Recently, i was reading an article about military bases overseas and proposed cuts in funds that keep them secure. with the country experiencing so many financial difficulties and so much money being spent on the war in iraq, proposals are being made to cut funding that secures american overseas military bases not in the middle east. this concerns many people, who fear that diverting funds used to secure those bases might result in another pearl harbor. though these decisions are not final, military personnel and their families are asking the government to reconsider any cuts it is planning on making. what is the historical allusion?

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

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