Word: qing
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...Chinese are not sporty people who tote racquets or join gyms. China's international athletic success is about nationalism; it is the physical expression of a resurgent country, a rebuttal to its history as the "sick man of Asia" exploited by colonialists during the waning days of the Qing dynasty. The average Chinese?for whom supporting the motherland in athletic competition is one of the few instances in which mass, spontaneous celebration is allowed?is conditioned to see sporting victories as a metaphor for China's ascendance. "Our current national sports policy is called 'Winning Pride at the Olympics,'" says...
...Written by first-time author Li Cunxin, Dancer is a poor-boy-makes-good memoir populated by a strange cast of historical figures. Chief among them is the rabid Jiang Qing, Mao's infamous wife, who was a fierce proponent of the Great Helmsman's postulate that "There is in fact no such thing as art ... detached from or independent of politics." To Madame Mao, all presentation was propaganda; she drafted armies of performers to edify the masses through highly politicized operas and films, such as the epic revolutionary musical The East is Red. She also revived the once outlawed...
...plane incident that marked the first foreign policy crisis of the Bush administration - Madame Chiang was raised as a Christian and educated at Wellesley College where she graduated in 1917. Her sister, Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the nationalist leader who created modern China after overthrowing the Qing imperial dynasty in 1911. May-ling married the young Kuomintang (KMT) general Chiang Kai-shek in 1926, a year after he'd taken control of the party and the year before the onset of a bloody civil conflict between the KMT and Mao's communists - a conflict that also marked...
...years); two pages later, without respecifying her geographic boundaries, she writes that "out of the welter of dialects only one written language had emerged." What about Tibetan, Uighur, Mongolian? Chang is particularly hard on the Manchus, the northern-dwelling nomads who conquered China in 1644 and established the Qing dynasty. Chang correctly notes that the Manchus required their Han subjects to wear their hair in queues. But she calls this "a badge of their humiliation"?failing to mention that the Manchus wore their hair the same way. For someone so aware of the dangers of misrepresentation, Chang ought to know...
...mess with the Jackie Chan Hollywood formula. It teams him with a goofy American?Owen Wilson here, Chris Tucker in Rush Hour?who sasses his way into predicaments that Chan must get him out of. Knights, like its predecessor Shanghai Noon, is a western, the U.S. equivalent of the Qing dynasty martial-arts films that made Chan famous back home. Wilson's Roy O'Bannion is the self-legendizing cowboy, and Chan's Chon Wang (sounds like John Wayne) is essentially Roy's stern Indian sidekick. That's apt, since, when he's not smiling, Jackie's face...