Word: peng
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...have put Liu far down the list of party hopefuls. Yet when he finally reached Mao's Yenan headquarters in 1937, he quickly made up for lost time, moved nimbly through the party infighting. As a political commissar, he was assigned to investigate the army commanded by grizzled Peng Teh-huai, the Reds' No. 2 military man and later commander of Chinese "volunteers" in Korea...
Unimpressive in appearance but steely cold in personality, Liu boldly accused Peng of "bureaucratism," so overawed the burly soldier that ex-Bandit Peng went into a paroxysm of selfcriticism. Even his close association with Mao's archopponent within the party, Stalinist Li Lisan, did not halt Liu's rise. Thanks to his gift for translating Mao's sweeping ideas into explicit political handbooks, Liu's "literary" works (How to Be a Good Communist, On the Party Struggle) became must reading for all Chinese Communists...
...along with the shakeup in the civilian hierarchy went one in the army. Liu's old opponent, Marshal Peng Teh-huai, was dismissed as Defense Minister, as were two of his top aides, because they had protested the use of troops in labor battalions. Into the chief of staff's post went General Lo Jui-ching (TIME cover, March 5, 1956), bloody-minded former boss of the secret police, who could be depended upon to ferret out any more "incorrect thinking" among the military...
...while no less a soldier than Peng, can be expected to hew to the party line more closely. And to help him stamp out any disaffection in the army, he will have the help of a new chief of staff: Peking's No. 1 policeman, Lo Jui-ching, who is infamous for inventing the "deviation of boundless magnanimity," i.e., being too soft on counterrevolutionaries...
Except for Peng Teh-huai, most of last week's casualties were second-level officials of the Foreign Office and other non-military departments. Their crime seems to have been "rightist opportunism," Communist jargon for those who argued that Red China's economic leap forward should be executed in slower and more orderly fashion. Though Peking is now grudgingly "tidying up the communes," discarding the wasteful backyard pig iron furnaces and giving its weary and befuddled population something of a breathing spell, it cannot admit failure. Neither can Red China's top leaders, still apparently unaffected...