Note: Title also translated as "A Tragedy That Might Happen in the Year 2000." "Originally appeared in the unofficial journal Peking Spring in May 1979. That journal, subsequently suppressed, was one of a welter of publications emanating from the short-lived ''democracy movement''." (source: New York Times, September 1985)

Synopsis: "In the story, the pseudonymous author Su Ming imagines that [Deng Xiaoping] has died in 1998. A power struggle erupts, and many of the dead leader's associates die in car and airplane crashes. The surviving Deng followers are blamed for these by a ''leftist'' faction that has seized control and proceeds to reintroduce Maoist policies abolished by Mr. Deng 20 years earlier. The moral of the story is that Deng Xiaoping's re-forms could be as easily reversed as Mao Zedong's were after his death, and for the same reason - the extreme centralization of power." (source: New York Times, September 1985)