Word: pei
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DIED. Warren Platner, 86, architect and designer whose graceful steel-wire chairs, tables and ottomans for the Knoll furniture company have been continuously produced since 1966; in New Haven, Conn. Platner, who worked with Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei, had a role in some striking examples of modernism, including the interior design of Chicago's Water Tower Place, a vertical shopping mall, and Windows on the World, the restaurant that sat atop New York City's World Trade Center...
...Chinese perceptions of the United States are deeply ambivalent," says Minxin Pei, China program director at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They mix resentment and admiration, fear with respect, jealousy with the desire to emulate." So long as that volatile mixture constitutes a central, "brittle part of the national psyche," says Pei, there's always the possibility that these emotions will boil over...
...President Chen Shui-bian toward a declaration of independence from the mainland. But whatever Bush says about Taiwan, which the U.S. has pledged to help defend, Hu's most important achievement in Washington may simply be turning up. "From a domestic Chinese point of view," says the Carnegie's Pei, "you have not really established your credentials as a leader until you have been received on the south lawn of the White House with all due pomp and ceremony," such as an honor guard and a 21-gun salute...
...That's particularly the case for Hu, says Pei, because he has had the least exposure to the outside world of any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. Hu's predecessor Jiang Zemin spent his early years in Shanghai, China's most cosmopolitan city, studied in the Soviet Union and reveled in his trips overseas; he was proud of his ability to recite from memory chunks of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. By contrast, Hu studied only in China and spent much of his career in its remote, impoverished western provinces. Jiang "liked to make jokes" with his foreign hosts, says...
...result of this bickering, says Pei, Bush and Hu will now have only an hour and a half to cover all the issues troubling relations between the two countries - from trade conflicts to Taiwan, from human-rights abuses to the rampant piracy of U.S. goods. "With half the time taken up by translators," adds Pei, "how much of substance can they cram in? These guys are going to be breathless from racing through their talking points...