Titans of History

In 1965, Mao launched his vicious, vindictive and destructive purge of China, the Cultural Revolution, designed to restore his own personal dictatorship, communist radicalism and liquidate the new party elite who had dared to challenge his absolute power. President Liu and many others were destroyed in this terrifying purge that threw China into chaos, supervised by Mao himself. Premier Chou Enlai managed to survive by cravenly agreeing to all Mao’s brutal measures. Deng was fortunate: though he was sacked and sent to work in a factory as an ordinary worker, and his son was thrown by Red Guards out of a window and rendered paraplegic, Deng was not tortured or humiliated, a decision that had to come from Mao himself.

Mao’s chosen successor was his chief ally in the Cultural Revolution, the talented but neurotic and vain Marshal Lin Biao, the vice-chairman, who, in an attempted coup, was killed flying toward Russia. As the old chairman, now aging, ailing and senile, but still omnipotent, called a halt to the Cultural Revolution, he recognized that the country needed stable management. Lin Biao was dead; Chou was dying of cancer so Mao looked to Deng.

In 1974, Deng was brought back as first vice-premier and effective ruler of the country. But as Mao deteriorated, his wife Jiang Qing along with the rest of the radical faction she led—better known as the Gang of Four—realized that Deng represented a real danger to their plans to take power after the chairman’s death.

Once again, Deng was purged. His old ally Premier Chou Enlai succumbed to cancer and Mao himself died, succeeded to everyone’s surprise by a little-known provincial boss Hua Guofeng. Deng, the leader of the political and military veterans, trusted by both Party and Red Army, led an effective coup against the Gang of Four, who were arrested, tried and imprisoned.

Henceforth he quickly emerged as the leader of China, effortlessly pushing Hua aside. Though he never felt the need for a full Maoist cult of personality nor for the full list of titles such as president, chairman or premier, it was soon clear that Deng was in charge, rechanneling the revolution to preserve absolute one-party communist control but freeing up the economy: “To get rich is glorious!” he supposedly declared. Backed by his protégés such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and others, Deng, semi-retired, guided China from behind the scenes, enjoying only his position running the country’s chess federation—and the chairmanship of the Party Military Commission which commanded the army. Under his guidance, China negotiated the return of Hong Kong and Macao and emerged as a new military, almost imperial, superpower as its economy boomed. But in 1989, the Soviet Union tottered; eastern Europe regained its freedom; the Iron Curtain was raised. When communist rule was challenged by thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, Deng faced the end of the party’s monopoly on power and, it was ultimately the decision of the paramount leader to crush the protests with total ruthlessness. The China of today—a harsh police state under a communist Party monopoly with an increasingly international imperialistic and economic reach—is Deng’s China.

DUVALIER

1907–71

I am the Haitian flag. He who is my enemy is the enemy of my fatherland.

François “Papa Doc” Duvalier

François Duvalier, the president of Haiti for fourteen years, was a corrupt and brutal autocrat who brought to heel a proud but unstable nation—the first free black republic—through his ghoulish paramilitary death squads, the Tonton Macoutes. With his violent acolytes he plundered the country and terrorized opponents of the regime. Coming to prominence as a medical doctor with a genuinely popular appeal, he resorted to corruption, kleptocracy and voodoo mysticism in which he saw himself as a semi-divine figure, half-Christ, half-voodoo hero Baron Samedi.

François Duvalier was born on April 14, 1907 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. His mother, who was mentally unstable, worked in a bakery and his father was a teacher, journalist and justice of the peace. The couple nicknamed their son Papa Doc after he qualified to practice medicine at the University of Haiti in 1934. In 1939, as a successful young professional, he married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and went on to have four children, three girls and a boy, Jean-Claude, born in 1951, who would later succeed his father in 1971. Duvalier spent a year at the University of Michigan and, with American assistance, won national recognition for his public-health work against tropical diseases such as yaws and malaria, which had claimed countless lives in Haiti.