Word: bureaucrats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impossible to describe the complete pleasure her smile conveyed. Perhaps she gets a bonus for being a particularly petty bureaucrat. Perhaps she resents foreigners and their privileges. A Chinese train's best accommodations, the "soft sleeper" compartment, in which two bunk beds actually sport linen, are reserved for foreigners and high party and government officials. I could understand her hating such preferential treatment, but then again, she and her colleagues do pretty well because of it. For notwithstanding my status as a foreigner, the "soft sleeper" car was "sold out" until a kind official laid a carton of cigarettes...
Sometimes an interruption is worth a thousand words. Taking the train from Shanghai to Shandong province, Michael Kramer shared a four-bed sleeping compartment with a middle-aged factory official clad in a blue Mao suit. As the man explained to Kramer why only foreigners and very important bureaucrats were allowed to travel in such accommodations, the door opened and in strolled a young Chinese man in a yellow Lacoste shirt, loaded down with boxes of stereo equipment. Absorbed in the music crackling through the headphones of his Walkman, the budding entrepreneur remained oblivious to Kramer and the very-important...
...bureaucrat who serves at the pleasure of a dozen bosses, Delors can be short-tempered and occasionally imperious. During one memorable speech last year, he accused a British representative on the 16-member European Commission of being "a lackey of the Labour Party" and referred indelicately to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as "fat-assed." His blithe contention that eventually E.C. officials would preside over 80% of the national economic and social decision making now conducted by individual countries infuriated Britain's Margaret Thatcher. So does his next major goal: replacing each nation's currency with a unified European monetary...
...apparently, the new Prime Minister, Toshiki Kaifu. Last week, in a move to improve the scandal-ridden image of his Liberal Democratic Party, Kaifu appointed two women to his 21- member Cabinet. Sumiko Takahara, 56, a writer on economic affairs, became Economic Planning Agency director, and former Labor Ministry bureaucrat Mayumi Moriyama, 61, was named to head the Environment Agency...
...sorting out takes time and patience. An interview with a local bureaucrat seems to support Naipaul's contention that "everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two." After much difficulty, he has arranged a chat with two Tamil radicals. The pair are escorted to the writer's hotel room by two plainclothesmen. The luxurious Taj Coromandel is overrun by an international gathering of leather-goods manufacturers, and for all anyone can tell, Naipaul and his group could have just concluded an agreement to turn sacred cows into discount luggage. His reaction to the interview...