Word: yu
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...Seoul headquarters to analyze reliability issues, sometimes bringing in a whole car and lifting it up on a hydraulic platform to get a firsthand look. Likewise, the company's 68,000 workers are encouraged to make suggestions for improving quality in regular factory-floor meetings. Late last year, Yu Seung Byul, a quality inspector in Hyundai's Asan factory in Korea, invented an improved method for detecting missing bolts and brackets in hard-to-see nooks inside the car frame. He and his managers had spent weeks debating how to solve the problem. Then, says Yu, "I woke...
...Yu Xiaogang, 53, the founder of Green Watershed, realized that the millions of villagers affected by China's 80,000 dams are a powerful weapon. Tens of thousands facing relocation in Sichuan province rioted last October over compensation for their paddy lands along the Dadu River. They formed a "dare-to-die brigade" that held a local official hostage until Beijing dispatched paramilitary police to the area. At least two smaller demonstrations followed in neighboring provinces. Since the media are barred from reporting on trouble at dam sites, peasants remain ignorant of resettlement problems elsewhere. "If people know what...
Last summer Yu chartered a bus and drove peasants from a proposed dam area along the upper Salween to visit a 10-year-old dam a few hours away. The government had celebrated the Manwan Dam as a model of development for its cheap electricity and successful relocation of 3,500 people. The visitors saw something different: peasant women picking through the hydropower station's garbage dump for plastic bottles to recycle for pennies. Sobbing, the women explained that they had not found jobs after losing their land. The scene was captured in an underground documentary that environmentalists have passed...
...Yu has even taken a page from civil rights struggles elsewhere by promoting a living symbol for the anti-dam movement. Ge Quanxiao, a farmer from the Jinsha River area, stands to lose his home to a planned dam. Yu arranged elocution lessons for Ge and taught him to protect himself by invoking political slogans introduced by China's leader, Hu Jintao. He brought Ge to Beijing to address a United Nations Development Program conference on dams and plead for villagers' right to review settlement plans. Most of all, Yu armed Ge with information to take back to his fellow...
...over dam construction. But opposition to dams has become the emblem of activism in China--for now. The movement remains vulnerable, and the government could quickly view it as a threat. "A few extreme people could have the whole movement considered anti--Communist Party, which it is not," says Yu Xiaogang. "But if we can keep discipline, we will be strong." There is a lot more than dams at stake...