Word: westernizes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...making major foreign investments, Beijing has gone on the prowl for resources and underpriced assets across the globe. Cash-rich Chinese companies, backed by soft loans from state banks and re-energized by lower labor costs as jobs dry up, are descending on Central Asia, Africa and even Western Europe to snap up assets. State mining company Chinalco has tabled a $19.5 billion bid for British-Australian resources giant Rio Tinto. Beijing has launched a fund to buy distressed assets worldwide, inked a deal with Brazil's Petrobras and provided Russia with a $25 billion loan in exchange...
...Beijing is also taking political advantage of the global economic meltdown. Western countries are strikingly reticent these days about criticizing China's human-rights abuses, not least, perhaps, because Beijing has, for the first time, started warning the West not to take for granted its massive investments in their currencies and bonds. Capitalizing on this grace period, China has shored up its ties to repressive states such as Iran by signing a $3 billion natural-gas deal, challenged American ships off the coast of China and cracked down hard in Tibet for the 50th anniversary of the 1959 uprising...
...China's leaders are using the crisis to point out what they regard as flaws in Western capitalism. On a visit to Europe in January, Premier Wen Jiabao called China a "great power" and then criticized "an unsustainable model'' of development in the West that partnered a lack of savings and "blind pursuit of profit." Vice President Xi Jinping, on a recent trip to Mexico, blasted his hosts for harping on China's human-rights record, saying "there are a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country...
...this hypocrisy casts the Arab world in a very negative light. But, while the Arab reaction was perhaps expected, the nonchalance with which the great Western powers have dealt with the matter is at least as disturbing, given their official opposition to Bashir’s acts. Rather than boycotting the Arab summit, Secretary General Ban Ki Moon appeared and delivered only a brief denouncement of Bashir regarding his expulsion of 13 aid groups from the country. Indeed, the Western response has on the whole been lacking. Reaction from world leaders was limited to calls for the Sudanese government...
...ended when the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over responsibility for governing Iraq to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004 which ended the occupation of Iraq. "Protected person status is never a permanent status as it applies only during circumstances of armed conflict or occupation," a Western official says...