Word: li
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When Li Shuchang became a Communist Party chief in the northeastern town of Yingkou, his family quickly prospered. Li named a son to be deputy director of the local industry and commerce bureau. Li's son-in-law became deputy secretary of the Communist Youth League, and his daughter rose from typist to police-department junior official. But when more than a dozen cousins and other clan members also gained influential posts, outraged city leaders acted. They sacked Li last month, suspended his party membership, and warned all local party members to take heed of his example...
...Li's fall reflects the latest Chinese attack on the ancient bureaucratic practice of dispensing jobs and favors to friends and family members. After flourishing for centuries of imperial rule, nepotism still thrives under avowedly classless Communism. Known as taizi pai, or the princes' faction, the children of leaders attend the best schools, get the best jobs and are allowed to travel abroad. "They are always one step ahead of the pack," complains a Peking University graduate student. The privileged range from Vice Premier Li Peng, 59, the adopted son of the late Premier Chou En-lai, to junior officials...
...lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again." Lines like that were once the cynosure of adolescents and the despair of writers like Ernest Hemingway, who called their creator, Thomas Wolfe, a "glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice . . . the over-bloated Li'l Abner of literature...
Students are also being singled out for a clampdown. All Chinese universities have launched new ideological indoctrination courses with the spring term. Vice Premier Li Peng, a conservative who chairs the state Education Commission, said last week that only those with "political integrity are to be regarded as qualified students." Political tests for students were last seen during the Cultural Revolution. Another top education official called last week for students to be sent to factories and farms to be "integrated with reality and physical labor" -- another Maoist prescription...
...Li sees the demonstrations as pointless because, he says, he does not think there is a need for greater political freedom. "In China you have the right to think, but you cannot do everything. Just like in the States there are many people who worship Hitler, but they are not allowed to practice Nazism...