Word: freedoms
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...African governments have taken freedom of speech and fair elections more seriously recently. Most notably, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria was forced out last year when his term was up. At the same time, continent-wide reforms have improved governance. At the end of the last century, African rulers, led by Mbeki and South Africa, began to commit to the rule of law, human rights, and free and fair elections. The Organisation of African Unity, little more than a club for dictators, was reconstituted as the African Union, with aspirations to rule Africa better and a mandate to intervene...
...most advanced people today are the descendants of nomadic races. They drink milk, eat cheese and steak, weave clothing from wool, lay sod, raise dogs, fight bulls, race horses, and compete in athletics. They cherish freedom and popular elections, and they have respect for their women, all traditions and habits passed down by their nomadic ancestors...
...Despite this sort of encumbrance, Jiang says he is confident that the book will find a mainstream Western audience, and believes that foreigners may even "be able to understand the point I am trying to make about freedom and independence better than many Chinese." Perhaps his faith in Western civilization - he names Jack London's White Fang as his favorite novel - is a vehement reaction to everything that modern China has done to him. Jiang says that one of the reasons he went to Mongolia in 1967 was because its remoteness would allow him to bring along banned "bourgeois" literature...
...paean to liberty, born of sublimated political frustrations that millions of Chinese can relate to. "In 20 years, I think it is inevitable that China will evolve into a freer society," says Jiang. But curiously there is no such optimism in the book. The wolves - those symbols of perfect freedom - are exterminated by officials as part of a plan to turn the grasslands over to large-scale farming, and Chen Zhen, the protagonist, can find only hackneyed, metaphysical solace as he meditates upon a wolf-cub pelt, imagining the cub's spirit in "the place where all the souls...
...system has deservedly earned us the contempt of the world [March 17]. We incarcerate a larger percentage of the population than any other nation, and the government puts away harmless souls under the guise of fighting its two "wars" on terrorism and drugs. It's a tragic irony that freedom is now a mere buzzword in a land once regarded by many as a beacon to the world. Gordon Wilson, Laguna Niguel, Calif...