Word: humanism
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...being blitzed with new students. In fields such as engineering and economics, there simply aren't enough high-caliber teachers to go around. "China lacks the educational infrastructure to keep pace with the frantic demand for education," says Tang Min, chief China economist at the Asian Development Bank. A human-resources executive who helped produce a report on the subject for the American Chamber of Commerce in China puts it more bluntly: "the vast majority of [Chinese] kids go to second- or third-rate schools - diploma mills - and are just unprepared to enter a very competitive job market. They...
...Employers say the incidents illustrate two broader problems in China's higher-education system. Education is such a bedrock value that "kids who really shouldn't even be in college go anyway, and then expect a good-paying job when they graduate," says the human-resources executive. Two years ago, the central government implicitly acknowledged this problem when it announced a plan to increase the number and quality of vocational schools throughout the country, hoping to siphon off some of the kids going to universities while still providing them with decent job opportunities. Employers say it's too early...
...founding myths, the Japanese Emperor is considered the direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu; it was in Emperor Hirohito's sacred name that Japanese soldiers fought in World War II. When a battle-vanquished Hirohito announced in 1946 that he was not, in fact, a god in human form, some Japanese distanced themselves from the animist tradition. While shrines remained and festivals continued, Shinto was initially condemned by the occupying Americans as yet another ideology that had led Japan to wartime disaster. But centuries of tradition are hard to eschew. Today, for film director Naomi Kawase, who was raised...
...Chinese standards, it was a calm response. "Those foreign protesters appear to have been handled with a relative level of restraint by security forces," says Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, an NGO based in New York City. "In the eyes of the Chinese government, the priority isn't to punish those individuals - they want them removed from the scene and off their hands. They're an embarrassment...
...while foreign demonstrators have simply been sent out of the country, domestic activists face much harsher scrutiny. Human Rights Watch says there have been at least five cases of the authorities blocking Chinese citizens from staging protests during the Games. A legal activist from southeastern Fujian province was arrested on Aug. 11 after applying to protest corruption and official abuses of power in Beijing. Ji Sizun, 58, hasn't been seen since, the group says. "He posed no threat to social stability or harmony. He wasn't challenging the legitimacy of the government or the Chinese Communist Party," says Kine...