Word: businessmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...said, "came to do good-and they did well." After building a basic, solid structure of up-to-date education and Christianity, the missionaries stayed on, became sugar planters. Sugar became big business, and soon the new landowners began importing Chinese coolie labor. By 1890, the missionaries-turned-businessmen were operating 72 plantations, exporting more than 25 million Ibs. of sugar a year. Born in the boom were the "Big Five" factoring companies, set up to handle the business of the sugar plantations. Gradually, they took over the functions of business agent, banker, labor supplier and arbiter of status...
Lectures & Whims. Many of the samples that lured Western businessmen also turned out to be junk, and others were not delivered in promised quantities. Orders of iron bars arrived with pockmarks of rust, textile bolts with lengths misstated, rice colored by bluing on the sacks. In Shanghai, 20 out of 31 steam turbines and 64% of electrical relays manufactured during one period were below standard, and one-third of the castings for electric motors were worthless. A whole shipment of electric generators had to be rebuilt at the factory because of "faulty cores." Canned goods, sometimes turned out by several...
That is bad enough business, but the Red Chinese further infuriated Western businessmen with high-handed, independent business practices. Businessmen ordering goods were forced to undergo long,, pompous lectures on Marxism. Prices and offers changed from day to day at Peking's whim, and officials often tried to play one trader off against another. A British businessman who went to Canton to buy 500 tons of vegetable oil was told it was not available. Then he was awakened at 4 a.m., told that Peking had decided to give him the oil. The next day Chinese authorities sold half...
...that the Peking Daily Worker complained that " 'more' and 'quick' are stressed, but 'good' and 'economical' are ignored" in Chinese industry, even suggested that "individually run enterprises" might be set up side-by-side with state enterprises. To woo back disillusioned businessmen, the Red Bank of China has taken the unprecedented step of accepting claims by traders seeking damages for substandard exports. So far, the Bank has seen fit to rule in the trader's favor only a few times...
Trap Drums & Businessmen. After studying at M.I.T. and the famed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he offended a department of meteorology at New York University with the breezy claim that he could forecast more accurately than the local U.S. weatherman. At Minnesota he outraged College of Education colleagues in 1957 by blithely asserting that they had replaced the three Rs with "the three Ts-typing, tap dancing and tomfoolery." Once he thrust his martini glass at Minneapolis Symphony Conductor Antal Dorati and said: "Tony, we can build a machine that can compose music." Retorted Dorati: "Well, then you'd better...