Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...government estimates that 10 million to 20 million of the 109 million workers in state enterprises are redundant. Calculations by private economists push that figure much higher. In a study of the laundry-detergent industry, McKinsey & Co. concluded that mainland producers employ 10 times as many workers as Western factories with the same capacity. Executives of Shanghai Petrochemicals, one of the most successful state enterprises, admitted last year that 40% of workers were involved in "non-core" activities -- in the company's clinic, nursery, cafeteria and other human-resource departments...
...style produced profits that were just about average for the industry, but his personality created serious turnover problems. An arrow of a man, with a loud, deep voice and a blunt manner, he underscored every bottom line with outbursts of temper. When Martin Davis took over Paramount (then Gulf & Western) 10 years ago, the two dictatorial bosses began a festering, not quite open feud. Snyder is a buccaneer, better suited to being an entrepreneur than an employee. Says Joan Didion: "This is the game he wanted to play; he played it for 30 years, and he lost this round...
...some of his editorial brashness to his days as a student activist in Germany and Britain, where he was schooled in engineering and filmmaking. When he returned to Indonesia in 1981 after 12 years abroad, he got a massive case of culture shock as he confronted opposition to his Western-inculcated ideas. "I was so overwhelmed," Eros says, "that a doctor advised me to lie down for three months and not say or do anything." By 1986 he had been up and around enough to make a critically acclaimed feature film, Tjoet Nya' Dhien, about an Indonesian woman...
...this were a western, such peacefulness would signal "Apaches!" Sure enough, disaster befalls. While Alice is tending her own and a neighbor's kids, the neighbor's two-year-old tumbles into a pond and is pulled out brain dead. A second calamity follows, as Alice is accused of sexual abuse by the mother of one schoolboy and then by the parents of several others. She is blameless, but so shaken that her denials sound like admissions, and she is jailed to await trial...
...Western powers have not used what meager authority they have to force the factions into more humane behavior. The U.N. Security Council two years ago asked the five-member Commission of Experts to investigate reports of atrocities. A year ago, after the panel concluded that "grave breaches" of international law had been committed, the Security Council created an 11-judge international court to deal with them. Little has happened since. The judges "are like firemen polishing their engines, waiting for a fire," says an international lawyer. They have prepared rules of procedure and evidence, but the court's offices...