主题：【求助】求彭博社披露当代中国新八大家族的文章！ -- 卢比扬卡

Family Control

“There were four families under Chiang Kai-shek; now we have 44,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, a Harvard historian who studies elite Chinese politics, referring to the Nationalist leader who lost to Mao. “To change the system will demand some traumatic national experience, when people say, ‘enough is enough.’”

The people generally known as the Eight Immortals are now all dead, though all but three lived into their 90s. Their stature in China is on a par with that of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in the U.S. They are:

-- Deng;

-- General Wang, who fed Mao’s troops;

-- Chen Yun, who took charge of the economy when Mao assumed power in 1949;

-- Li Xiannian, who was instrumental in the plot that ended the Cultural Revolution;

-- Peng Zhen, who helped rebuild China’s legal system in the 1980s;

-- Song Renqiong, the Party personnel chief who oversaw the rehabilitation of purged cadres after the Cultural Revolution;

-- President Yang, who backed Deng’s order to carry out the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown;

-- Bo Yibo, a former vice premier and the last of the Immortals to die, at 98, in 2007.

They emerged from the Cultural Revolution after Mao’s death in 1976, during which many of them had been in internal exile, to find an economy in ruins. Gross domestic product in 1978 was $165 a person, compared with $22,462 in the U.S. With Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong booming, the Immortals were surrounded by capitalist success stories.

The victorious Communists had executed landlords after 1949. Farms had become People’s Communes. Factories belonged to the state.

The Immortals turned that on its head in the 1980s: Farmers could lease land. Private enterprise -- at first on a small scale, later bigger -- was tolerated, then encouraged. Deng took the gamble that in order to stoke growth, some “flies and mosquitoes” could be tolerated, said Ezra Vogel, an emeritus professor at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wrote a 2011 biography of Deng.