Word: townes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have coasted for years under the old system, and they dislike Deng's perestroika because it asks them to compete like capitalists, and capitalism has losers. "Keeping their jobs is their No. 1 priority," says Sinclair Choy, a marine engineer from Hong Kong, who in partnership with a coastal town on the mainland runs a fishing boat-repair business. "Order, stability, calm," says Choy. "That's what these Chinese officials want. Anything that threatens to upset the applecart sets them...
...Zouping is experiencing the telecommunications and electronics revolution before agricultural mechanization. It is possible to stand in a field in Zouping and watch wheat harvested exactly as it was 2,000 years ago, by sickle, and then to look up and see the giant satellite dish that links the town with Beijing's Central Television -- as incongruous a sight as that of Chinese businessmen furiously pedaling their bikes through the capital as they speak on cellular phones...
Unlike Guangdong, where Deng's injunction to "seek truth from facts" has led provincial officials to cite "unique local conditions" as a way of drifting as far from Communism as Beijing can tolerate, Wu's village represents the opposite tendency. In many ways it is still a collectivist town. The village employs doctors and covers all medical costs -- a practice $ no longer common in China, where many must pay for health care out of their own pockets. Land is privately owned, but much of its cultivation is accomplished by group effort...
...surface, then, totalitarianism in Beijing seems no more oppressive than a constant low-grade fever. Underneath, though, the town seethes. Even the silence is telling. Herded by their supervisors to the military museum's "True Story of Tiananmen Square" exhibit, those I see viewing it are stone-faced. Politically reliable cadres are everywhere, but so are wry smiles, especially when people see a giant blowup photograph of the man who defied a column of tanks, with a caption saying he had been spared because of the army's humanity...
...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...