Word: officialdom
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...shapeless clothes. "Where are you going?" he barked at my assistant, sitting at the wheel. "We are journalists, researching security conditions on the road," Ali answered. I lowered my sunglasses, thinking that my light eyes and obvious foreignness - usually a quick pass out of any brush with Afghan officialdom - would speed us through the inevitable interrogation. Instead, it only made the official more agitated. "Why don't you have a bodyguard?" he demanded. "This road is unsafe; people can be kidnapped...
...Given that the very purpose of the boo-boys is to get under the skin of French officialdom, a more effective response may be to feign indifference in order to rob the slight of its intended impact. In fact, a significant portion of the booing has little to do with politics at all - it's the reaction of white French soccer fans to the parlous state of the national team, and failure of an unresponsive establishment to rectify it by firing the widely loathed national coach, Raymond Domenech...
...better known abroad for his sweeping epics evoking the hardships of Communist rule. The show fast-forwarded through the glories of ancient Chinese civilization: the invention of gunpowder and movable type, the building of the Great Wall. The overriding message, though delivered, admittedly, with the earnest phraseology of Chinese officialdom, was clear. "Imbued with the finest element of Eastern flavor," stated Liu Qi, the president of the Beijing Organizing Committee, "this grand gala will act as a showcase of a 5,000-year-old civilization...
...diplomat, that "a successful bid for the Games would bring an unprecedented - and in some cases very harsh - spotlight" on China and how it is governed. On the other side, everyone from human-rights activists to independence-seeking dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang - "splittists" in the vernacular of Chinese officialdom - knew that they would have an opportunity to push their agendas with the world watching. "Though the specific trigger for this in Tibet is still unclear, that it intensified so quickly is probably not just an accident," the Western diplomat says. According to this view, it was never hard...
...Barriers to Understanding It's easy to think that, at their heart, Japanese instincts don't change. Japanese officialdom tends to treat foreigners who live in Japan as temporary residents, not potential immigrants. This predicament isn't confined to Chinese. Koreans, Brazilians and Peruvians who have lived in Japan for decades have a hard time gaining citizenship. But for highly skilled Chinese workers who could just as easily have emigrated to the U.S. or Europe, such restrictions are particularly galling...