Word: wen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...opportunity to show that China could be forward thinking, and not just a prisoner of history. Since then the two nations have toned down the hostile rhetoric and found patches of common ground-like stopping North Korea's nuclear program. The good vibes culminated with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's trip to Japan on April 11 to 13, the first high-level Chinese visit in nearly seven years. But while it was all smiles and bows in Tokyo this week, China and Japan remain wary rivals at best. "The two sides realized they hadn't talked with each other...
...Were Wen Jiabao to visit Yasukuni in the course of his visit to Japan this week, he would find the Shinto shrine's cherry trees in late bloom, raining white petals with every breeze. But such serenity would quickly be disrupted by the contents of a shrine that honors Japanese war criminals, and of its adjacent Yushukan museum, which rewrites 20th century history to place much of the blame on China for its devastation by the Japanese military in the 1930s, describing the Nanking massacre simply as an "incident...
...course, Wen would never go to Yasukuni, because China sees the shrine as a symbol of unrepentant Japanese imperialism. Beijing has made Yasukuni a litmus test - it was only when new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe became purposefully vague on visiting the shrine that icy Sino-Japanese relations began to thaw. Yushukan perpetuates the lie that the war was unavoidable, and that the 5,843 mostly young men who lost their lives as kamikazes died for a transcendent cause, died to save Japan. The museum is a celebration of wasted lives...
...consideration. This year, in an evident move to quash dissent, all discussion of the property law was banned. When the respected weekly Caijing defied the ban and drafted a cover story on the law, authorities forced the magazine to drop the story at the last minute. That Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao were forced to go to such extreme measures to ensure the law wasn't scuppered again this year is a worrying sign that the conservatives still wield substantial influence...
...delegates dutifully approved several other measures with equal celerity, then trooped out under the imposing columns of the Great Hall of the People and boarded scores of buses waiting in an otherwise deserted Tiananmen Square. In a subsequent press conference before hundreds of reporters and photographers, Chinese Premier Wen wasn't asked about the property law. He was, however, asked about an article he penned recently that appeared to argue that it could be a century before China was ready for democracy. While Wen didn't confirm that interpretation exactly, he was at pains to stress that China's transition...