Word: chengdu
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...turn a profit. An aircraft factory in Xi'an runs a marriage-introduction center that does a booming business serving the needs of hundreds of well- educated women who by their late 20s are desperate for husbands because men with less schooling are reluctant to marry them. In Chengdu the Xinhua bookstore owns a flower shop, a hair salon and a clothing boutique whose manager gets his goods from "a guy in Shanghai who has good guanxi." In Shanghai itself the city's world-famous acrobats attract bigger audiences by sponsoring fashion shows between tumbles. A university in Guangdong...
...Bing, the "rumormonger" who was sentenced to ten years in prison for "exaggerating" the Tiananmen death toll in an interview with ABC News (he said 20,000 had died). Absolutely everyone knows the tale of Xiao. "Xiao Bing makes a point about the future," says an economics professor in Chengdu. "The people in Beijing were there -- and so may be very willing to take to the streets again. But we elsewhere are more cautious. It's not that the propaganda campaign is working. Most of us know full well what went on -- if not the details, then the essence...
...maybe not powerful enough. My conversation with the professor takes place more or less publicly at a table for twelve in a teahouse in Chengdu, a drab city where the sun rarely shines more than 60 days a year. Instead of smoking and no-smoking sections -- almost everyone in China smokes -- this teahouse sets aside tables for those who want coffee. Unfortunately, we are at one of them. Drinking Chinese coffee is like drinking hot water with a distant memory of caffeine; there is an atavistic link somewhere, but it is not coffee...
...retrenchment worsens and if the economy fails, if Premier Li stops Jiang's succession, then all bets are off for Deng and his cronies," says the Chengdu professor. "Deng got the point that Communism doesn't work, that it tries to change human nature. He got the point about incentive. The problem is that many of the other old guys don't like his views and never have. And right now they are trying to force a serious turn back, and they're using the ammunition of a faltering economy. Well, the macroeconomic numbers are indeed bad, but most people...
...turmoil spread from Beijing to Shanghai to Guang-zhou to Xian to Chengdu, the shock waves reverberated throughout the Communist world. Publicly the Poles congratulated themselves on the contrast between their political accomplishments and the calamity unfolding in China. But privately many said they feared what they might yet have in common with the Chinese -- a system that has still to prove it can tolerate genuine democracy...