Word: boom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...complaints of China's petitioners are a stark reminder of the lingering social ills confronting the nation as President Hu Jintao wraps up his first year in office. The most common grievances involve corrupt local officials, land seized by authorities and developers to fuel China's property boom, unpaid wages from cash-strapped state-owned enterprises, and industrial accidents at unregulated private factories. Some cases are doubtless spurious, but most aren't. Even Zhou Zhanshun, head of the State Letters and Visits Bureau, admitted to the state-run Xinhua News Agency in January that 80% of the complaints are reasonable...
...still clear as day and hip-hop never scaled the heights of marketability. It’d be a mistake to slot his music alongside more pedestrian bids for mass appeal. Last year’s Mississippi: The Album would have sounded curiously wrong to heads raised on boom-bap, full of blues chords and unearthly bass tones grafted to low-riding drums so nuanced they bordered on expressionistic. But with Outkast as crunk music’s ambassadors, few probably listened anyway. Suitably, Banner makes jams above all for himself, his crew, his hometown, the bitter South...
Shojo manga, the cute-but-cool subgenre targeted at girls, are a big part of that boom. Shojo typically feature 13-to-16-year-old female protagonists and are generally written and drawn by women but have little in common with the corny romance titles of yesteryear. Shojo plots focus on love and relationships, and often include adventures in magical worlds outside the humdrum realities of school and home. Mecca Moore, 13, of Los Angeles, buys manga every week and says she spends $1,000 a year on the stuff. "[Shojo] tell a story in art that makes a person...
...minimum wage, better job training, medical coverage for the almost 44 million who have none. Will any of it happen? The working poor don't vote in anything like the numbers of their more affluent neighbors, so even in election years they carry no real weight. But the economic boom of the '90s is behind us, job creation is feeble, and the time limits on welfare are kicking in. Expect those dominoes to start falling faster than ever...
...China Netcom Corp. and possibly China Construction Bank, one of the mainland's four largest banks. Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that Chinese companies will raise $10 billion in IPOs in Hong Kong this year; about 50% more than in 2003. The big question, of course, is whether the current boom will last, or whether Chinese stocks will simply prove to be the next bubble waiting to pop. Already, there are some ominous signs of irrational exuberance. For example, a firm called China Green Holdings, which began trading for the first time on Jan. 13, became the most popular...