Word: china
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...This growing soft power of China was strengthened by the 2008 Olympics extravaganza, and the Shanghai Expo next year will similarly dazzle. The 60th anniversary celebration in Beijing on Oct. 1 will impress, if not frighten, the world with an arresting display of military hardware and goose-stepping soldiers. Less visible is the fact that China is the first major economy to recover from the global recession and, indeed, is leading the world out of it. (Read "Mission Accomplished. Now What...
...China is on a roll, particularly when viewed over time. Visiting or living in China every year over the past three decades, I have had the personal opportunity to witness dramatic transformations. When I first went to China in 1979, vestiges of the Cultural Revolution were still evident: revolutionary slogans painted on walls and pockmarks on university buildings from bullets and howitzer shells shot by dueling Red Guards. Camouflaged, but just as evident, were the personal scars borne by intellectuals and officials whom I met at the time. I heard stories of beatings and humiliations, confiscations of personal possessions...
...early 1990s, I again experienced China as a society traumatized, this time by the aftermath of Tiananmen. But by mid-decade Deng Xiaoping had reignited domestic economic reforms and China had normalized its place in the world after its post-Tiananmen isolation. Politics, however, remained frozen and the heavy hand of the state remained evident. Only during the present decade, in the waning years of Jiang Zemin's rule and under Hu Jintao, has the Communist Party begun to experiment with very limited political reforms. My discussions with those party officials involved with crafting the "democratic" reforms makes clear that...
...Thus, when considering the totality of six decades, the record of the PRC is decidedly mixed. While its achievements have been momentous, so are the contrasts and contradictions exposed by those very same achievements. In many sectors, each reform breeds new problems and challenges. China has come a long way, but it still has a long...
...question for China's leaders was never whether to modernize - but how. During the Maoist era a variety of economic models were experimented with, each of which achieving some modicum of growth. Yet all of them left China lagging far behind the West and East Asia. The costs of some initiatives, like the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1960, were catastrophic in human and environmental terms. It was not until Deng and Chen Yun, another reform-minded Politburo member, returned to power in 1978 from internal exile that the economic course was changed. (See pictures of a new look...