Word: peasant
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...more serious tale is Yan Dang Mountain. A peasant uprising in the 7th century has put the Sui dynasty on the defensive, forcing a retreat to Yan Dang Mountain. The forces of yellow (the empire) and blue (the peasants) clash in a kaleidoscope of acrobatic encounters, until finally the rebels vault over the defending walls and capture the stronghold. The athletic skills displayed in this and other parts of the program could win gold medals in a dozen Olympics, and the brilliantly garbed Chinese players have discovered what may be a new art form - the somersault. They do fast flip...
...hostages were held, the President asked about the Iranian guards stationed inside the embassy, near the wall that the commandos intended to scale. Were they volunteers or conscripts? he wondered. If they were radicals, Carter explained, he could go along with killing them, but if they were only peasant conscripts, he wanted them knocked out temporarily. Carter was gripped by what Historian Thomas Bailey has called the "tyranny of the trivial...
Economically, the new regime has concocted a potpourri of socialism and private enterprise, a program dictated less by ideology than dire need. When they took over last year, the Sandinistas inherited a $1.5 billion national debt, $1.3 billion in war damages and an impoverished, largely peasant population. The government launched a number of ambitious reforms, from a sweeping agrarian redistribution and nationalization of banks to a literacy campaign that has already taught some 600,000 people to read and reduced the country's illiteracy rate from 50% to about...
...directly influenced the coup that last October toppled El Salvador's own dictator, General Carlos Humberto Romero. In a desperate attempt to pre-empt a San-dinista-style revolution-with Washington's encouragement-a group of moderate military officers seized power. Then, in an effort to satisfy peasant expectations and calm labor unrest, the five-man military-civilian junta made its own attempt at reform. It expropriated some large estates and nationalized the core of the country's banking system...
...different. On the remote Long Chi (Dragon's Pond) commune, perched on the lower slopes of 9,000-ft-high Mount Emei, the soil is rocky and dry. Farming is confined to low-yielding terraces that have been carved out of the hills and planted primarily with corn. Peasant incomes are one-third of those on the wealthy Jin Ma commune; they average $44 a year, more than half of which is distributed in grain rather than cash. No one starves, but the commune members eat meat only once a week...