Word: peasant
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Ever since Nureev defected while in Paris with the Kirov Ballet and began to be hailed there as a major star in his performances with the Marquis de Cuevas Ballet, balletomanes have dreamed of a Nureev-Fonteyn partnership. Nureev, 24, comes from a Ural peasant family, had danced with the Kirov company for ten years at the time of his defection. Ballet fans who have watched him in Paris call him the outstanding male dancer in the West-and probably in the world. A gifted soloist, he is also known as a superb partner of the kind that 42-year...
Everyone in China must belong to a factory, neighborhood, peasant or office danwei. The danwei controls your life. You introduce yourself on the telephone by identifying the danwei to which you belong. The neighborhood danwei assigns you to a job; then you belong to the factory danwei, which decides when you can have a baby and how large an apartment you live in. It can also transfer you to a danwei in a distant province and your wife to another. And so, up the line, to absolute control...
Since such absolute control did not work, the new leadership is trying to transfer more authority to the provinces, more autonomy to the cities, more responsibility to the peasant villages. But, as reins are let loose, other problems sprint. How does one settle the impending dispute between the provinces of Sichuan and Hubei over how they will share the electric power from the huge dams planned in the throat of the Yangtze gorges? Or deal with the growing resistance of newly autonomous provinces to the army's network of farms, arsenals, production plants? What does the new peasant "responsibility" imply...
...hours: peasant girls trained to make sophisticated oscilloscopes and circuit boards; forced labor cutting hard rock with mallet and chisel; then young women, treated as beasts; then the pride of Chinese technology...
...dogma drove the spike into the flesh of the country, even the revered ancients of the revolution were pushed to death. Li Ta, one of the original founding fathers of the Communist Party of China in 1921, was "struggled" against until he committed suicide. He Long, a Robin Hood peasant bandit who became a marshal of the Red Army and helped conquer south-central China for the revolution, had been a hero. He Long suffered from diabetes, but the hospital denied him water, then injected him with glucose instead of insulin. So he died...