Word: changsha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Given this feverish interest in China, it was inevitable that Occidental travelers would add their own speculations about the People's Republic. Two years ago, Mark Salzman wrote Iron and Silk, a recollection of his years as an English teacher in Changsha. Next spring he will produce a novel, tentatively titled Journey to the West, that mixes Chinese myth and actuality. And next month will bring The Great Black Dragon Fire, by veteran journalist Harrison Salisbury. The fire was not fiction; it occurred in 1987, and it burned a Manchurian forest "so large that, like China's Great Wall...
Worse violence was reported Saturday in Xian and Changsha. The state-run Xinhua News Agency said rioters in Xian, a popular tourist city and capital of northwestern China's Shaanxi province, forced their way into the provincial government compound and burned buildings and vehicles...
...young certainly do. Prosperity next door has become a magnet for young Hunanese, though they may still lack the skills to benefit quickly. Those who remain behind contend that the lure of Guangdong saps Hunan of its best and brightest. In Changsha, the capital of Hunan, one government functionary demands a radical solution. "We should not merely ask for higher prices for our rice and vegetables," he says. "We should demand 40% of Guangdong's foreign-exchange earnings. Otherwise we would really become its colony." Some Hunanese have gone so far as blockading the border to prevent the outflow...
Mark Salzman was riding an overcrowded bus in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, when he saw a passenger clambering aboard. The driver asked him to step off. The request was ignored, the door closed, and the bus pulled away with the stubborn rider sticking halfway out. Arriving at his destination, the man cheerfully paid half the usual fare and went...
Salzman knows exactly how he felt. For two years the author stood part way in, part way out of a rapidly moving conveyance called the People's Republic of China. Fresh out of Yale, he took a job in 1982 teaching English at a college in Changsha. He lived, worked and learned among his pupils, mostly young medical students, plus a group of former Russian-language instructors sent down for retraining after shifting political winds had rendered their specialty obsolete. Nearly every day Salzman tried to reignite imaginations extinguished by the Cultural Revolution. Nearly every hour circumstances taught him about...