Word: brahms
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...University in Beijing. "Would water flood out because the level inside the dam is higher than outside or would the opposite happen? That's what they are afraid of, that uncertainty." Li believes it could take 15 years for China to make the yuan a fully convertible currency. Laurence Brahm, a China expert and author of the new book The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club, seconds this view. Though Brahm believes that China has a long-term goal of making the yuan a top-tier global currency, he says that the major reforms needed may have to wait until new leaders...
...ranking Chinese visitors to his renovated courtyard home. They were awed by his collection of revolutionary furnishings, so he came up with the idea for a restaurant that celebrates what he calls communist chic. "China has modernized so much, so quickly, that Beijing now looks like Los Angeles," says Brahm. "The people have lost the kind of cultural spirit that used to drive the place. It used to be that China was all ideology and no material goods; now it is all materialism but no ideology. So the Chinese guests seek some sort of nostalgia for how they thought...
...rooms are decorated along different themes. The Edgar Snow Room features an old typewriter with a facsimile of a page from Red Star Over China still on the roller. The two sumptuously decorated Concubine Suites, complete with silk-draped, Ming-era opium beds, are designed for guests who, says Brahm, "always wanted to be a concubine?or have one." The Chairman's Chrysanthemum Suite is modeled on Mao's library and bedroom, where he received most of his visitors. The bookshelf above the antique bed is stacked with the Great Helmsman's favorites...
...Beijing has other eating joints that celebrate the Cultural Revolution by serving up the hearty peasant fare that Beijingers remember from their enforced exile in the countryside. Brahm's approach is far tonier. His Red Capital Club boasts Zhongnanhai cuisine?the preferred dishes of the Party ?lite who lived in Beijing's government enclave. Mao's favorite meal, red roast pork with bitter melon, is on the menu, as is Deng's family recipe for chicken. (That dish comes garnished with black- and white-cat sculptures?carved out of beets and turnips?in honor of Deng's famous economic axiom...
...have once been the home of Kuomintang General Fu Zuoyi and served as both an infirmary and message center for the Communist government. In the late 1960s, a bomb shelter was dug out from under the courtyard on the orders of Lin Biao, Mao's then-heir apparent. Brahm has turned it into the three-chambered Bomb Shelter Bar, a lushly decorated wine and cigar lounge where you can sip red Bordeaux while watching vintage films, such as The East Is Red and Ballet of the Red Detachment of Women. Brahm has improved on one of the most powerful propaganda...