Word: asianness
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After winning a surprise gold medal in the 110-m hurdles in Athens four years ago, Liu morphed from amiable jock into national stud. In 2006 he shattered the event's world record with his 12.88 time. As an Asian athlete competing in a klieg-light track event - not an international sideline sport like badminton or table tennis or synchronized diving - Liu came to personify the Chinese nation's rising ambitions. The pressure for a golden repeat in China's Games must have been overwhelming...
...horde of 43 that Mark Spitz's team amassed in 1972. But none of the athletes in the pool, American or otherwise, stood a chance of eclipsing Phelps. Taehwan Park of Korea and Kosuke Kitajima of Japan both snared Olympic titles and set a new standard for Asian swimmers at the élite level, but no other Olympian could come close to the frenzy that Phelps generated in the Water Cube, luring luminaries from two Presidents (George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush) to LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, who attended not just one but several of Phelps' races...
...universities are being blitzed with new students. In fields such as engineering and economics, there simply aren't enough high-caliber teachers to go around. "China lacks the educational infrastructure to keep pace with the frantic demand for education," says Tang Min, chief China economist at the Asian Development Bank. A human-resources executive who helped produce a report on the subject for the American Chamber of Commerce in China puts it more bluntly: "the vast majority of [Chinese] kids go to second- or third-rate schools - diploma mills - and are just unprepared to enter a very competitive job market...
...respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. Russian leaders have also remarked that Crimea, a part of Ukraine, should once again be joined to Russia. Similarly, Russian pressure on Moldova led to the effective partition of that small former Soviet republic. Moscow is also continuing to try to economically isolate central Asian neighbors like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. And the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have been the object of various threats from Russia, including economic sanctions and disruptive cyberwarfare...
...feat marked the return of a once-fearsome Chinese women's swimming squad. In 1994, a fleet of well-muscled Chinese dominated the pool at the Asian Games. But the secret to China's success was soon exposed: drugs. Seven of China's Asian Games swimmers tested positive for banned substances and were stripped of their gold medals. That ignominious streak extended to the 1998 World Championships, where four more Chinese swimmers were caught using drugs...