Word: premieres
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 revolution recently, Deng...
...Chongqing led to a summons to Peking and an almost dizzying ascension in the hierarchy. Already a 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...
...Deng astonished everyone by showing up at a Peking banquet, using his old title of Vice Premier. It was soon clear that he had been rehabilitated to take over the day-to-day running of the government from Chou, who was succumbing to cancer. Deng also assumed operating control of the party and the military. Chastened at first but then with growing sureness, he helped Chou map out the ambitious Four Modernizations program, announced in January...
Deng relaxes by swimming and indulging his passion for bridge. He and his wife hold a regular Saturday game at their home in the Western Hills area of Peking, usually with Vice Premier Wan Li and Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. Deng has a fondness for pomelos, a grapefruit-like citrus fruit grown in Sichuan, and he sometimes places special orders for them. He is also a world-class smoker, lighting one Panda-brand cigarette after another in his meetings and audiences. Deng recently declared to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, "Mine is a hands-off policy...
Much of the credit for Sichuan's transformation belongs to Premier Zhao Ziyang, a Deng protégé who served as the party's provincial secretary from 1975 to 1980. Zhao helped introduce the contract-responsibility system, the bedrock of rural reforms, in 1977. Families and individuals were assigned plots in return for promising to meet harvest quotas. Surplus crops could be sold to the state at higher prices. Eventually, peasants were also allowed to sell the extra grain at market. The experiment worked so well that it was adopted as a national policy in late...