Word: shanghaiing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hundreds of well- educated women who by their late 20s are desperate for husbands because men with less schooling are reluctant to marry them. In Chengdu the Xinhua bookstore owns a flower shop, a hair salon and a clothing boutique whose manager gets his goods from "a guy in Shanghai who has good guanxi." In Shanghai itself the city's world-famous acrobats attract bigger audiences by sponsoring fashion shows between tumbles. A university in Guangdong has branched out to invest in a three-story bar in Shanghai whose top floor, called Lovers' World, features 15 banquettes where couples...
Those eager to delve further have been rebuffed. When some Shanghai writers proposed a Cultural Revolution museum in 1986, Beijing said no. The leadership apparently fears that any thorough investigation would quickly run to criticism of the current regime and so must be prohibited. The outer boundaries of permissible complaint in China have been set. Anything may be criticized except that which really matters: the right of the party to rule. To today's leaders, the experience of the past demands a straitjacket on political dissent and helps explain why Deng so feared accepting the Tiananmen demonstrators' demand for free...
...hotel in Sichuan province that alternates between a Rod Stewart oldie (Sailing) and a socialist goody (Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China). Like the young man break-dancing to a blaring Madonna album amid a few hundred elderly tai chi practitioners at a Shanghai park. Like the reserve and civility evident in personal relations that rarely translate to civic responsibility. Like the more intractable tensions of incorporating the best of capitalism while preserving socialism -- tensions that have arisen because of, rather than in spite of, Deng's economic reforms. Like everything about the ghost marriage...
...year-old English teacher in a small town not far from Shanghai on China's eastern coast. He could have taken Russian in college but chose English because "there is no one to talk to in Russian and no one interested in learning it." Bi speaks English so well that only a careful listener might guess that it is his second language. He pays particular attention to his consonants, and the effect is riveting. It seems that everything he says has been carefully weighed and thought...
...same don't-make-a-big-thing-of-it, be-subtle manner is present in Shanghai, one of three Chinese cities directly under the national government's jurisdiction. There, a lobby notice in the Hilton hotel duly conforms to official policy: WESTERN NEWSPAPERS ARE UNAVAILABLE. But upstairs, there they are. The hotel's televisions air the supposedly banned daily news shows of ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN -- all broadcasting press conferences by Chinese dissidents who have escaped Beijing's dragnet...