Word: burnish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang proved himself in the art houses abroad. But many mainland critics remained unimpressed, accusing him of "exoticizing" the nation's feudal past and poverty-stricken countryside for foreigners. They felt he should play cultural ambassador, using his camera to burnish China's overseas image. Chinese audiences share this ambivalence. Younger moviegoers have an almost universal description of why they dislike Zhang's fixation on the past and on the countryside: "The films are really just too far away from us," says Zhang's 25-year-old assistant, speaking of her boss...
...experts disagree on whether, more generally, Harvard degrees burnish the political reputations of individual candidates...
...Arroyo, known in Manila as the "Photo-Op Queen," has sought to burnish her tough-on-terrorism image by appearing on television with arrested suspects. One such photo-op, on Oct. 19, however, went badly awry when Arroyo marched out a prisoner and introduced him as Abu Pula or "Doctor Abu," a forty-something leader of the kidnap-for-ransom group Abu Sayyaf, who allegedly engineered the 2000 abduction of 11 European tourists from a Malaysian beach resort. Alas, the perp she walked wasn't Doctor Abu: he was Mark Bolkerin Gumbahale, a 21-year-old Abu Sayyaf member arrested...
...challenging the Communist Party's monopoly on power. Now that Beijing has struck its deal between economic freedom and political restriction, the virus looks as if it is moving the other way. So what, the Hong Kong administration may say, if we lock up a few dissenters to burnish our credentials with the emperor to the north provided he gives us some economic advantages to pull us out of our slump...
Some students say they join activities to burnish their resumes and get pre-professional training, all in the hopes of securing that dream job. For others, however, a variety of short-term motivations replace the former goal of getting into college...