Word: almosts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...neighborhood committees that exist almost everywhere in China -- watchdog groups that keep an eye on everyone and everything -- are unnecessary in Wu's village. In tone and in fact, he controls almost every aspect of village life -- and the villagers have prospered thanks to his wisdom. When income from the local ice-cream factory fell short of projections, Wu converted the plant to a successful cotton-fabric operation in six months. When this summer's drought threatened to devastate the village's wheat and vegetable crops, Wu proposed that water from the Yellow River -- unused previously because...
...maybe not powerful enough. My conversation with the professor takes place more or less publicly at a table for twelve in a teahouse in Chengdu, a drab city where the sun rarely shines more than 60 days a year. Instead of smoking and no-smoking sections -- almost everyone in China smokes -- this teahouse sets aside tables for those who want coffee. Unfortunately, we are at one of them. Drinking Chinese coffee is like drinking hot water with a distant memory of caffeine; there is an atavistic link somewhere, but it is not coffee...
Then there are "the girls," about 3,000 of them, who work from 7:30 in the morning until 11 at night six days a week. None I speak with are over 19. Almost all are from Hunan province. Most stay no more than two years and then return home to marry. They earn close to $200 a month, an almost unheard-of wage in China...
...here," he says. "I don't know anything about the work here, so I can't judge product quality very well. I wish I could go somewhere else, but I may be stuck here for the rest of my life. I could learn the job, but moving up is almost impossible without guanxi" -- that word again -- "which I don't have. If I had it, I maybe could have arranged it so I wasn't sent here in the first place...
...must be hell being Irving Berlin," a music publisher once lamented. "The poor guy's his own toughest competition." Few could match his output: more than 800 published songs and almost as many unpublished. Nor could they equal his business acumen. Fiercely protective of the copyrights to his songs, he helped establish the principle that every performance of a composer's work deserved a royalty. At the end, the boy from Cherry Street was worth millions...