Word: zheng
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...Vice-Minister accustomed to running a branch of China's government as his own virtual fiefdom, the sentence must have come as a surprise. On Tuesday, a Beijing court handed down a death penalty for Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), after he was convicted of dereliction of duty and accepting some $850,000 in bribes, according to local media reports. But while the severity of the sentence wasn't completely unprecedented-several senior officials have been executed for corruption in recent years including a deputy minister in 2000-it was still...
...Zheng, who was arrested in December, may to some extent be a victim of bad timing: Beijing is being bombarded with criticism at home and abroad for its sometimes-fatal inability to regulate its food and medical industries. Chinese citizens have been inundated with news stories about fake drugs and poisoned food products in recent years. In 2006, six people died and scores of others became ill after taking a contaminated antibiotic. Several years earlier, 300 babies fell gravely ill and more than a dozen died of malnutrition after being fed fake milk powder which had found its way onto...
...Even worse for Zheng, China's regulatory problems have extended beyond the country's borders. More than 100 people in Panama were killed by Chinese-made cough medicine last year; in March, Chinese-made pet food ingredients containing the chemical melamine sickened or killed an untold number of animals and led to the recall of some 100 brands of pet food. With the world's spotlight is on Chinese efforts to improve its record on food safety, there's little doubt that the pressure of international embarrassment and death and illness at home added to the severity of Zheng...
Like just about every ambitious engineering student at China's Tsinghua University in the early 1980s, Li Zheng had his heart set on the high-tech, high-profile electronics field--up until the day he bombed on an electronics exam. But his uncharacteristic classroom stumble led Li to a field that could play an even larger role in China's future: energy production. "I think the choice was a very fortunate one in the end," says Li, who studied thermal engineering and in 2000 became a full professor at Tsinghua--China's M.I.T.--at the remarkably young...
...After centuries, when Zheng He's exploits were forgotten even in China, he has deservedly entered the pantheon of the world's great explorers. The admiral has been adopted in his homeland as a symbol of an old, outward-looking, adventurous China?all things, perhaps, which it is once more. But the memory that China once traded with the world is not the only lesson of Zheng He's life. Here's another: when he died, so did China's global ambitions. Mandarins decided that oceangoing voyages were a waste of time and money; soon the great naval shipyards...