China’s Economic Surge Has Roots Before Deng, Book Finds

The official position of the Chinese Communist Party is that the answer is easy: Mao Zedong. But as evidence has accumulated in recent years about the extent of the killings, torture and chronic economic mismanagement through much of Mao’s rule, academic assessments outside China and sometimes even inside have been increasingly damning about Mao’s legacy.

That has produced a search for who should be given the credit for China’s re-emergence as an economic juggernaut with growing military and political heft. Jung Chang, the author of one of the most scathing biographies of Mao, as well as the best-seller “Wild Swans,” has suggested an alternative in a new book: Cixi, the empress dowager who for practical purposes was the ruler of China for most of the years from 1861 until her death in 1908.

Using extensive access to imperial court archives in Beijing that have not been available to biographers outside China, Ms. Chang presents her subject as neither the cruel despot nor the easily manipulated ruler whom the Communist Party and other critics have long portrayed. Her book, “Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China,” presents Cixi (pronounced tsuh-shee) as a powerful, strong-willed woman responsible for most of the modernizing programs undertaken during her rule, only to be thwarted on many occasions by men who were sometimes in the pay of foreign powers.

Ms. Chang gives Cixi credit for building China’s first rail artery from Beijing to Wuhan, although she initially opposed it, as well as for strenuously resisting Japan and other foreign powers, protecting freedom of the press and even seeking in her last days to give millions of Chinese men the right to vote.

Some historians have criticized the book as painting too rosy a picture of its subject.

John Delury, an assistant professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, who specializes in the Qing dynasty, said that, with most of the chapters ending with strong praise of Cixi, he was concerned about whether the archival material had been objectively assessed. “As a reader, you don’t know what to trust, because everything is the best possible” interpretation of her actions, he said. “Really what we need is a post-revisionist biography that is very scholarly and very careful.”

Speaking in Hong Kong last week, Ms. Chang defended her work as fair while acknowledging that she “did develop sympathy” for Cixi.

“I documented every single one of Cixi’s killings, some of which have not even been put out by the official propaganda,” she said. “What I did was to provide the context and why Cixi did it.”

Ms. Chang said: “It is a biographer’s job to enter the head of your subject. I mean that is my job — I felt I entered Mao’s head, and I felt I entered Cixi’s head.”

A few other authors have also begun offering somewhat favorable interpretations of Cixi, notably Sterling Seagrave in his 1992 book, “Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China.” Chinese historians, too, have offered more sympathetic interpretations of Cixi and other Qing court figures who resisted more radical calls for change in the late 19th century. But Ms. Chang said the Beijing archival material to which she unexpectedly gained access after the international success of her biography of Mao showed that Cixi had played an even more central role and been even more important to modernization than previously believed.

Although Ms. Chang’s books are banned in mainland China, Ms. Chang said the government had continued to let her travel to China each year to visit her aged mother, but with restrictions.

“I’ve made a commitment not to speak at public gatherings, not to talk to the press and not even to see my friends — I just restrict my visits to my mother and very close, old friends who have nothing to do with politics,” as well as a few Chinese scholars, she said. “I just hope that I can still go back to China and see my mother.”

Before Blast, Hauling Oil Revived a Tiny Railroad

On the other end are the little guys like Edward A. Burkhardt, the chief executive and majority owner of Rail World Inc. That is the company whose runaway train of oil tankers exploded last week in the town of Lac Mégantic, Quebec, killing 28, leaving 22 people missing and presumed dead, and the vacation town’s core incinerated.

The Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway runs on 510 miles of track, including a former section of the Canadian Pacific Railway that runs through Lac Mégantic. As large railways in Canada and the United States have divested themselves of low traffic routes, small players like Mr. Burkhardt have swept in with the hope that they can be turn the lines into profit makers.

Mr. Burkhardt, an American who turns 75 this month, bought the rail lines that form the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway in 2003 after a long career running railroads in the United States. The 21 locomotives that make up the railway’s secondhand fleet provide a colorful cavalcade with many showing the faded paint schemes from previous owners.

Rail World also owns the 13-mile San Luis Central Railroad in Colorado, where it mostly hauls potatoes and grain. It runs trains in Estonia and owns two small railways in Poland, which rely on secondhand Moroccan locomotives built in the 1970s. One of the railways is based in Oswiecim, better known by its World War II German name of Auschwitz.

Mr. Burkhardt did not respond to requests for an interview. Calls to the head office in Rosemont, Ill., are met with this recorded message: “Hello, you’ve reached the offices for Rail World and the New Zealand Consulate.”

The incongruous combination is the legacy of Mr. Burkhardt’s global ambitions and dates to when he helped privatize New Zealand’s national rail network.

Mr. Burkhardt began his career with the Chicago and North Western Railway, a large carrier that eventually disappeared through mergers. But it was the purchase of a network of tracks from Canadian Pacific to form the Wisconsin Central in 1987 that made him something of a legend in the railroad business. He was a man who, as a cover headline on Trains magazine put it in 2007, ran railroads that “defied adversity.”

The Wisconsin Central, by several accounts, became a success by offering customers better service than Canadian Pacific. But Mr. Burkhardt had global ambitions, which included the privatization in New Zealand and running several freight lines in Britain. Shareholders thought he had overreached and he was eventually ousted in 1999.

With Rail World, founded that year, Mr. Burkhardt made an unsuccessful effort to buy back the Wisconsin Central.

Then Mr. Burkhardt landed the bankrupt Bangor and Aroostook Railroad in 2003, renaming it the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. It was not an obvious prize. A combination of a long established railroad in Maine and pieces of former Canadian Pacific lines in Quebec, the Bangor and Aroostook’s primary business had once been shipping potatoes in distinctive red, white and blue freight cars emblazoned with the words “State of Maine Products.”

But the forestry and paper-related industries that remained along the M.M.& A.’s tracks were in decline. In 2010, Mr. Burkhardt sold 223 miles of track he had threatened to close down to the state of Maine for $20 million.

The rail business was not great, but the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota changed all that. Just over a year ago, Irving Oil contracted with the M.M.& A. to carry Bakken crude to its refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick. That deal revived the railway.

The train that devastated Lac Mégantic, now known in Quebec as the “ghost train,” started out in the Bakken oil fields. It was loaded with crude oil that then traveled across the Continent on Canadian Pacific rails to Montreal, the line’s Eastern terminus.

Mr. Burkhardt’s M.M.& A. took it from there.

Despite the oil deal, the railroad is not a financial success. The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the province’s pension fund, invested $7 million for a 12.8 percent stake in 2003. This week it disclosed that even before the disaster, that investment had been written down to a token $1,000 value.

What happened in the village of 6,000 last week is not yet clear to accident investigators. Mr. Burkhardt initially blamed “tampering” with the train’s locomotives for the derailment before pointing a finger at volunteer firefighters who put out a fire in one of the locomotives.

As residents of Lac Mégantic jeered in the background during the news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Burkhardt shifted blame again, this time to the engineer who parked the train for the night uphill from the village. Although the railway is not involved in the investigation and he offered little detail, Mr. Burkhardt said he thought the engineer had ignored safety laws and did not properly secure the train’s hand brakes.

Mr. Burkhardt’s prolonged absence from the disaster scene had been widely condemned by politicians and residents. As he was driven to the village, the cable news channel of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation updated viewers about Mr. Burkhardt’s travel progress on the roughly two-hour drive. The news conference opened with him lecturing reporters about their manners.

As the news conference began to fall apart on Wednesday, and before he was whisked away from reporters by police for several hours of questioning, Mr. Burkhardt was asked if his tiny railroad’s giant disaster would be its financial ruin. Smiling, he said, “Everyone in the world that has a business of any size has occasions when they think they might go bankrupt.”

Mr. Burkhardt mixed his “abject apology” with jokes. When pressed repeatedly by a reporter about his personal worth in the wake of the accident, he eventually said, “A whole lot less than I was Saturday.”

Career Couch: Before the Job Interview, Do Your Homework

A. Research the company and the industry, says Adrien Fraise, founder of Modern Guild, which provides online career coaching to college students and high school seniors. “Know the major industry trends and news,” he says, and be able to talk about how they could affect the company.

Find out who runs the company and how they got there. “Look at their profiles on LinkedIn and see if you find a common bond,” says David Lewis, the chief executive of OperationsInc., a human resources outsourcing and consulting firm in Norwalk, Conn. “If you are able to say, ‘I went to the same college as you’ or ‘I also majored in psychology,’ that demonstrates you really did your homework.”

Familiarize yourself with the company’s products or services and look for ways, even small ones, to possibly expand or add value. Note the positives, then talk about opportunities you see, says Moses Lee, C.E.O. of Seelio, a platform that lets students and recent college graduates post samples of their work and search for jobs.

“Let’s say you are talking about a recent marketing campaign,” he says. “You could say, ‘I enjoyed that campaign and if I had the opportunity to work on it, I might frame it so it resonated with millennials, too.’ ”

Q. What questions can you expect, and how can you prepare to answer them?

A. You may be asked to walk the interviewer through your résumé, so prepare concise, articulate anecdotes to illustrate what you did or learned in each experience you’ve listed, Mr. Fraise says. Highlight what you achieved and the skills you used — and how you want to keep using them. “Rehearse in front of the mirror and then in front of others,” he says. “Be so comfortable with it, it doesn’t sound scripted.”

Interviewers often ask questions like “Can you give me an example of when you had to work as part of a team or learned something new quickly?” Mr. Lewis says your examples might come from experiences in a club, fraternity or sorority. “Did you organize a membership push? Plan events? Do recruiting?” he says.

If you’re asked a question like “Why did you choose your college major?” be complete in your answer. “Don’t just say ‘because I really like psychology,’ “ Mr. Lewis advises. Instead, note from a business perspective why you liked the subject. “Maybe you found the classes to be informative about human behavior, which is a key to success in anyone’s business,” he says.

Take along samples of your work — whether from an internship, a class or an extracurricular activity — in a folder or on a laptop computer or tablet.

And always prepare questions to ask at the end of the interview, says Alexa Hamill, American campus recruiting leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Philadelphia. Questions on the interviewer’s own career progress are a way to conclude, she says: “What opportunities have been presented to them? How were they trained and developed? This shows you are looking at the job as something potentially long term.”

Q. You want to exude confidence and maturity. What are some ways to bolster your confidence before an interview?

A. Develop a personal elevator pitch — a 30-second to one-minute summary of your academic career, your interests and what you did outside school — and correlate that to the job you want, Ms. Hamill says. PricewaterhouseCoopers offers a free tool on its site to help think through those questions, she says.

Q. What are some basic interview etiquette rules, in terms of dress and behavior?

A. Turn off your cellphone before walking into the company’s offices, and don’t take it out during your interview. “Don’t remind me you’re a 22-year-old,” Mr. Lewis says. “Have a firm handshake, maintain eye contact and don’t fidget.”

Remember not to talk about inappropriate topics like a recent fraternity party or something you saw on Facebook, Ms. Hamill says. When speaking to interviewers, “face them with your knees pointing toward them, sit up straight and stay engaged,” she says. After the interview, send a thank-you e-mail and include a link to your online portfolio or Web site if you have one.

Unless the company recommends dressing casually or informally for the interview, men should wear a suit and tie and women should wear a suit or skirt and blouse, Mr. Lewis says. You may be the only one in the office dressed that way, he says, but it’s usually better not “to walk into an interview dressed as if you are already part of the team.”

Public Utilities: Must Electric Utilities Enter Homes Before Restoring Power?

In a case the defendant electric utility is claiming could have broad implications on power companies' ability to restore Pennsylvanians' power, the state Supreme Court is set to decide whether a Western Pennsylvania utility had a duty to enter a customer's premises and inspect its electrical facilities before restoring power.

Lackawanna President Judge Appears Before Federal Grand Jury

Lackawanna County President Judge Thomas J. Munley testified before a federal grand jury Tuesday, according to sources in the legal community.

Modest Jobs Growth in Final Report Before Election

Whoever wins the election on Tuesday might even inherit an accelerating economy in 2013, if (and that is a big if) Congress is able to smooth over that pesky fiscal cliff in the few weeks after the election.

The nation’s employers added 171,000 positions on net in October, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and more jobs than initially estimated in August and September. Hiring was broad-based, with just nearly every industry except state government adding jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, but for a good reason: more workers joined the labor force and so officially counted as unemployed.

None of this makes for a game-changer in the presidential race, analysts said. But it appeared to provide some relief for President Obama, whose campaign could have been sideswiped by bad news from the volatile monthly jobs report. With the latest numbers, the economy finally shows a net gain of jobs during his presidency. His record had previously been weighed down by huge layoffs in his first year in office after the financial crisis.

The report also allayed widespread suspicion that September’s plunge in the unemployment rate — to below 8 percent for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a one-month statistical fluke.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement that the jobs report was evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said. He also noted that October’s unemployment rate of 7.9 percent was higher than the 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009. Unemployment peaked at 10 percent in October of Mr. Obama’s first year in office, and has been skidding downward very, very slowly since then.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job and output growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

The jobs snapshot for October was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy. Economists expect that businesses and employment will resume their normal activity by the next jobs survey, in mid-November, and that some industries will even show an increase in hiring because of the storm.

“We had a lot of lost hours worked and production stuff still delayed, but much of that will be offset by hiring of emergency workers, government workers and construction, to do all that emergency fixing,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial.

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs in most months over the last three years.

One of the low points of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-income jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then had been lower-wage ones.

Stock markets opened higher after the jobs report on Friday, but fell for the day, apparently weighed down later by a number of concerns from the possible lingering effects of the storm to the uncertainty about the outcome of the election.

The United States has now posted job gains for 25 consecutive months, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb the increase in the working population. About 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, with about two out of five of those people out of a job for more than six months.

That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part time but really want full-time jobs.

“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions expire. He said he still had some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

Labor advocates and many economists have been urging Congress to renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt whatever forward momentum the economy has.

“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families, but the economy as a whole.”

Friday’s jobs report was unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”

“The Fed desires both a substantial and sustainable improvement in labor market conditions and is likely to read recent payroll growth as a positive step in the right direction, but just one step in a longer journey,” said Michael Gapen, director of United States research and global asset allocation at Barclays Capital.

Bits Blog: H.P.’s Chief Says a Revival Is Unlikely Before 2016

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Hewlett-Packard needs four more years “to have confidence in itself,” says Meg Whitman, the company’s chief executive.

7:45 p.m. | Updated

SAN FRANCISCO — Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive, beat up her company on Wednesday.

Ms. Whitman told a meeting of Wall Street analysts that they should expect sharply lower revenue and profits. She also told them not to expect the company to fully right itself before 2016. “We have much more work to do,” she said.

While the news was not completely unexpected, the vehemence of Ms. Whitman’s message drove shareholders to the exits. H.P.’s stock dropped about 8 percent while she was speaking and ended the day at $14.91 a share, down nearly 13 percent on unusually high trading volume. The stock had not been that low in a decade.

The drubbing was probably what Ms. Whitman, the former chief  of eBay, had in mind. Executives involved in her presentation, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said she wanted to get as much bad news as possible out at once, so the company could focus on rebuilding rather than having to explain one disappointing quarter after another.

Analysts, while somewhat taken aback by the depth of H.P.’s problems, thought Ms. Whitman had made the right move in putting them out in the open. “In an era where C.E.O.’s watch every word they say, it’s refreshing to see complete candor. H.P. is a mess,” said Patrick Moorhead, president of Moor Insights and Strategy, who attended the meeting. “It will take five to 10 years to fully take care of this, just the way it took I.B.M. to remake itself. Wall Street doesn’t like anything longer than a one- to three-year horizon. It’s too much risk for them.”

For now, Hewlett-Packard is still the world’s leader in sales of personal computers, printers and computer servers, with revenue last year of $127 billion, but it forecast revenue next year of 11 percent to 13 percent below fiscal 2012 levels. Analysts had assumed it would only decrease about 1 percent.

Operating profit margins, which have been about 7 percent, could evaporate completely or, at best, shrink to about 3 percent, the company said. Earnings per share were expected to fall by about 16 percent from what analysts had projected.

The meeting was probably also Ms. Whitman’s last chance to blame previous leaders for any of H.P.’s problems. Since 1999, H.P. has had three other chief executives, each with a different vision and operating strategy. All left under duress, leaving a company that leads the industry in revenue but is internally chaotic.

Those problems now belong to Ms. Whitman, who took over almost 13 months ago. She has replaced a number of top executives, and has initiated changes to product development and the company’s global marketing and branding. These changes will start to appear next year, but she is clearly impatient to fix more things faster.

“Operational excellence should have become a way of life,” she told analysts, but instead, H.P. is hampered by poor internal communications and management systems.

“I’ve learned at H.P. that you do not get what you expect, you get what you inspect,” she said.

Investors may also have been troubled by some of Ms. Whitman’s strategy. She intends to shrink the number of products H.P. makes, and to move out of businesses that are in decline.

For example, she said the company made more than 2,100 varieties of laser printers, causing excess costs in everything from parts to packaging requirements.

Printer cartridges were once responsible for over 90 percent of H.P.’s profits, but they face increasing competition from lower-price suppliers. Consumers are also using their printers less because many of the things they used to print routinely, like maps and boarding passes, are on smartphones.

H.P. is reversing its printer strategy in the developing world by selling cheaper cartridges and more expensive printers. In developed economies like the United States, it wants to move to a subscription model in which business customers pay an annual fee, and their Internet-connected printers get new cartridges when the system detects they are low on ink.

Investors could be skittish about plans like these, simply because they are not yet proved. Indeed, H.P. shares fell further as Ms. Whitman’s lieutenants laid out the new strategies.

In other areas, there are questions about whether H.P.’s new products can replace, or even surpass, the revenue lost from declining businesses. Cloud computing systems, which consist of thousands of servers sold as a unit, are meant for an increasingly important market. Cloud computing is more efficient than existing systems, however, which means it is likely to lower the overall demand for large numbers of servers.

For all the difficulties she identified, Ms. Whitman may have actually cloaked other long-term problems. The new company she foresees, which she projected would exist by 2016 or so, would probably increase revenue no faster than the overall growth of the global economy. Profit margins would improve from better management, but not necessarily from technological innovations.

The new H.P. would most likely employ fewer workers, as well. Ms. Whitman has already announced a total of 29,000 layoffs. The company had 349,600 employees at the end of last October. She said future profitability would depend in part on more automation, indicating even more job cuts.

While Ms. Whitman said H.P. must focus more closely on its top 14 markets and its main  competitors, a continued low stock price may present other worries. The tech industry is facing a transition from traditional PCs and servers to mobile devices and cloud computing, and is consolidating. H.P. could become a target either for corporate raiders or for another tech company in a hostile takeover.

Birth Certificate Legal Clinic Being Held Day Before Voter ID Arguments

The Homeless Advocacy Project has held birth certificate clinics for at least five years, but Executive Director Marsha Cohen said the program has become all the more important in light of Pennsylvania's new voter identification law.