In 1966 on July 16, on
this heart-breaking day of national tragedy and sorrow, Chairman Mao
Zedong expired from a heart attack in Wuhan. He had participated earlier
in a great Crossing-the-Yangzi event. Intended as a celebration of his
vitality by marking a similiar event on the Long River ten years
earlier (prompting his penmanship of a poem called "Swimming") instead
the years of smoking and excess had taken their toll on the "Great
Helmsman" and having over-exerted himself, he was dead, aged
seventy-three.
However,
he had been more or less forced to take this calculated risk in his
doomed attempt to regain power that had slipped through his hands during
the Cultural Revolution. Instead, the two major figures of Liu Shaoqi
and Deng Xiaoping vied for power and ultimately, Deng would emerge as
the "paramount leader" of the People's Republic of China for the next
three decades even though he never actually served in the official
capacity as head of state. Ironically, Deng had been close to being
forced out of the Chinese elite when the Chairman had made his fateful
trip to Wuhan. But as Mao himself had written "A Single spark can start a
prairie fire."
Out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution
Deng's brilliant leadership would steer China towards an exhilarating
future that few could have imagined in the disaster that was 1966.
President Nixon would recognize "Red China" during his first term and he
personally traveled to Beijing to regularize relations between two
super-powers. In an unguarded and unexpectedly generous comment, he even
described the Chinese as the "ablest people in the world". After Nixon
came an even more surprising guest from Taiwain, Chiang Kai-shek who
would build open the American initiative by establishing detente with
"White China."
After a brief interregnum, it even appeared
that China might restore its status as a superpower, a status it enjoyed
for fifteen hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire. But
despite appearances, Deng would urge his followers to "Seek Truth from
Facts". And those facts were that the country - civilization, really -
was not headed towards the restoration of a Middle Kingdom. The world
around China was changing, and communism itself was in retreat. By the
middle of the 1980s Deng had to decide whether or not to junk the whole
of Mao's legacy, including Marxist orthodoxy itself.
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Originally posted on Today in Alternate History.
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