Word: burma
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Asians save their sharpest prejudices for their own minorities, including Burma's harried Indians, Japan's Koreans and -throughout Southeast Asia-the overseas Chinese. Sixteen million Chinese live outside China, and everywhere their prosperity, diligence and clannishness arouse jealousy. Often they are accused of disloyalty to their host countries. Indonesians have stripped rich "slit-eyes" of their holdings, and Chinese in Laos are scornfully called "Mao Tse-tung." International airlines make sure that no Chinese stewardesses work on their flights to India...
Died. Dr. Gordon Stifler Seagrave, 68, the indomitable Burma surgeon who, starting in 1922, built up a 250-bed hospital in the wild northern hill country near China, there supervising the treatment of some 17,000 patients yearly despite his own ill health (TB, dysentery, bubonic plague, beriberi) and a shoestring $75,000 annual budget, part of which came from his best-selling books (Burma Surgeon, Burma Surgeon Returns); of a heart attack; in Namhkam, Burma...
...cease-fire, withdrawing your troops, and returning the weapons of the peaceloving followers of Gandhi, may have fooled the Chinese people, but the American people weren't fooled for a minute. Your fiendish stunt of peacefully settling your borders with every other country to the south, including giving Burma a net 25,000 square miles of territory that was previously China's was merely a further attempt to make Gandhi's children appear the villains...
Still, that public loyalty reflects Burma's earlier experience with parliamentary democracy, which was even more bungling and far more corrupt than the present government-by-army-officers...
Diplomats in Rangoon concede that, compared to the rest of Southeast Asia -with the notable exception of sturdy and prosperous little Thailand-Burma is not too badly off. In other words, it has just managed to avoid disaster. But that still leaves it far from being a pilot plant for Western policy in Asia...