Word: kong
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...With reporting from Massimo Calabresi / Washington, Bill Powell / Shanghai and Michael Schuman / Hong Kong...
...Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University and Britain's last Governor of Hong Kong, sets out to explore how nation states can "do more together rather than less." Through entertaining and wide-ranging discussions of terrorism, the threat of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, migration, drug-trafficking, diseases, energy and climate change, Patten sees enough opportunities for cooperation to remain an optimist. The former European Commissioner for External Relations is an unashamed liberal internationalist, happy to call antiglobalization activists hypocrites. But he also recognizes the severe damage American adventurism has done to Washington's image over the past few years...
Early this year my wife and I watched Venus Williams, one of the world's finest tennis players, compete in Hong Kong. During the match several young men sitting near us kept referring in Cantonese to Williams as "black demon," as well as another unprintable epithet. They shut up when my wife, an American citizen who is ethnic Chinese, berated them for their racist language. (Williams, by the way, won the tournament.) What, I wonder today, would those men say about Barack Obama, who soon could be the U.S.'s first African-American President...
...Even Hong Kong, one of the world's worldliest cities (and where TIME has its Asian headquarters), can be astonishingly parochial. For instance, Hong Kong enacted antidiscrimination legislation only very recently. Before, it was perfectly legal for a landlord to deny renting an apartment to an otherwise qualified tenant simply because of his or her skin color. One of my colleagues, an Indian national who has lived in Hong Kong for more than two years, still gets stopped by police for no given reason and told to present his ID. When he complains, the cops merely shrug. In Asia...
...most are convinced, TIME correspondents around the region tell me, that Americans will not, in the end, choose an African-American as their leader - simply because it has never been done. That the President of the United States should be white is a truism, reckons a retired Hong Kong Chinese professional who's a friend. His assessment of Obama is devoid of a critical examination of his values and vision. It's enough, says my friend, that "Obama does not look presidential...