Word: tens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Strange, surely, but about the only truly odd tradition I encounter during five weeks in China. By plane, train and car, from the prospering coastal provinces to the country's heartland, where the agricultural reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping ten years ago began a miraculous economic transformation, to Beijing and a village not far from the capital that is infinitely poorer than towns a thousand miles farther inland, I find little that is charming or especially exotic. Just a mostly drab and dusty country, a perfect backdrop for the tedious and too often unrewarding nature of daily life. Still...
...college, 'Happiness and sorrow flow along the same river.' Do we deplore what the army did in Tiananmen? Of course. Do we wish the government were different, more democratic, more humane? Of course. But what would you have us do? Take to the streets? For what? We have had ten relatively good years of economic growth and domestic tranquillity. Yes, there is some retrenchment now. But consider the previous ten years, the time of the Cultural Revolution, when everything was at its worst. Do we want to return to that? Take to the streets against those with the guns...
...most famous man in China this summer seems to be Xiao Bing, the "rumormonger" who was sentenced to ten years in prison for "exaggerating" the Tiananmen death toll in an interview with ABC News (he said 20,000 had died). Absolutely everyone knows the tale of Xiao. "Xiao Bing makes a point about the future," says an economics professor in Chengdu. "The people in Beijing were there -- and so may be very willing to take to the streets again. But we elsewhere are more cautious. It's not that the propaganda campaign is working. Most of us know full well...
...describing a social contract, abhorrent to an American but understandable, even comforting, to many Chinese. In exchange for letting the rulers rule, the subjects will be permitted by the regime to continue the economic progress they have enjoyed for ten years...
...After ten years of a bloody civil war that has claimed some 70,000 lives, there are no eternal optimists left in El Salvador. Blind hope went out of fashion after then President Jose Napoleon Duarte met with failure in three meetings with the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. Since the last talks in 1987, the two sides have dug in with renewed determination. Now, four months after Alfredo Cristiani, 41, succeeded Duarte as President, there is new talk of reconciliation. Representatives of the government and the F.M.L.N. met two weeks ago in Mexico City...