Word: teng
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After completing high school, Teng was one of 92 boys from China awarded scholarships to study in France. Instead of studying, the 16-year-old Teng got a job in a Paris galosh factory. At the same time, he helped out in the offices of a Chinese Communist periodical called Red Light. Its editor was Chou Enlai, who later became Teng's patron and protector. Teng's zeal in carrying out the menial chores of binding and mimeographing the magazine soon earned him the nickname of "Doctor of Mimeography...
After joining the party, Teng studied briefly at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and then returned to China in 1926. He rose rapidly in party ranks, becoming political commissar of the Communist Seventh Army at the age of 25. By that time he was a convert to the guerrilla strategies of Mao Tse-tung, the new chairman of the party's military committee. When these theories were attacked by other Communist leaders, Teng was ousted from office?the first of three times he was to suffer this ignominious fate...
Eventually Teng was restored to good standing and became editor of the army newspaper Red Star. In 1934, he joined Mao's legendary Long March?the heroic, 6,000-mile trek by the party's forces, under constant harassment by Chiang Kai-shek's armies?to remote Yenan, in Shensi province. Food was scarce in the mountainous caves, but Teng rose ingeniously to the occasion. According to Chou's secretary, Yang Yi-chih, Teng earned the gratitude of Mao and other party leaders because of his skills, not in the military arts, but in cooking. He was justly famous...
During World War II, Teng helped set up a highly effective guerrilla force against the Japanese in North China. After Japan's surrender, the group continued its operations against Chiang's Nationalist armies. When the Communists took power in 1949, Teng served as the party boss of South China and the mayor of Chungking. Called to Peking in 1952, he held a variety of major posts, some of them simultaneously: Finance Minister, Secretary of the Central Committee, Vice Chairman of National Defense, Secretary-General of the Communist Party. In 1956 he was appointed to the Politburo's seven-man standing...
...Teng's power grew, his relationship with Mao degenerated. The Chairman complained that Teng rarely consulted him and treated him as a "dead ancestor." In the aftermath of Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, Teng tried to reintroduce a measure of private farming to give peasants the initiative to produce more food. In a statement that would later be cited as proof that he was an "unrepentant capitalist reader," Teng declared: "Private farming is all right as long as it raises production, just as it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches...