Word: fang
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...latest issue of the official mag azine China Reconstructs, Maritime Historian Fang Zhongpu purports to solve the puzzle. His prime evidence: a 35-kg (80-lb.) doughnut-shaped stone discovered in 1972 off Point Conception, near Santa Barbara, Calif. Fang says that the stone is a clear sign of a pre-Columbian Chinese visitation, and he cites the testimony of some American scientists to back...
...Fang is far more positive. By the 3rd century A.D., he notes, Chinese merchant seamen had reached the Indian Ocean and could reckon their sailing speeds and distances. "So it would have been quite possible for Chinese ships to cross the Pacific in the 5th century...
...most common abuses among officials is influence peddling to obtain favors for their children. As a modern-day Chinese proverb has it: "The 10,000 things are good, but they are not as good as a well-connected father." In Shanghai, one clever young swindler named Tang Fang posed as the son of the first secretary of the provincial party committee, a ruse that won him not only watches, money and fashionable clothes but also the affection of a comely female soldier...
...clarity and freshness rarely found in books of this type. Everything is confronted directly and, though there is sameness, there are no clichés. There is even an occasional touch of Kipling in his prose: "Above the village the scant ruins of a castle sat on a fang of rock, accessible only by a precarious path above a 200 foot drop. From this seemingly impregnable strong hold Hassan-i-Sabbah, the 'Old Man of the Mountains,' had ruled . . . and his successors had sat like spiders at the center of their web, for 170 years until Hulagu...
...Fang Yi and his colleagues have set difficult goals for a country that still relies heavily on human sweat. In the cities, women sweep the streets with brooms they make out of straw. In the countryside, road crews work with pick and shovel; when steamrollers are available, they are usually fuming, coal-burning monsters. Despite the vaunted Chinese emphasis on the dignity of the masses, produce is still conveyed by pedal-powered carts carrying burdens several times heavier than their human engines...