Call it policy presentation with Chinese characteristics. After the meeting of its leadership last week, China’s Communist Party issued a muddled communique that aroused no great excitement. Then, on the weekend, well ahead of the usual schedule for such announcements, the party released a longer follow-up statement worth getting excited about.It’s radical stuff ― in principle, if not (yet) in policy. Maybe China’s new president, Xi Jinping, aspires to be another Deng Xiaoping after all.The “Dec

Viewpoints Nov. 19, 2013

The celebration of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address offers an opportunity not simply to memorialize an extraordinary speech; it provides a model and a mirror for writing and speechmaking today.“It’s only words”: This phrase captures what many feel about writing today. After all, our casual, rapid-fire communiques are tossed off at the push of a “send” button.Within days of the battle of Gettysburg, plans were put in place to establish and dedicate the first national

Viewpoints Nov. 19, 2013

The idea is deceptively simple: Because President Barack Obama promised Americans they could keep their existing insurance under his new health-care-reform law, Congress should pass a law guaranteeing that they can.In reality, though, Obama was wrong to have made that promise ― and Congress would be compounding his foolishness by forcing insurance companies to keep it. The primary goal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is to make the health-care system more efficient and comprehe

Viewpoints Nov. 18, 2013

I hate to admit it, but the paranoid secularists who for a decade have been saying Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan harbored a secret agenda are being proved right.For years I’ve been gently pointing out to those paranoid secularists that Erdogan has been in power a long time already, and if he was really hiding an Islamist master plan ― as opposed to his declared conservative agenda ― he was doing a good job.Besides, didn’t you hear the man tell Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood leaders the

Viewpoints Nov. 18, 2013

It used to be the tallest building in America. It used to be the tallest in the world. It used to be the Sears Tower.Now Chicago’s Willis Tower is second, um, banana to New York’s not-yet-completed One World Trade Center, which was declared tallest in the nation Tuesday by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the official arbiter of disputes over the height of skyscrapers.Council members from all over the world huddled here last week to decide whether the tower rising from the rubble

Viewpoints Nov. 18, 2013

As hundreds of thousands of Filipinos struggled to find food, water, shelter and the bodies of loved ones in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, China quickly dipped into its world-leading $3.7 trillion of currency reserves and came up with … all of $100,000.That was Beijing’s first miserly offer of aid to the storm-tossed Philippines. By Thursday, an international outcry over China’s stinginess shamed it into upping its pledge to a modest $1.6 million worth of relief materials such as tents and blanket

Viewpoints Nov. 17, 2013

Social theorists, above all Duke University’s Timur Kuran, have drawn attention to the phenomenon of “preference falsification.” The basic idea is that when people speak in public, they aren’t always truthful about their preferences. What they say is different from what they really think.In unfree societies, people may be too frightened to disclose their actual views in opinion surveys. But preference falsification can also afflict democracies, if social pressures lead people to misdescribe thei

Viewpoints Nov. 17, 2013

When both the nation’s top justice official ― Attorney General Eric Holder ― and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy say there is a problem with criminal sentencing, it is time to take notice. When Democrats and Republicans in a divided Congress agree that our nation’s system of federal sentencing laws is in dire need of reform, it is time to remedy chronic problems in criminal sentencing.Congress enacted federal mandatory minimum sentences beginning in the 1980s in an effort to mitigate what

Viewpoints Nov. 17, 2013

Pending a court ruling, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union will be allowed to remain a legitimate trade union and exercise its right to engage in collective bargaining and take industrial action. The conditional permission was granted earlier in the week when the court accepted the liberal union’s request for an injunction against the administration’s move to deprive it of its legal status as a trade union.What the court did on Wednesday was to order the administration to put on ho

Editorial Nov. 15, 2013

President Park Geun-hye’s administration says it plans to balance the national budget in 2017, the final year of her governance. But it is more optimistic in its fiscal outlook than warranted, its critics say.Most notable among the critics is the National Assembly Budget Office, which says the demand for spending on welfare is soaring while tax revenues are not growing fast enough to meet it. If the administration has an earnest desire to balance the budget by the target year, the office says, i

Editorial Nov. 15, 2013

The world is watching the ongoing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. They began days after tens of thousands of Iranian demonstrators screamed “Death to America!” as they remonstrated outside the former United States embassy in Tehran.That’s what the world knows of Iran ― its nuclear program, the resultant economic sanctions and the nation’s turbulent relations with the West. The Iranian government talks about little else. Neither does the Western news media.In the background, howe

Viewpoints Nov. 15, 2013

The ruling Saenuri Party is seeking to amend the National Assembly Act, which was revised last year to make it virtually impossible for the majority party to pass bills unilaterally. The party is also planning to file a request with the Constitutional Court for adjudication on the constitutionality of the law.The present law was enacted toward the end of the 18th National Assembly to root out violence in the Assembly. At the time, public aversion to lawmakers frequently engaging in unseemly braw

Editorial Nov. 14, 2013