Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself;
Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.
1986 Of Christopher Isherwood. In the New Republic, 4 Nov. |
A nation of people longing to be12-year-olds or even younger.
Ian BurumaGerman memory was like a massivetongue seeking out, over and over, a sore tooth.
Ian BurumaIt was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism.
Ian BurumaThe question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom.
Ian Buruma