August 22 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Deng Xiaoping. While Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai are the undisputable founders of China-US relations in the modern era, Deng was an energetic pioneer and his ideas and propositions on relations with the United States are still being carried forward by China's leaders today.
When I studied at the University of Sydney in 2009 for a master's degree in media, I was surprised by the interest ordinary Australians had in China. Not only was China the topic for class discussions every week, one of my lecturers also told me during an after-class chat that she was sending her son to learn fencing in Shanghai in the upcoming summer holiday as China had emerged as an ideal place for his training. Later, my supervisor at a local magazine where I had a month's internship told me his son was studying Chinese at Beijing University of Languages and Culture, as he believed the language advantage would help his son find a job in Australia which was forging an increasingly closer bond with China.
IT HAS BEEN REPORTED THAT IN CENTRAL CHINA'S Hunan province, low-rent housing, a welfare that the government provides for low-income families, has become a means some people use to make money. It is a matter of social justice and fairness and it should never be ignored or handled with kid gloves.
Affordable housing relies on government subsidies to maintain low rents or low prices. The policy aims at using taxpayers' money to help those on low incomes get a place to live. Therefore those who get a permit to reside in them are breaking the law when they rent them out and such deeds should be punished.
The recent high-profile probes into multinational shipping, auto and high-tech companies have been accompanied by penalties on State-owned enterprises and sweeping measures to tackle administrative monopolies.
China has a complex history in the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1849, the first institution to treat the mentally ill in China was established by Western missionaries, and some principles instituted by one of them, Dr John G. Kerr, are still valid today. His principles are: mentally ill patients should not be blamed for their actions, they are not to be thrown into prisons but put in hospitals, and they should be treated as human beings, not animals. Western models of treatment, however, were gradually introduced in China only after the launching of reform and opening-up in the late 1970s.
I was 9 when I began inheriting the wariness toward law enforcement that is ubiquitous within the black community. My mother gifted it to me in a ritual that's likely been repeated between mother and son since the first black foot pressed into American soil.
The first-ever summit meeting between the United States and 50 African leaders held earlier this month in Washington has brought Africa to the forefront of US foreign policy.
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