Anyone still professing the aged, but never quite dead, Wade-Giles system may be relieved that this post is not a very belated praise of the generalissimo, toasting yet denigrating his name by giving it the title of the upstart usurper Mao (and the pinyin translation which, to his name like the PLA to Taiwan, never quite mastered it). Rather, and not too unexpectedly, we may either rejoice or commemorate the great decade or so when the destiny of China was (safe)guarded by this man known to history as the great Deng's successor, chairman and president Jiang Zemin.
He was the first president to hold the job since Mao, and thus the longest, until Chairman Xi may yet follow in the term whose end, and indeed beginning, he will not enjoy the benefits of, as the People's Assembly convene the following spring. And in this post, and from this post - now one of real significance associated with it in the post-Enlightenment era, to the extent that "communist" nations must follow in this - he reshaped China from the draperies of yet-breathing Deng's power base.
It was the ninth of June which made him who he was, and thus also confirmed his fate to die in a China far from those words of Lincoln he was reportedly fond of quoting; "... of the people, by the people, and for the people." But even as Mike Wallace, another fallen giant of that generation, struggled to hold onto his senses as he quipped and questioned his defiance, the fact that this statesman mastered the English tongue was indeed something. The question was, could this alliance, forged in the heat (!) of the Cold War to savour the destruction, in their lifetime, of the Soviet Union, last?
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