Word: secret
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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None of China's new international gregariousness should obscure the bleak totalitarianism with which it maintains internal discipline. The discipline may be eased at times, but the mechanisms of control, especially through the Pao-wei forces, the secret police, remain at government disposal. In a report in November, Amnesty International, the human rights organization based in London recorded a number of legal outrages A teacher named Ho Chun-shu, for example, was said to have been executed at the beginning of 1978 for writing and distributing a "counterrevolutionary pamphlet." Last June, however, China released about 110,000 people...
...orchestration of the China move may be a textbook model for Carter as he picks his way through the difficult problems of the following months. While the details of the inner secret were known by only a few men, there were other layers of contact. The China experts in the State Department were asked to work out "hypothetical problems" that turned out to be not so hypothetical. And then key members of Congress were talked to in a general way about the same issues. Thus the Government "knew" without really knowing, and at the center the President moved along...
Williams has no vision of deer and antelope, however. "We'll have ambassadors and citizenship," says he. "We'll put in a gambling casino and a TV station, and we'll register ships." He also hints at tax-free companies and Swiss-style secret bank accounts. What if the U.S. and Mexico interfere, as they surely will? "I'll take it right to the World Court," says Williams. "It takes them 20 years to rule on anything, and if worst comes to worst, I'll have my country for 20 years...
Doubtless they felt that by resetting the story in San Francisco, that great breeding ground of contemporary aberration, they might be able to do some salutary social criticism. Indeed, Leonard Nimoy is quite good as a piously trendy shrink who turns out to be the pods' secret leader. But, on the whole, the San Francisco setting is a mistake. It is barely believable that the alien invaders could take root in a small, isolated town, as they did in the original. It is ridiculous to think that they could take over a huge metropolitan area without arousing opposition from...
...unquestionably, been a confused time, neither here nor there, neither the best nor worst of times, as free of a predominant theme as of a singular direction. Maybe the reason is not even visible. Maybe the little energy left over from the '60s got mostly spent, in secret, on assimilating and liquidating the traumas and griefs of that overlong epoch. If so, then perhaps the most memorable thing about the '70s has been simply that, as Stanford Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, "nothing disastrous is happening." Such a historical pause may not at the moment seem worth remembering...