Word: maoism
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Chinese history is replete with tales of imperial intrigue and sanguinary succession struggles. No one, perhaps, understands the fate that may befall a leader's policies after his death better than Deng Xiaoping, who was twice purged by Mao Tse-tung but bounced back in 1978 to begin dismantling Maoism. Not long after Deng came to power, he told a gathering of top officials that choosing his successors was "a task of century-long significance." Since then, he has taken every possible precaution to ensure that Dengism will outlast...
...most urgent priority of what some Chinese call Deng's "cultureless (materialistic) revolution" is to find a new dynamic for China that can help ensure the stability of its society even when the inevitable economic and political disappointments occur. The pragmatists have succeeded in brushing off the ashes of Maoism. They must now find a way of enabling the Middle Kingdom to advance at last along a middle...
...center of the transformation is the country's aging leader, the shrewd and gritty party veteran who refers to the program of economic reform as China's "second revolution." Whether in reaction to the paroxysms of hero worship that accompanied Maoism or perhaps out of a personal sense of propriety, Deng Xiaoping has actively discouraged a personality cult for himself. His portrait does not adorn government offices, and his ancestral home in Sichuan, though well maintained, is virtually unknown to Chinese citizens. Still, the man and the "revolution" are inseparable, and Deng's personal popularity appears...
...venturing beyond the confines of Maoism over the past eight years, Deng's great undertaking has, perhaps predictably, come in for some rough challenges. Disagreement lingers between the reformers, who are experimenting at the very margins of Marxism, and conservatives wedded to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and Maoist collectivism. Communes have been abolished, central planning reduced, party and government bureaucrats replaced by technocrats. Deng's innovations, rooted in the premise of "building socialism with Chinese characteristics," have stirred apprehension among China's Old Guard that the Communist Party's dominance could eventually be endangered. How much ideology can a country shed...
...Deng is singularly adept at accommodating his opponents without ever letting them escape his control. In particular, he has deployed some deft dialectical sleight of hand to dismantle Maoism without entirely discrediting Mao. He can hardly afford to denounce the former leader too vehemently: 50 years ago, after all, Deng was a participant in Mao's epochal Long March, and some 25 years ago he was helping Mao administer brutal punishment to hundreds of thousands of intellectuals. But since he assumed power, Deng has published his belief that "every Chinese knows that without Chairman Mao there would...