Word: basic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There are still issues pulling us apart. The most prominent, as it has been throughout our history, is race. At a town meeting on affirmative action in Sacramento, we saw glimmers of potential accord, but there remains a conflict between two basic approaches: giving no special preferences based on skin color and finding ways to ensure that all citizens share equally in the American Dream. We also met people, like those in the coal mines of West Virginia, being left behind by the new economic forces...
Unless this empowerment--to control not only the nicotine content of cigarettes, already approved by a federal court, but their tar, carbon monoxide, carcinogenic flavorings and other additives as well--is a basic part of the deal and not conditioned on the FDA's having to meet evidentiary standards of the industry's devising, the whole settlement package is a toothless wonder and should be tabled. Even granted essential regulatory muscle, the FDA needs both the resolve to carry forward its regimen and the funding to do it properly; perhaps revenues from a higher federal cigarette tax should be earmarked...
...matter what the pundits, politicians and experts say, everyone is only guessing about how this bold experiment will fare. All the opinions boil down to basic attitudes: you're either an optimist or a pessimist. Optimists start from the premise that it is so much in Beijing's interest to make Hong Kong work that it is bound to keep its promises. As Frank Ching, senior editor and columnist for the Far Eastern Economic Review, writes, "China did not spend two years negotiating the Joint Declaration, five years drafting the Basic Law...with the idea that it would tear them...
China will certainly be judged on how it deals with Hong Kong's political aspirations. But important as those are, Hong Kong's survival and well-being depend more on how well Beijing lives up to the broad Western values guaranteed by the Basic Law, a kind of miniconstitution it approved along with Britain in April 1990. China's leaders put their names to a document maintaining the rule of law, an independent judiciary, civil liberties including the right to peaceful protest, a free press, continuation of the capitalist system, a separate identity in international economic bodies, local control over...
...country is a mosaic of backwardness and new thinking, of worship of Mammon and nostalgia for Mao. Hong Kong poses no graver threat to the powers in Beijing than homegrown forces already at work; the embrace of individual enterprise has forever undermined the basic tenets of communism. The pace and uncertainty of this unique transition frighten as many Chinese as they embolden. Whatever the Chinese are on the way to becoming, they offer this counsel: Naixin. Patience. Xuyao shijian. It takes time...