Word: motherland
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...cold war may have ended, but the echoes of that struggle linger in China's athletic-training program. Across the nation, nearly 400,000 young hopefuls in 3,000 sports schools toil to bring glory to their motherland. Most are plucked from elementary school and sent to train at these state-run sports academies before the age of nine?regardless of their interest in athletics. Given such a concerted culling of China's 300 million youngsters, it's perhaps no surprise that in less than two decades of Olympic participation, China?which stayed away from the Games in previous decades...
...join gyms. China's international athletic success is about nationalism; it is the physical expression of a resurgent country, a rebuttal to its history as the "sick man of Asia" exploited by colonialists during the waning days of the Qing dynasty. The average Chinese?for whom supporting the motherland in athletic competition is one of the few instances in which mass, spontaneous celebration is allowed?is conditioned to see sporting victories as a metaphor for China's ascendance. "Our current national sports policy is called 'Winning Pride at the Olympics,'" says Hao Qiang, head of the State General Administration...
...punishing training system that had forced millions of children into athletic servitude just like the Soviet machine, which was its model. Chinese athletes were given extra help in attending university after retirement, and financial incentives offered the nation's sports stars a reason beyond patriotism to struggle for the motherland...
...wanted to limit the influence of Jews. "The soft encroachment of nationalism increasingly permeates Russia," says Sukhachev. "What is happening is unprecedented. Milder forms of racism have long been part of the Russian political scene. The Liberal Democratic Party, led by nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as well as the new Motherland Party and elements within the Communist Party, all espouse nationalist policies. The people of the Caucasus "must separate from us completely and never come over here!" Zhirinovsky recently told a reporter from the Armenian daily Novoye Vremya. Some 35% of the electorate supported nationalist parties in the last parliamentary elections...
...election campaign, Chen had repeatedly stressed Taiwan's separateness from China. While that stance helped him win votes among many people in Taiwan who increasingly see their island as a sovereign entity, it infuriated Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province that must be returned to the motherland, even by force, and vexed the U.S., which is trying to keep the peace between the two. Now, however, Chen was dispensing with the provocation and adopting a conciliatory tone. Though he still emphasized Taiwan's "national identity" in his speech, he dropped a controversial plan to write a new constitution...