Word: shensi
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Nation's Birthplace. China's 22 provinces baffle foreigners because so many of them sound alike (Honan, Hunan; Kiangsu, Kiangsi; Shansi, Shensi). Most typical of the northern provinces is perhaps Hopeh, which contains the capital city of Peking. From its rugged border with Manchuria, the province runs down in a shelving plain to the shallow Gulf of Chihli. Very few eminent Communists come from Hopeh or its neighboring province of Shansi, which is noted for sacred mountains and such spectacular cave temples as Yun Kang, where a mile-long cliff face has been chiseled into thousands of Buddhist...
...when Edgar Snow evaded Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomingtang blockade of the Communist controlled Shensi province and first met Mao Tse Tung and his band of revolutionaries, most people in the outside world doubted that these Chinese "soviets" even existed. Snow's prediction of a Kuomingtang-Comunist alliance was widely discounted; his warning of a post-war victory for the revolution was almost completely ignored. In fact, Russia as well as the West scoffed at this so-called Communist movement, which possessed a peasant rather than prolctarian base. Up through the 1949 debacle, the Soviet Union continued to support Chiang...
...hits of the opera season this summer was "Blood and Tears of Hatred." In it, according to the Peking Review, "a poor peasant family, suffering from natural calamities and the tyranny of the Kuomintang regime, is on the verge of starvation. Its members flee to the Northern Shensi Border Region where they are rescued by the Communist Party and find a way out of their bitter plight." The opera is produced by the Modern Opera Group of the China Railway Workers' Cultural Troupe...
...parley with their two other brothers, Run Ji and Run Di. At issue: whether or not to sell their last remaining family possession, a dilapidated theater. They decided to sell their house instead and live in the theater, managed to put together a cumbersome stage melodrama called Man from Shensi, which inexplicably became a hit. One reason: the first night, the hero leaped into the air, fell through rotten floor boards. The audience laughed so hard that the brothers made the crash part of the play...
Efficiency fell off so badly that in Shensi province, members of four communes assigned to reap grain left nearly 300 tons of wheat to waste in the fields. Inevitably, too. the peasants lost interest in selling their crops; according to the Peking People's Daily, the amount of produce kept by China's peasants for their own use jumped 146% last year...