Xiaoping

Beijing -- When asked 10 years ago what he thought the biggest story in China was, the Toronto Globe and Mail's Allen Abel gave a prophetic reply: "Deng's death. That's the big event that everyone's waiting for."Unless it happened by the time you read this article, senior leader Deng Xiaoping is still kicking. The difference between 1985 and 1995 is that the media have now become so impatient that it almost seems as if they're urging the old man to give up the ghost.At least that's the conclusion that one might draw after watching the media's interest in Mr. Deng's health over the past few months.

HE LIBERATED China from the communes, the horrors of the great famine of the 1950s, the folly of the Great Leap Forward and the terrors of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s-70s. He brought back the profit motive, supply and demand, individual initiative, the stock market, the private farmer, the private company. He unleashed the massive potential of China to produce the greatest economic growth of any country at any time. He was the antidote to the madness of Mao Tse-tung. For all this, Deng Xiaoping will be gratefully remembered as long as there is a China.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration expects so few repercussions in China's leadership resulting from Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's death yesterday that it moved ahead with plans for Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright to visit China early next week."

BEIJING -- Deng Xiaoping, who dramatically transformed China while brutally maintaining Communist political supremacy, died yesterday. He was 92.The death of the resilient former guerrilla fighter -- twice purged from power before becoming paramount leader of the world's most populous nation in 1978 -- was announced by Xinhua, China's state news agency.Xinhua said Deng died of complications from Parkinson's disease and a lung infection. He had been hospitalized since last week and had been sick for years.

They ought to hold the election every year so we could have these debates more often.Deng Xiaoping at 88 decided the other guys are too old.If Toronto wins the Series, the Canadian constitution wins the Oct. 26 referendum, and if not, not.The stock market crashed five years ago but the sky did not fall. This year, vice versa.

Caution: The polls that say George is losing are the ones that a year ago said he was invincible.Just because 5 million Americans asked Ross to run does not mean they will vote for him.Transportation authorities are testing a Swiss-Swedish fast train on Baltimore tracks and plan to make it available to MARC in the year 2092.China finally has a regime in place that will last as long as Deng Xiaoping, 88 and feeble, shall live.

The Great Architect is taken from us and we really hardly knew him.Chairman Mao sounded paranoid 30 years ago but he was right: Deng Xiaoping really was taking the capitalist road.Big-county executives don't mind how much money is spent on city school children as long as more is spent on theirs.Trustees must face whether to sell the Peale paintings to save the City Life Museums, or vice versa.Pub Date: 2/21/97

THE WORLD watches the deathbed -- if such it is -- of a 92-year-old man who has held no office since 1990 and not been seen in public for three years. China's President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng rushed back to Beijing. Word went out unofficially -- officially denied -- that Deng Xiaoping, the Great Architect, was failing. A Hong Kong newspaper said he had a massive stroke.Perhaps he did. Stocks dipped on the Hong Kong stock exchange and plummeted on two little stock exchanges inside China.

How does a frail 90-year-old with no official title cling to all-embracing political power? One way, as detailed by Ian Johnson, The Sun's Beijing correspondent, is to enforceretirement at 70 in the private sector. Especially in the unauthorized religious sector.The incident of goons rising in the capital city's largest Protestant church during service in front of a full congregation and unceremoniously dumping the pastor outside, because of the Rev. Yang Yudong's 73 years, is simply part of a larger campaign against Christian, Muslim, Taoist and Buddhist worship that is flourishing outside the state-created "patriotic" churches.

DEMANDING CONTRADICTIONS, the 15th Communist Party Congress of China is enshrining Deng Xiaoping Theory along with Mao Zedong Thought. Economic ownership must represent diverse interests; political control and expression must be monolithic. As though the two had nothing to do with each other.Party boss Jiang Zemin, the late Deng Xiaoping's last protege, decreed a breathtaking clean-out of China's creaking state industries, which drag down growth and production while keeping the populace ostensibly employed.