Word: kowtow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jiang played his WTO hand brilliantly, waiting for U.S. President Bill Clinton to call him--twice--before putting his weight behind the deal. Says Hong Kong-based Fred Hu, Goldman Sachs' chief China watcher: "That's called the Emperor mentality--you kowtow to me first...
...kowtow the U.S. did. The American negotiators obligingly traveled to Beijing, where Jiang kept his distance from the talks, sending in Premier Zhu Rongji to thrash out the details. Once the pact was signed, however, Jiang elbowed Zhu aside. "The photo op was Jiang's," says Charlene Barshefsky, the U.S. Trade Representative, who led the American team...
...Rankings Irrelevant" (Dissent, Dec. 16): Nobody is asking Noah Oppenheim to "kowtow to the notion that minorities can only feel comfortable in each other's company." However, he should acknowledge that many people do feel uncomfortable when surrounded by others who do not look like they do. Clearly, neither I nor Oppenheim can ever understand how it feels to be black in a white majority. But let's turn the tables: If Oppenheim were a student at Howard instead of Harvard, how comfortable would he feel...
Further, there was a direct relationship between a school's percentage of black students and its social rating. We should not kowtow to the notion that minorities can only feel comfortable in each other's company. While randomization is problematic on many levels, the demise of self-segregation should be lauded, not lamented...
...title novella in McInerney's new book, Model Behavior (Knopf; 275 pages; $24), does make some good jokes about our increasing desire to kowtow to celebrities. Having interviewed a slew of them for magazines, and having been interviewed almost as much himself since his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was published in 1984, McInerney knows how generic the whole experience is. The main character in Model Behavior just hits a button on his keypad to produce a paragraph about an actor living in Montana (CTRL, Mont) or a starlet claiming she still thinks of herself as ugly (SHIFT, What...