Word: shanlis
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...appetite for virtually every metal was voracious, they got stuck with stiff price increases. The deal could give Chinalco, which already owns 9.3% of Rio, better access to the company's choicest deposits of copper, iron ore and bauxite. The secretary-general of China's Iron and Steel Association, Shan Shanghua, has already hinted that Chinese buyers could have some additional clout. This rankles some of Rio's major shareholders. "It's up to Rio to convince us that this does not transfer key pricing power over a key commodity to a big customer," says a large institutional shareholder. Chinalco...
...March 1979, in a provincial Chinese town named Muddy River, a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary, Gu Shan, is executed, after 10 years of imprisonment, for publicly losing her faith in communism. At the denunciation ceremony, which the entire town is obliged to attend, it becomes clear that her vocal cords have been severed so that she cannot cry out counterrevolutionary slogans. But like a stone cast in water, the ripples of this execution spread out wide and The Vagrants - Yiyun Li's first novel after her extravagantly praised and miraculously poised prizewinning debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers...
...Chief among them are Shan's parents, Mrs. Gu, devastated by her loss, and Teacher Gu, bewildered by the nature and personality of the child he has fathered and retreating further into the arid haven of his intellect in order to cope with her demise. But there are less obvious people the death marks: Kai, a public announcer on a government radio station that spews out continuous propaganda; Kai's husband Han, a man on the make in the provincial government, who harbors dreams of greater influence; and Nini, a deformed girl, eldest of six daughters, who is nothing more...
...some accidental - between these lives and gives each of them vast, rich interiorities, news reaches Muddy River of Beijing's Democracy Wall movement (in which reformists posted calls for political change on a wall in the city center). It is followed by more shocking news: just before her execution, Shan's kidneys had been harvested for an influential Communist Party official who needed them. A fledgling protest haltingly tries to gather momentum in Muddy River - but when the democratic movement in Beijing is suppressed, Muddy River's hopes of change are also routed brutally...
...Staff writer Shan Wang can be reached at wang38@fas.harvard.edu...