Word: cantonization
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...sell their land. One indignant priest, who had twice been chased off a German-owned beach, complained from the pulpit: "Has the day really come when an Irishman can't go for a swim in his own sea?" In tiny Ticino, Switzerland's only Italian-speaking canton, worried citizens formed a militantly anti-German outfit called D.D.T. (for Difesa del Ticino). But despite a new law screening all foreign real estate purchases, the Germans now outnumber the Swiss in many areas. "The average Swiss," sighs one official, "can no longer afford to buy his own home...
Dissolving Society. A solidly muscled man who looks like a bouncer in a waterfront saloon, Chan Po-cheung was born in the Toishan district, southwest of Canton, and grew up in the violence of a dissolving society. When he was eleven, his father was murdered by a hired gangster because of a property dispute, and the killer went free owing to his political connections. At 17, while South China was still shakily controlled by Chiang Kaishek, Chan was a student at a police training school in Canton. He spoke openly against the Nationalist regime and was overheard by a plainclothesman...
...comrades he liked were purged for being rightist deviationists. "It made me feel something was wrong." He was switched to the "tiger squad," which launched a drive on businessmen suspected of holding out on taxes or hoarding gold. Chan claims he saw police figures in 1953 listing, for Canton alone, 8,000 executions and 10,000 suicides. Chan says now: "I wanted to quit, but it was as if I were an orphan. I felt I had no place...
...escape from the tiger squad by entering Whampoa Military Academy near Canton, where he spent two years "listening to those bandits who took part in the Long March preach about the goodness of Communism." Chan was still gullible enough to take at face value the "hundred flowers" campaign, which called for frank criticism, and industriously sent in 14 reports, castigating everything from party spying to forced labor...
...final camp, Chan used his last article of wealth, a Parker pen set, to bribe his way into the prison hospital. On a stormy night he slipped out a window, climbed the fence, and raced between the guard towers. Hopping a freight train bound for Canton, Chan hid out with friends who gave him food and civilian clothes. From September 1961 until he made it across the border, Chan was constantly on the move, sometimes staying with a sympathetic cop of the PSB, more often working for the black marketeers of Canton running gold bars, ginseng, watches and saccharin upriver...