Word: shanghaied
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...capital after another to pitch his innovative and audacious project to government leaders, curious techies, education advocates, NGOs and anyone else who will listen. But even as he was criss-crossing Rome in a hectic 14 hours earlier this week, Negroponte's attention was fixed on a factory near Shanghai. That's where within a week - after all the development and design and gigabytes of both hype and scepticism - mass production will begin on the state-of-the-art, low-price computer that its backers are billing as nothing less than the most ambitious education project in world history...
...Taiwan-based laptop manufacturer Quanta will begin by turning out 44,000 units a week at a recently expanded factory in Changshu, northwest of Shanghai. Negroponte said some 300,000 orders have been booked so far. The goal is to be turning out a million laptops a month by mid-2008. That avalanche, the critics will say, better start rolling soon. But Negroponte doesn't seem to mind the doubters. Four years ago, he ran into Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell computer makers at the World Economic Forum and told him - again - about his concept for making inexpensive...
...year-old Zhang Jun is changing all that. The newly promoted deputy director of the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Theatre, Zhang believes the art form can be salvaged to appeal to audiences in the era of roaming broadband and speed punk. During the past two years, he and his team have compressed epic Kunqu scripts until they play about as long as the average movie, and introduced other innovations. The changes are finally starting to draw respectable audiences of curious Shanghainese. At last summer's three-week run of Palace of Eternal Youth, a Tang dynasty love tragedy, two thirds...
...take a modern approach and employ the right marketing, the chance for Kunqu is there," says Zhang, who with his artfully shredded jeans and spiky hair looks more like a pop artist than an opera devotee. In fact, he is a former member of Wind, a popular Shanghai hip-hop outfit, but says he has always had a special affinity for Kunqu, which he began studying at the age of 8. "It was a torturous experience," he recalls. To train for the acrobatic maneuvers that are sometimes incorporated into a Kunqu performance, "we were forced to squat for hours...
...still early days. Zhang's predecessor at the theater, Cai Zhengren, 66, says Kunqu "is like a person trying to stand up after many years of paralysis - it still needs support." But help is appearing. The city of Shanghai has started paying two-thirds of the tuition for students pursuing high-level Kunqu studies - grants that encouraged a sixfold increase in applications from...