Word: reformer
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...took over the obscure House Administration Committee. In 2000 he ran a fierce campaign to leapfrog over a more senior Republican to take over Ways and Means. Thomas quickly established a reputation for intelligence--impressing and confounding colleagues with long-winded explanations of everything from car engines to Medicare reform--and for independence. That quality has now made him Bush's biggest new problem. --With reporting by Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson and Karen Tumulty/Washington
...inscription, "Go with an Easy Heart." The most liberal leader China's Communist Party has ever known died in seclusion on Jan. 17 after spending more than 15 years under house arrest in this modest home on Fuqiang Lane. Many ordinary Chinese remember Zhao Ziyang, who advocated political reform and opposed the Tiananmen Square massacre, as a symbol of their country's democratic aspirations. His former comrades, by contrast, had tried never to mention him at all. Zhao became a political ghost, but one with a rare power. The mere utterance of his name, everybody knew, could reopen debate about...
...Emphasizing the indoctrination of students?for that is what an improvement in political thinking means?is not the kind of reform many people expected from Hu. Although his rise to power betrayed little of his political leanings, Hu had left hints that he was more open to political change than his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. He rose through the ranks of the Party's more liberal organs, such as the Communist Youth League, helped terminate a crackdown on intellectuals in the early 1980s, and urged high-ranking cadres to study foreign political systems in the 1990s. Since assuming China...
...important speech in September to 194 members of the Central Committee that was never made public, Hu set out his stall. According to someone who read a copy, Hu said China would never have its own Gorbachev, referring to the Soviet Union leader whose commitment to openness and reform in the 1980s hastened the end of Communist Party rule there. In the speech, according to the source, Hu railed against people who "fly the banner of democracy and political reform" and said the Party must be "pre-emptive" and "strike when they rear their heads...
...those wishing to see real political reform, the early signs are hardly encouraging. Hu, for example, has strengthened a secretive institution that Zhao had tried to abolish. From the national level all the way down to the smallest rural township, the Party maintains "politics and law committees" to coordinate law enforcement and instruct judges on court decisions. Only a month after taking charge of the Party in 2002, Hu inserted the head of China's national police force, Zhou Yongkang, as vice chairman of the Central Commission of Political Science and Law?the country's highest-level politics...