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Lijia Macleod
For Lijia Macleod's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
ENVIRONMENT
Jul 31, 2001
Dammed by the state: Displaced Chinese fight for their rights
JIANGSU, China -- Last August, the great Chang river (formerly known as the Yangtze) washed a modern day Noah's Ark from the heart of southwest China to the mouth of the Yellow Sea. Crowded aboard the ferry were 800 peasant farmers, nursing children, animals and seedlings on their three-day voyage to a new world, far from the floods that will inundate their homes and ancestral lands.
ENVIRONMENT
May 22, 2001
China's shifting sands close in on Beijing
BEIJING -- Mother Nature has got it in for Wang Yongxian. In 1988, the farmer fled his hillside cave when flooding triggered landslides on Dragon Treasure Mountain, 70 km north of Beijing. Forced to abandon their traditional cave homes, Wang and neighbors moved down to the safety of the plain. Or so they hoped. Today, a creeping 10-km sand dune threatens to swallow their rebuilt village and set Wang on the run again.
JAPAN
Nov 1, 2000
The rising price of knowledge
BEIJING -- It should have been party time on the bright summer day 18-year-old Li Junliang was accepted by prestigious Beijing University. Fewer than one in 10 of China's students secure places at any of the country's crowded colleges and universities, let alone the Oxford University of China. But the acceptance letter sparked little in the way of celebration in the Li family home.
LIFE / Travel
Sep 14, 2000
Bruised flowers: China's hidden army of child laborers
BEIJING -- Hu Changjun was desperate to escape the poverty trap in Wuxi County in southwest China's Sichuan Province. So she couldn't believe her luck when a fellow villager named Changyan offered her work at a joint-venture factory in distant Beijing. "A joint venture means a foreign company, where the work is easy and the pay is good," explained Changyan.
JAPAN / History
Jun 28, 2000
China's Korean War POWs find you can't go home again
BEIJING — In a hotel room in the Yangtze River port of Wuhan, a dozen elderly Chinese men fight back tears to sing a song written almost 50 years ago in a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp in South Korea. At the end of the song, their tears flow freely, for friends lost in the conflict and for their own harsh treatment by the country that sent them to war.
COMMUNITY
Jan 26, 2000
Watching the world go by: portrait of a centenarian
When she was in her 70s, Xing Guizhen brushed aside the idea of false teeth. "There's no need," she declared. "I'm going to die in a few days."
COMMUNITY
Jan 26, 2000
China's gray peril
BEIJING -- Xue Aiying, a 65-year-old retired worker from Nanjing, used to go to Bailuzhou Park every morning to practice Falun Gong before the sect was outlawed in July last year. "I didn't know what to do with myself after I retired," she explains. "I felt lonely and empty before I joined Falun Gong."

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