Word: sichuan
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...temporary home is not a zoo but a breeding station in the Wolong (Resting Dragon) Nature Reserve, in the thickly forested mountains of China's Sichuan province. The reserve is the center of an unusual collaborative effort of Chinese and Western scientists, mostly American. Their object: to ensure the survival of Jia Jia and the thousand or so other giant pandas still found in the wild...
...pandas will face more than tummy aches. Two have already died. In 1975-76 a similar flower-and-die disaster involving the umbrella bamboo, which is in a different growth cycle, led to the deaths by starvation of 138 animals in a panda habitat on the border of Sichuan and Gansu provinces...
...responsibility system" in Sichuan has demonstrated that peasants work best when they tend their own fields. For Westerners this recognition seems equivalent to the rediscovery of the wheel. But with a crucial difference. The state, via the commune, has replaced the old landlord. It owns the fields; the peasant rents an allotted share of land; if he meets the state's quota (once called the landlord's rent), he keeps the rest. This is progress. It is harsh; yet the Great Cultural Revolution was far more cruel...
...such absolute control did not work, the new leadership is trying to transfer more authority to the provinces, more autonomy to the cities, more responsibility to the peasant villages. But, as reins are let loose, other problems sprint. How does one settle the impending dispute between the provinces of Sichuan and Hubei over how they will share the electric power from the huge dams planned in the throat of the Yangtze gorges? Or deal with the growing resistance of newly autonomous provinces to the army's network of farms, arsenals, production plants? What does the new peasant "responsibility" imply with...
...sweep of terror, China under the Cultural Revolution was the equivalent of Nazi Germany. Thugs, Red Guard bands and idealists fought in the cities, all rivaling one another to show loyalty to Mao Thought. Stories from the interior convey the sweep of the violence. In Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, the handsome old government palace was blown to bits by Red Guards; in its place they erected a new hall filled only with portraits of Mao. In Chongqing, workers fought each other with machine guns, artillery, armored cars and tanks. In Harbin, the factions used air planes to bomb each other...