Word: li
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...many ways, Li embodies the Chinese dream: poor country boy works hard, becomes the only one from his school to go to college and makes it in the big city. But Li is concerned about those who didn't make it: the 100 million rural inhabitants--including his own parents--who have fled exorbitant taxes and dwindling agricultural prices and flooded the cities in search of work. Those migrants are what Li calls "ghosts in the city." "They have built the cities that China is proud of," he says, "but they are barely treated as human beings...
Bitter memories shape the way Li Shasha, one the nation's youngest best-selling authors, writes about the contradictions of modern China. Li's father left his village in Hunan province to toil in the southern factories that power the nation's export-led growth. When Li was 13, his father came to the school where he boarded. The watchman, apparently not believing that the shabby migrant could be a student's father, didn...
...Li decided to write about their plight, and his accounts of the rural poor resonate with Chinese readers. This year he was nominated for the country's top literary award for debut authors. But China's publishers, wary of offending the censors, haven't been as encouraging. The first edition of Li's 2004 coming-of-age novel, Red X, quickly sold out, but there has not been a second printing. Li, 23, has refused the publisher's request to edit out what it called "morally offensive" passages. Li can't yet support his parents so that they can quit...
...part because Wal-Mart is spreading a management style that many of its young Chinese employees find liberating. In most Chinese companies, managers typically share little information with employees, and promotions usually depend on whom you know. At the Sam's Club outside Beijing, it's different. Alan Li, 31, the store's deputy manager, encourages workers to contribute ideas about efficiency, and managers tell employees what's going on. "It doesn't matter who you know here," says Li, a high school graduate from a peasant family in rural China. "All that matters is your work." In a country...
...Some of the news in the book is not new. Mao's womanizing, gourmandizing and peculiar personal habits?his aversion to bathing and teeth brushing, for instance?surfaced in the entertaining 1994 memoir by his physician Li Zhisui. Evidence of Mao's Machiavellian ruthlessness has been seeping out of China for years. Journalist Jasper Becker reported in his 1996 book Hungry Ghosts that China's granaries were bulging during the 1958-61 famine, the worst in history...