Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...provincial officials to cite "unique local conditions" as a way of drifting as far from Communism as Beijing can tolerate, Wu's village represents the opposite tendency. In many ways it is still a collectivist town. The village employs doctors and covers all medical costs -- a practice $ no longer common in China, where many must pay for health care out of their own pockets. Land is privately owned, but much of its cultivation is accomplished by group effort...
Despite its vast gray Soviet-style tenements and the absence of the imposing wall that enclosed it for a thousand years, Beijing strikes me as China's prettiest and most livable large city. Staggered work shifts are common, and vehicles from outside the city are banned during the day. The avenues are broader, the streets are cleaner. There are even more trees...
...exchange of business cards at the wedding, as common in China as saying hello, establishes that one of the guests has more than a nodding acquaintance with cremation. "Yeah," says a middle-aged man proudly, "I burn stiffs for a living." Only I smile. Everyone else knows what's coming, a recitation of the state's official line against using precious land for burials. "This is ridiculous," says the man, arcing a wad of spittle behind him, a small measure of civility indicating that China's famous antispitting campaign has done little more than improve the people's aim. "Zhou...
...dead people, to ensure them a peaceful afterlife, is dead wrong. The real if equally fanciful reason is that the unmarried dead are feared capable of becoming angry spirits who may disturb their living relatives. "Face it," says the stiff-burner, gesturing to the coffins now set in a common grave. "This thing we call a wedding is something we are doing for us, not for them...
...Enough!" shouts the mother of the groom. "This is their wedding day. I don't want to hear anymore. Let us leave quietly." Then, apropos of nothing more than the increasingly common disdain many Chinese appear to feel for the army they saw as their great protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter...