Word: mann
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Alison (Katherine Heigl) and her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) are out clubbing, celebrating the former's promotion from stage manager on one of those Inside Hollywood TV shows to an on-air job. There they meet the overweight, unemployed Ben (Seth Rogin). She's giddy with happiness (and a certain amount of booze) and they retire to her place - it's the guest house at her sister's nice middle-class home - and have unsafe and unsatisfactory sex. He's hopeful of a relationship; she's hopeful of never seeing him again. Many distressing pregnancy tests later, they both have...
...pair of prime examples is The China Fantasy by James Mann, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and The Writing on the Wall, by British journalist Will Hutton. The two volumes are both nominally about China, but their aims are to influence policy in the West. Their subtitles make that much clearer: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression gets second billing on Mann's book, while Hutton's subtitle is Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy...
...similarities end there. Mann's is a slim volume, an extended essay skewering what he sees as the hypocrisy of U.S. politicians in dealing with China. For the sake of maintaining good trading relations, Mann argues, American leaders have ignored the inconvenient fact that China is run by a repressive, sometimes brutal regime that stands against everything they profess to hold dear: democracy, human rights and freedom. They excuse this behavior with what he calls the "soothing scenario" that China will eventually come around to sharing their values, based on the assumption that democracy is a necessary byproduct of economic...
...dense with facts and footnotes-his bibliography runs to 27 pages-Hutton sets out a detailed analysis of China's rise and of what Western nations must do to preserve a leading role in the face of it. His proposition is fairly simple, and pretty much diametrically opposed to Mann's. "If the next century is going to be Chinese," Hutton writes in his preface, "it will be only because China embraces the economic and political pluralism of the west." Beijing faces a host of woes ranging from pervasive corruption to a crippled banking system to the contradictions inherent...
...China Fantasy and The Writing on the Wall are penned by men who clearly feel passionately about their subject. Mann's book is a distillation of years of observations on the interaction between Beijing and Washington. On the other hand, while Hutton's research is prodigious, he seems to begin with a set of preconceived ideas, and makes clear in his acknowledgments that he took on this project at the urging of his agent, despite knowing very little about China. I'm inclined to agree with Mann on the likelihood of democracy evolving in China anytime soon: as long...