Word: pasts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past year has been a momentous one for American-Jewish-Taiwanese singer Alisa Galper. After her win on the Taiwan talent show One Million Star (the island's answer to American Idol), she was quickly signed by Universal Music Taiwan, who immediately began touting her as "Asia's Rihanna." The comparison isn't too fanciful, and what she lacks in the Barbadian singer's rhythmic ease, she makes up for in range and diversity...
...China is on a roll, particularly when viewed over time. Visiting or living in China every year over the past three decades, I have had the personal opportunity to witness dramatic transformations. When I first went to China in 1979, vestiges of the Cultural Revolution were still evident: revolutionary slogans painted on walls and pockmarks on university buildings from bullets and howitzer shells shot by dueling Red Guards. Camouflaged, but just as evident, were the personal scars borne by intellectuals and officials whom I met at the time. I heard stories of beatings and humiliations, confiscations of personal possessions...
...Three decades later, Chinese society has fully blossomed. Chinese today experience a wide variety of personal freedoms in daily life that they and their ancestors had never known. Chinese state and society have also reconnected with the past, emphasizing Confucian and Buddhist values. More than 200 million people have been lifted out of poverty and the members of a growing middle class with disposable income travel abroad, invest in the stock market, dine out and decorate their stylish apartments with furniture purchased from stores like Ikea. Access to education has become far more widespread. Some 21 million students attend university...
...million or so migrants. Income disparities (as measured by the Gini coefficient) are now approaching the highest in the world. China has again become a stratified society - just what Mao sought to eliminate. Still, given the unprecedented scale and nature of China's socioeconomic change over the past 30 years, the country's relative stability is commendable...
...structure and essential nature of the system remains largely the same, the substance and process of politics has changed quite a lot. The leadership and the 76 million party members are better educated and their recruitment and promotion is much more meritocratic. Competence is now rewarded. In the past, there existed only two exit paths from officialdom: purges and death. Now mandatory retirement is firmly implemented. Instead of being a totalitarian party dominated by a single leader, the CCP today is an authoritarian party with a collective leadership. The leaders themselves - at least those I have witnessed - are now remarkably...