Word: systemics
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...When the communists were fighting for control of the nation in the 1930s and '40s, they promised democracy, a free press and an independent judicial system. Six decades after they came to power, none of those exist...
...After a shocking number of Sichuan schools collapsed in the catastrophic earthquake last year, Tan decided to compile a list of those students who had died. I recruited volunteers for a similar project. When you see so many lives vanish, you have to ask why. And when the system refuses to provide an answer, you have to use your own means to uncover it. At every step the government tried to block our inquiries. Police followed, harassed and in a few cases beat the volunteers. Tan was arrested on March 28. While I was in Sichuan to speak...
...believe that corruption and shoddy construction contributed to the high student death toll, which may be as high as 6,000. Why is the government so afraid of an independent investigation into this matter? Because the Party knows its system is vulnerable, that its credibility is weak and that it has become a mafia whose only unifying ideology is to hold on to power. The truth about something as simple as why those students died in Sichuan could undermine its authority. To witness this vulnerability, you need only look at the soldiers and paramilitaries filling the streets of Beijing...
...simple questions - like why so many students died in Sichuan. It is about demanding answers and accountability from one's government. If Chinese citizens do that, then this 60th anniversary will not just be about the Party congratulating itself. It will be the final hurrah of a dying system...
...seriously. In fact, Brazil was long the butt of a joke that said it was the country of the future - and always would be. It was the only New World country to have a monarchy, which it abolished in 1889. That regal tradition spawned a quasi-feudal class system that made Brazil a stained paradise in the 20th century: a country with endless beaches, heavenly climate and sensual bossa nova culture, but also appalling poverty, social inequality and military dictatorship. By the 1980s, the country was mired in what Sotero recalls as fracassomania, an obsession with its failures...