APAD: carpetbagger

Meaning:

   opportunist, self-seeker, an outsider who seeks power or success

   presumptuously, a person who places expediency above principle.

 

   Example: "after the Civil War the carpetbaggers from the north tried to take

   over the south"

 

Background:

   An outsider who pretends to be an insider is a carpetbagger; he's a person

   who tries to take advantage of a group by joining it only for his own

   personal benefit.

 

   Northerners who moved south during Reconstruction in the 1860s and 70s were

   the original carpetbaggers, named for their suitcases. It was a derogatory

   term then, and it continues to be used with contempt today. You can use the

   noun carpetbagger to describe a politician who is running for governor in a

   state where he's only lived for six months.

 

- www.vocabulary.com [edited]

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I remember this word from Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" so many years

ago and on Aug 5, was delighted to read its apt usage in the last paragraph on

page 70 of the book "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" by Jung Chang.

 

   The Kuomintang personnel put in charge of the factories--those that had not

   been dismantled by the Russians--were conspicuously unsuccessful at getting

   the economy moving again. They got a few factories working at well below full

   capacity, but pocketed most of the revenue themselves.

 

   Kuomintang carpetbaggers were moving into the smart houses which the Japanese

   had vacated...

 

Chang was writing about the Nationalist rule in the Manchu city Jinzhou in early

1946, after the Japanese surrendered the previous year, the Russians'

three-month looting and raping, and the Communists' brief sojourn and retreat to

the rural areas.