Word: railings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crush of people in front of him. For the past year the 27-year-old has worked for a cosmetics factory in this southern Chinese city, and now he's trying to get home to see his mother near Suzhou in eastern China, 20 hours away by rail. He's going to miss his connection. Around him hundreds of people, all hoping to find seats, push toward an opening in the metal fence surrounding the station as a police officer shouts into a megaphone, calling for order. The hands of the giant neon green station clock tick closer...
...more than half a million travelers who were stuck outside the station in the closing days of January after some of the most severe weather in decades brought China to a virtual standstill. Unusually frigid weather and heavy snowfall severed crucial transport arteries including major rail lines, highways and airports; power outages rolled across 17 provinces, forcing factories and businesses to close. The southern part of the country, which hadn't seen snow like this since 1954, was woefully unprepared. Even more northerly cities such as Shanghai, which is near the coast, were staggered by winter's wallop. At least...
...Lunar New Year or Spring Festival, which begins Feb. 7, is China's most important holiday. Each year the nation's roads and rail lines are swamped by the world's largest annual human migration. Factories and mines close down for as long as two weeks, providing the year's only chance to return home for many of the 200 million migrant workers who drive the country's booming economy...
...avoided the worst of the weather, it is the site of some of the most vivid scenes of adversity. The city, capital of the country's most prosperous province, is a major transit hub through which millions of migrants would have to pass on their homeward journey. Road and rail outages have left as many as half a million stranded here. The main rail link between Guangzhou and Beijing was disabled when heavy snow and ice in Hunan province knocked out power lines last weekend, leaving at least 136 trains stranded, according to Xinhua. Several highways north out of Guangzhou...
...Creative would have been to announce a Great American Renewal, to announce - for starters - that we're going to attack the looming recession by unleashing an army of unemployed construction and manufacturing laborers to insulate every public building in America, replace every incandescent lightbulb, rebuild the rail system for high-speed travel and start building solar and wind farms to provide electricity for our military installations and every other federal building. Or whatever. But something big, something that recognizes that the word United, which appears prominently in the name of our country, is probably the biggest Democratic idea...