When students ask me who was the most memorable character I've met, I never know how to reply. Was it Nelson Mandela, with a steel-trap political sense sneaking out from under the surface charm and grace? Or Margaret Thatcher in her pomp, allying clarity of thought to an utter conviction in the rightness of her judgment? Or Bill Clinton in 1991, fizzing with ideas and intellectual curiosity, before we knew how indiscipline would diminish him? Or any one of countless others?
It's an impossible choice. But when it comes to the leaders of modern times whom I never met, but would dearly have loved to, there's no contest. I'd give anything to have sat down with a tiny — barely 5 feet tall — bridge-playing chain smoker who used the spittoon liberally and had a weakness for croissants. And I'd ask him: Did you have any idea what you were doing?
It is exactly 30 years since the conclusion of the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the meeting that consolidated Deng Xiaoping's position as China's leader and laid the groundwork for a generation of economic reform. In 1978, Deng was the great survivor. He had been a party member for nearly 60 years, and had been purged more often than a top model's digestive tract, only to claw his way back to the leadership. China was desperate. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution were a fresh memory. As Premier Wen Jiabao said in a speech to a World Economic Forum conference in Tianjin this year, in 1978 "the country was in a backward state ... with the economy on the brink of collapse."
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