Word: eras
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Passive-Voice Era It's probably not a surprise that China is a bit ambivalent about the Western world order. Its association with it, after all, began violently: the shock of the Opium Wars 170 years ago, a collision that led to what the Chinese think of as a century of humiliation during which nine foreign nations tromped through the country. Americans often ask why Chinese care so much about sovereignty. To which Chinese say, Come back and ask after you've been invaded by nine countries. (See "Could Obama Get Around China's 'Great Firewall...
...Little wonder, then, to find most Chinese still very alive to sensations of weakness, whether inside or outside the country. This was surely the worry that the Chinese media fingered when they declared that the 2009 phrase of the year was beishidai, or "the passive-voice era." The phrase, state-run Xinhua news later explained, "is being employed by Chinese to express a sentiment deeper than just the passive voice: they are using it to convey a sense of helplessness in deciding one's own fate." There's a sharp edge to this phrase's popularity, since it was first...
...pressing for Beijing. Though exports collapsed last year as the world plunged into recession - China's current account surplus declined by about half as a percentage of its overall economy - that adjustment phase is over. Exports will again add to GDP growth in China this year, and in an era of high unemployment in the U.S. and Europe, the potential for a serious protectionist backlash is very real. (Indeed, a team from Treasury slipped quietly into Beijing recently to make just this point.) For administrations going back to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, it's been a tried a true...
Elements of the Kyrgyz nomadic heritage still shape much of this largely pastoral and agrarian society. The brand of Sufi Islam practiced by the majority of the population has blended easily with sky- and nature-worshipping traditions of an earlier era. Though now illegal, the distasteful custom of wife-kidnapping - where a woman is unsuspectingly and often forcibly seized and taken to her husband-to-be's home - perseveres in parts of the country. (See a TIME piece on whether Moscow subverted the upheaval in Kyrgyzstan...
...outspoken civil society. However, by the mid-1990s, Askar Akayev, president since the republic's inception, took an autocratic turn. He shielded business monopolies owned by friends and family and cracked down on journalists who pried into allegations of corruption - all the while, Kyrgyzstan's economy floundered, its Soviet-era industry and agriculture withering away while tens of thousands quit the country for low-paying jobs in resource-rich Kazakhstan or Russia. In February 2005, after a round of allegedly rigged elections, popular sentiment boiled over and precipitated mass protests the following month dubbed the "Tulip Revolution" that saw Akayev...