Word: zhu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reporters who descended on the village and began writing about what they saw and heard. The Dickensian tale of children who had been, in some sense, worked to death, was a chilling and all-too believable allegory for the worst kinds of excess in the Chinese countryside. Then Premier Zhu Rongji entered the picture, and the tragedy seemed to slide from debacle into farce. He surprised the villagers?and the rest of China?by blaming the village idiot. According to Zhu, the only fireworks in the building were brought in by a madman who wanted to blow up the school...
...country's Premier offered a different, though not especially satisfactory, explanation. After China's newspapers showed rare spunk in frankly addressing the explosion, Zhu outlined the tale of a deranged man who was said to have blown up the school. The official Xinhua news agency quickly backed him up with a report about a 33-year-old villager nicknamed Psycho who conveniently left behind a note reading: "I will sacrifice myself, blast all, burn all, kill scores of them, all is over." Suddenly, the race among Chinese journalists to cover a hot story became a rush to tow the party...
...political showcase, the National People's Congress, and party leaders surely worry that their handpicked delegates might wander from their scripts and ask tough questions about China's education failures. And with the International Olympic Committee voting in July on Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Games, perhaps Zhu didn't want anyone bringing up the fact that all those stuffed Olympic mascots and five-ring banners could be manufactured by kids in sweatshops. Last year China was embarrassed by reports that children were working 17-hour days packing plastic Snoopy figurines for McDonald's restaurants in Hong Kong...
...wooden bench cradling the body of her 11-year-old son. All she knows is that he had been making firecrackers at the school for three years. Perhaps both versions are correct: students were assembling explosives and a deranged man ignited them. But mostly there is skepticism. And sadness. Zhu's account, concludes Zhang Weifang, is "completely untrue." But even the truth wouldn't bring back her young sister...
...Zhu Zheqin, a struggling, whippet-thin Chinese singer, became her country's pop diva when she incorporated the Tibetan word for moon into her stage name, re-emerged as Dadawa and filled her repertoire with songs like Ballad of Lhasa. Her latest music video, shown repeatedly on Chinese television, depicts her high on the roof of the world wearing Tibetan robes, herding yaks and clowning with nomads. Her first performance in the capital two weeks ago packed Beijing's exhibition center with young Chinese who could afford to spend $50 for a ticket?and one apprehensive Tibetan lama with...