Word: sovietizers
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...global economy," said Zhu. "The U.S. and Japan are no longer the global-growth engine." At the end of last year, China officially adjusted the size of its economy in an attempt to better reflect the plethora of activity taking place that wasn't counted in previous, Soviet-style central-planning statistics. The upshot was a 16.8% increase in gross domestic product that pushed China's economy past France's into fifth place worldwide--just behind the U.S., Japan, Germany and Britain...
...East, its name is China," go the folk song's stirring lyrics. By the time the final standings were tallied in the Olympic competition, the Zhangs' choice of music seemed particularly prescient. Although Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin won the 12th consecutive pairs gold for Russia (or, previously, the Soviet Union), the Chinese nabbed the silver (Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao), bronze (Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo) and fourth place (Pang Qing and Tong Jian)?all in a sport China first entered little more than two decades ago. And China's emerging dominance of pairs skating is about to receive...
...ascendant Chinese have modeled their figure-skating program?and, indeed, their entire sports system?after that of the very country they hope to dethrone. Just as the Soviet Union once measured its worth on the international stage through Olympic medals, so now does China. Coaches comb the countryside looking for suitable kids for the nation's thousands of Soviet-style sports academies, where athletes are given free training in return for intense physical devotion. Even though China has no tradition of ice and snow sports and only started competing in the Winter Olympics in 1980, it won eight medals...
...Russia, by contrast, is struggling to keep its Olympic luster. After the Soviet Union fell, sports funding dried up. With no income to support them, some athletes found refuge in the crime world. Others, who might normally have passed on their knowledge to the next generation, simply left the country, with top coaches Tatiana Tarasova and Tamara Moskvina both settling in America. Russia went from 23 medals at the 1994 Lillehammer Games to 13 at Salt Lake City in 2002. After Russia's uninspired showing at the last Winter Games, President Vladimir Putin lamented the country's parlous medical state...
Martin did so, learning German and Russian along the way to conduct background research. Martin was intrigued enough to continue pursuing Soviet history...