Word: eunuch
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...19th and 20th centuries. When outsiders with advanced technologies, big guns and missionary zeal began prying the country open, China could do little to repel the onslaught. The 21st century might well turn out to be China's, but hundreds of years were lost when the Confucians trumped the eunuch-explorers. "If the foreign expeditions had been sustained, the world would be very different now," says Kong Lingren, a 69-year-old former civil servant who is secretary-general of a quiet little outfit known as the Zheng He Research Association. "We could have conquered the world...
...China has struggled to find its proper place in the world. The pendulum has shifted back and forth between openness and insularity, between the spirit embodied in Zheng He and that of, say, Yang Rong, the Confucian tutor to the Emperor who argued for rolling back the power of eunuch adventurers like Zheng He. The Confucians won; China wouldn't emerge again as a naval force until the past decade or so, as it began to build up a sizable fleet, probe disputed islands like the Spratlys and project a presence in Asia's sea-lanes...
...first, Warner was searching for a connection between the present and China's brief but glorious seafaring past. In Nanjing he found it: a direct, 19th-generation descendant of the Grand Eunuch's favorite adopted nephew, named Zheng Zhihai (which means from the sea). This modest 53-year-old, dressed in a rumpled suit, hasn't exactly followed in his ancestor's glorious naval tradition; Zheng works as a toilet engineer in a Nanjing factory. Still, while China had largely forgotten his heroic ancestor, Zheng says family legends kept his exploits very much alive. Tales of his voyages were passed...
...count an estimated 1 billion people by hand? And more importantly, when there are some 7,000 recognized castes and 300 million deities being worshiped throughout the country, how do you know exactly who those people are? Muslim or Hindu? Eunuch or transsexual? Maharaja or beggar? Check the appropriate box on your form, please...
...says an old colleague. And the incarnations are invariably suited to the politico-sociological moment. She has an unerring sense for the next big thing. In the early 1970s, she wrote one of the first anti-feminist manifestos--The Female Woman, a counterpoint to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch--anticipating the backlash against feminism before there was a hint of it. Her next book, After Reason, called for a commingling of politics and religion just as American evangelicals roused themselves from decades of political apathy. During the era of Reaganite glitz, she settled into the life...