Word: sovietizers
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...Soviet officials scoff at the idea that there is anything the highly industrialized U.S.S.R. could learn from agrarian China. But they have at least been inquisitive about Deng's reforms, and by some indications more impressed than they like to admit. Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer Daniels Midland Co. (a giant U.S. corporation dealing in farm produce) and a frequent visitor to China, journeyed to Moscow in 1984 and had a two-hour private talk with Gorbachev, who was then still in charge of Soviet agriculture. "He was very curious about what I told him concerning the reforms," Andreas recalls...
Long range, though, the prospect of China's creating a modern society by following a heretical brand of Marxism constitutes a deadly ideological danger to the Soviets. They are having enough trouble as it is getting their allies, not to mention Communist movements that have not yet come to power, to follow their leadership. China's example can only encourage such countries as Yugoslavia and Hungary to continue their efforts to blend market elements into state-dictated economies, and lead out-of-power Marxist parties to think they do not have to copy the Soviet line either...
Italian Communist leaders have praised the Chinese for asking the right questions about why Soviet-style Marxism has failed economically, and a highly sympathetic account of the Chinese reforms appeared in East Germany's official newspaper Neues Deutschland. Svetozar Stojanovic, a Yugoslav social scientist now serving as a visiting scholar in the U.S., goes so far as to say that "in the eyes of many people, the Chinese have become the new vanguard in the Communist world." More surprising still are the views of Silviu Brucan, professor of sociology at the University of Bucharest in Rumania, a nation formally allied...
Brucan, in common with Western analysts, also believes that successful Chinese modernization "is bound to acquire a tremendous following, particularly in the Third World." Many African and Asian leaders are committed to Marxism as the leading anticolonial ideology but suspicious of the Soviet version. Marxists in Africa talk about an "African socialism" that seems to embrace just about anything that can be accommodated with a one-party state. China's example seems likely to encourage them to believe that they can develop their economies and remain theoretically Marxist without following the U.S.S.R...
...inventive energies of the Chinese, which gave the world tea, paper, movable type, gunpowder and the first functioning bureaucracy, would be freed to carve out a unique role for the nation. China would enter the modern world on its own terms rather than on any dictated by Western capitalists, Soviet Marxists or anyone else. And Man of the Year Deng Xiaoping would expand what he alone among world leaders already seems to possess: a secure place in the history books to be written in the next century. --By George J. Church. Reported by David Aikman/Washington, Richard Hornik/Peking and James...