Word: gao
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...than when the subject is a Communist Party figure like Zhou Enlai - China's Premier from the founding of the People's Republic until his death in 1976, and still regarded by the vast majority of Chinese as a saint. "Ordinary people thought he was a good man," says Gao Wenqian, once Zhou's government-appointed biographer and more recently the author of the revisionist (and unofficial) Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, now available in a translation by Peter Rand and Lawrence R. Sullivan. "He is like a valuable antique in people's living rooms," Gao says...
...Gao's book dispels the hagiography. He paints the Premier as thoughtful and scrupulous, yet so blinkered by loyalty to Mao that he sanctioned the arrest of his own brother. Most controversially, Gao challenges the official version of Zhou's role during the Cultural Revolution, during which an entire generation of Chinese intellectuals - including the author's mother - was purged and exiled to the countryside. Rather than mitigating the worst excesses of Mao's disastrous anti-rightist campaign - as the prevailing view holds - Zhou was an active, if not always enthusiastic, participant. Gao cites evidence in Zhou's own hand...
...Gao, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1993, is uniquely qualified to air the dirty laundry of China's communist leaders. For 13 years, he worked as a researcher in the party's central archive, poring over personal correspondence and classified communiqués. He is no average apparatchik, though: in 1989, he supported the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. The violence that followed convinced him to leave China - but only after he'd used Western friends to smuggle his notes out of the country. "After the Tiananmen massacre, there arose a strong desire in my heart...
Close watchers of the Nobel Prize for Literature look at the selection process as a kind of geopolitical checkers match, as the Swedish Academy plucks major figures from the national literatures of far-flung countries: China (Gao Xingjian, 2000) Trinidad and Tobago (V.S. Naipaul, 2001), Hungary (Irme Kertesz, 2002), South Africa (J.M. Coetzee, 2003), Austria (Elfriede Jelinek, 2004), England (Harold Pinter, 2005), Turkey (Orhan Pamuk, 2006). By choosing Doris Lessing in 2007 the Academy has scored a triple: she was born in Iran, known then as Persia, in 1919; raised in Zimbabwe, known then as Rhodesia; and lives...
...such labs exist today. A 2005 survey by the National Institute of Health, which funds much of the country's bio-defense studies, tallied 277 Level 3 labs in the U.S.; meanwhile, a Homeland Security and Health and Human Services report the same year found more than 600. The GAO's Rhodes told Congress, however, the number is "surely in the thousands." Level 4 labs, which handle the most dangerous pathogens - those for which there are no known therapeutics or vaccines, such as smallpox, Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers - are fewer in number, partly because they're very expensive. Before...