Word: mainlander
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China's sports system, modeled on the Stalinist athletic machine, wasn't designed to celebrate the individual. Many mainland athletes, particularly divers and gymnasts, are plucked from normal life around first grade and deposited into sports schools, where they train up to nine hours a day and spend what little downtime they have imbibing communist propaganda. So it was for Tian Liang and Guo Jingjing, Chinese divers who are favored to win gold medals in Athens. It was the state, after measuring their narrow hips and flexible tendons, that decided the couple would somersault into the water for a living...
...glorify the Communist Party," says Tor Petersen, co-founder of Zou Marketing, a sports-marketing firm in Shanghai. "But in the past couple of years, athletes have been allowed to express themselves as individuals, even promoting brands instead of the state." Indeed, more often than not, the mainland's most popular athletes are now picked by the free market. Liu Xuan, a pert gold medalist at the Games in Sydney, works as a model and starred as a plucky migrant worker in a movie called Far from Home. Fellow gymnast Li Xiaoshuang has recorded an album of pop ditties...
...Social reforms have also revolutionized China's diving team. Guo and Tian may not say whether they are dating, but she keeps photos of him stored on her cell phone and he squired her to meet his parents last year. While the mainland's table tennis authorities recently kicked players off the national team for daring to date each other, the national diving squad maintains a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on romance. "I don't approve of athletes dating because it can interfere with their concentration," says Zhong Shaozhen, Guo's coach for the past six years...
...Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, two formidable American entrepreneurs, aim to transform Macau into a first-class tourist destination for millions of Asians, mainland Chinese in particular. Adelson and Wynn are credited with reviving Las Vegas' flagging fortunes in the 1990s by building a succession of spectacular complexes that combine hotels, entertainment and gambling facilities, among them the posh Venetian (Adelson's best-known resort) and the Mirage (a project by Wynn). Today, with separate gaming licenses from the Macau government, the pair are racing to duplicate their U.S. success. Adelson, 72, built the Sands Macau, so he is first...
...think so. "Risks? I don't think there are any," he says. And he might be right. Half of the world's population lives less than a six-hour flight away from Macau. The city has always attracted gamblers from Hong Kong and a few high rollers from mainland China. Beijing is now allowing more Chinese to visit Macau independently instead of in tightly controlled tour groups. A surge is under way?the number of mainland tourists to the former colony nearly doubled between 2000 and 2003. Last year, gaming revenues at Macau's 12 casinos increased...