Word: public
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Quan's admiration for Zhao may be a bit too public, but many of the Chinese I meet seem to share it. About 1,000 miles from Quan's farm, in Guanxian, a group of excited Chinese tourists is visiting the Dujiangyan irrigation system -- another marvel of China's ancient genius -- built 2,200 years ago. On a misty morning the tourists can barely make out an aging, abandoned hydroelectric plant about a mile upstream. Like much of what was built by the Soviets during the heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, this power station too is crumbling...
...Vogue, Elle and Glamour, you have to hunt for the lies at Wangfujing, Beijing's largest bookstore. The section labeled "Ideology and Political Education" actually displays books titled Modern Woman, Smart Woman, Handbook on Love and Life and dozens of how- to monographs like Eighty-Eight Points on Developing Public Relations. In other cities the regime appears successful at banishing books and periodicals dealing with "pornography, bourgeois liberalism and feudal superstition." Here one can buy steamy romances, political biographies of discredited leaders -- and seemingly anything ever written by or about Richard Nixon...
...attend -- and most of the theaters are half empty -- talk through the movie or read. At work, employees protest by increasing their sick leave and slowing their production. At school, the results of an essay competition glorifying the army's role in Tiananmen are supposed to have been made public weeks ago. Perhaps too many entries reflect the view of an eleven-year-old girl whose grandparents I meet. Her short, three-page paper, reflecting the unpopularity of China's conservative Premier, has Li Peng resigning because he is "too stinking." Most significant of all, perhaps, few people seem...
Irving Berlin knew what made his music so timelessly popular. "A good song," he once said, "embodies the feelings of the mob, and a songwriter is not much more than a mirror which reflects those feelings. I write a song to please the public -- and if the public doesn't like it in New Haven, I change...
...public liked it. When Berlin died last week at 101, he was the nation's most beloved songwriter, a Russian Jewish immigrant born Israel Baline, who rose from Cherry Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side to pride of place on Tin Pan Alley. Berlin's song is ended. But each time someone gazes up at blue skies, or wonders how deep is the ocean, or says it with music, his melodies linger...