelligent and has a great future ahead...
...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...