Word: totems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bespectacled and graying, 62-year-old Jiang Rong doesn't look as though he could have written Wolf Totem - an eccentric, blood-soaked eulogy to the fiercest inhabitants of the Mongolian plains that has sold millions of copies in China since its publication in 2004. In fact, publicity is something of a strain for a man who, until recently, was so averse to exposure that he refused to be photographed. But Jiang is enduring it as part of the worldwide launch of the much touted English-language translation of his book, which has just been released by Penguin...
...Although he still hasn't revealed his real name (Jiang is a pseudonym), the obligation to promote Wolf Totem means that these days Jiang will reveal previously guarded details of his life and the creation of his unlikely best seller - and they make it clear that behind the slightly donnish exterior, he has lived with the same willful spirit as the wolves he writes about. He has, for instance, been arrested five times for being a "counterrevolutionary," experiencing beatings and five years in prison (the last stint for leading a group of students to the protests in Beijing's Tiananmen...
...surprise - the show at Kew is a reminder of Moore's enduring credibility. It has its share of Moore at his most middlebrow: the white fiberglass version of Large Reclining Figure that Moore ordered up in 1984 - a bloviating enlargement of what had been a suave little totem when he first fashioned it in 1938 in gratifying dark lead - belongs at an airport. But set against the greenery of Kew, his way of conflating the curves of the human body with the swells of landscape is effective again. And his two- and three-part reclining figures, like Reclining Figure: Arch...
...that China's Foreign Ministry has relatively little power and largely acts as a messenger to convey policies crafted at higher levels, such as the military. "Everyone seems to think that Yang Jiechi is China's Condi Rice," says Huang, "but he's actually quite low on the totem pole compared with a senior general, to whom he would have to bow and be deferential." Of course, many bureaucracies suffer from communications problems, blurred lines of authority and plain old dumb decisions. But because of its burgeoning importance in helping to manage world affairs, China now has a responsibility...
...Nowhere is the social makeup of the national rugby team more of an issue than in South Africa, where the sport which had been a totem of the white minority in the apartheid era still remains almost entirely composed of white players. That has sparked passionate debate over whether rugby's national squads should replicate the socio-ethnic demographics of the societies they represent. A laudable goal for all nations on earth, perhaps, but one that would make those four New Zealanders playing for Japan a little tough to explain...