Word: communists
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...annual two-week session of the National People's Congress - China's nominal parliament - ended Friday with characteristic efficiency. The 3,000 delegates to what is effectively the legislative arm of the ruling Communist Party took less than a minute to vote in a much ballyhooed new property law, according to reports in state-controlled media. It was a speedy finish to an agonizingly long gestation for the law, which for the first time enshrines the rights of private individuals to own property...
...These days, signatures do not matter as "nobody reads petitions and if someone does we signatories are a laughingstock", Magor says. He waits for his knuckles marked with cuts from a fistfight with "some cretin" to heal, so he could smash the one-time communist prison guard into pieces. The new era with its corrupt politicians makes him "throw up", but in the end fighting for it was worth...
...celebrate an act of courage they jointly undertook 30 years ago. In 1977, a decade after Soviet tanks had crushed the last flowering of free expression on their city's streets, these men and women signed Charter 77, a human-rights declaration demanding freedoms suppressed by the totalitarian communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia...
...them, legendary underground bard Ivan Martin Jirous, also known as Magor (loosely translated as dimwit or bonehead), thunders that he will eliminate a communist prison warder who now sits in parliament, but whom once-jailed dissidents remember for, among other things, forcing them to lick a toilet bowl...
Every year, some 3,000 delegates from every corner of China converge on Beijing for a two-week meeting of the National People's Congress, the country's legislature. The meeting is largely a sham: Although the delegates are "elected," candidates have to be approved by the ruling Communist Party, meaning that despite the occasional hiccup, the NPC passes laws required by the Party leadership. Still, although it's an exercise in pretend democracy - or maybe precisely because it is that - China's government marks the occasion with considerable pomp and ceremony, scores of scarlet banners rippling in the breeze...