Word: emperor
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...situation is still unpredictable. But one thing is clear the people are no longer the same people. They have laughed together at the emperor's new dress. It is difficult to fool or menace or manipulate them in the same old manner. Times have changed. A new chapter in Chinese history has started. Modern democracy, a manifest destiny, is moving from the west to the east. People have learned that, instead of yielding their power to a handful of people to act under their name against their will, they must take control of their own destinies...
...students have struck an ancient chord in Chinese history," explains Thomas Bernstein, a China scholar and chairman of Columbia University's political science department. "It is the idea of the scholar-official who remonstrates with the emperor about some evil in the kingdom that the ruler should put right. The emperor won't listen, and the scholar-official takes his own life as a witness, or sacrifice, to the higher good." By casting themselves in the role of the scholar-official, the students have become the bearers of that tradition...
...runs directly counter to any efforts at reform. It demands higher wages, stable prices and job security. In China efforts to decentralize decision making have resulted in economic anarchy as local authorities assumed the power to tax or even create money that citizens had earlier unquestioningly granted to the Emperor or Mao. And in all three countries housewives, unable to make the connection between higher prices and availability, complain about paying several times the old official prices for food that was never available at the government-set level...
...neighbor may be better off, coupled with a belief that he must have cheated; suspicion of anything new, since most changes were for the worst; rampant superstition; and, finally, an unquestioning acceptance of a higher, distant authority, like the "Good Czar" in Russia or his Chinese counterpart, the "Good Emperor...
...President Yang Shangkun reportedly informed Deng that the movement had spread "to high schools, the countryside and even among the workers." Deng, whose sole official government title is Chairman of the Central Military Commission but whose ironhanded control of the government has led the students to dub him the "Emperor," agreed that the protesters intended to overthrow the Communist Party. Referring to the turmoil that has accompanied political reform elsewhere in the socialist world, Deng said, "Look what happened in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union." He called the demonstrators "a black hand against the party and myself," and told...