Word: li
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Actually the price reforms have much further to go. China at the moment has a two-tier system of state-set and market prices, sometimes on the same goods. Vice Premier Li Peng estimates that Peking still fixes prices on 70% of the products sold by state industries. There are other reminders of the heavy presence of the state. At Zhongshan University in Canton, 30% of the graduates are assigned to their first jobs by the State Labor Ministry in Peking. The remaining 70% are placed by university authorities after consultation with state industries and agencies; the graduates' wishes...
...objectives unless there is a clear-eyed sense of where China has been and where it is going. That is not simply a matter of understanding China's formal centers of power. What matters in China today is happening on the ground--in the lives of people like Liu Li...
...Li has never met anyone who wears the clothes she makes. For nearly two years the 20-year-old rice farmer's daughter has worked at the Chaida Garment Factory in the steamy southern Chinese city of Kaiping, stitching seams on winter jackets for such companies as Timberland. Amid the clatter of sewing machines, surrounded by mountains of down vests headed for the U.S., Liu tries to imagine the people whose wardrobes have given her a job. "They must be very tall and very rich," she muses. "But beyond that, I really can't picture what their lives are like...
...opposite of chaos is stability, and for the 16 years since the massacre near Tiananmen Square in 1989, China has enjoyed more stable leadership and prosperity than at any time in the past 150 years. Incomes have grown, and millions of lives--like that of Liu Li--have improved beyond imagination. To be sure, China is not one big, bucolic Iowa; all sorts of tensions over land use and workers' rights and free speech and endemic corruption and environmental despoliation loom, and they come into view in a startling number of riots and protests--big ones too. But compared with...
...millions, the wealth so evident in cities like Shanghai and Beijing is a prize continually being yanked out of reach. Economic reforms have reduced the entitlements to a steady job and basic health care that were enjoyed by earlier generations. "Life in China is much more uncertain now," says Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "Economic instability can cause social instability...