TIME’S PERSON OF THE YEAR 1978 & 1985 – ASIAN – DENG XIAOPING/TENG HSIAO P’ING

1985

Deng Xiaoping

BY GEORGE J. CHURCH

Jan. 6, 1986

TIME Person of the Year: Story Archive Since 1927, Deng Xiaoping

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1985.html

“Marx sits up in heaven, and he is very powerful. He sees what we are doing, and he doesn’t like it. So he has punished me by making me deaf.”
— Deng Xiaoping, 1985

The leader of 1 billion Chinese was joking, of course; he lost part of the hearing in one ear long before he launched the world’s most populous nation on an audacious effort to create what amounts almost to a new form of society. But, as might be expected from the diminutive (4 ft. 11 in.), steel-hard Deng, 81, it was a joke with a sharp point. If in his more solemn moments he still attempts to justify what he often calls his “second revolution” in the name of that patron saint of Communist revolution, Karl Marx, Deng is well aware that the system he is evolving in China either ignores or defies many of the precepts most cherished by traditional Marxists (especially those running the Soviet Union). In the Chinese spirit of balance between yin and yang, Deng’s second revolution is an attempt on a monumental scale to blend seemingly irreconcilable elements: state ownership and private property, central planning and competitive markets, political dictatorship and limited economic and cultural freedom. Indeed, it is almost, or so it often seems to skeptics in both the Western and Marxist worlds, an attempt to combine Communism and capitalism.

1978

Teng Hsiao-p’ing

FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE

Jan. 1, 1979

TIME Person of the Year: Story Archive Since 1927, Teng Hsiao-p’ing

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1978.html

The project is vast, daring, and unique in history. How could there be a precedent for turning 1 billion people so sharply in their course, for leading one-quarter of mankind quickstep out of dogmatic isolation into the late 20th century and the life of the rest of the planet? The People’s Republic of China, separated so long from the outer world by an instinctive xenophobia and an admixture of reclusive Maoism, in 1978 began its Great Leap Outward, or what Peking’s propagandists call the New Long March. The Chinese, their primitive economy threadbare and their morale exhausted by the years of Mao Tse-tung’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, hope to have arrived by the year 2000 at a state of relative modernity, and become a world economic and military power. They may not arrive, or arrive on time, but their setting off is an extraordinary spectacle of national ambition.

1985

Deng Xiaoping

BY GEORGE J. CHURCH

Jan. 6, 1986

TIME Person of the Year: Story Archive Since 1927, Deng Xiaoping

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1985.html

“Marx sits up in heaven, and he is very powerful. He sees what we are doing, and he doesn’t like it. So he has punished me by making me deaf.”
— Deng Xiaoping, 1985

The leader of 1 billion Chinese was joking, of course; he lost part of the hearing in one ear long before he launched the world’s most populous nation on an audacious effort to create what amounts almost to a new form of society. But, as might be expected from the diminutive (4 ft. 11 in.), steel-hard Deng, 81, it was a joke with a sharp point. If in his more solemn moments he still attempts to justify what he often calls his “second revolution” in the name of that patron saint of Communist revolution, Karl Marx, Deng is well aware that the system he is evolving in China either ignores or defies many of the precepts most cherished by traditional Marxists (especially those running the Soviet Union). In the Chinese spirit of balance between yin and yang, Deng’s second revolution is an attempt on a monumental scale to blend seemingly irreconcilable elements: state ownership and private property, central planning and competitive markets, political dictatorship and limited economic and cultural freedom. Indeed, it is almost, or so it often seems to skeptics in both the Western and Marxist worlds, an attempt to combine Communism and capitalism.