Guardian/December 25, 2008
The famed Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” is apocryphal; but perhaps it should have been coined for 2008. Both China’s citizens and outside observers thought the year would be dominated by the Olympics. Instead, it began with the heaviest snowstorms for decades and ended with an economic crisis seeing mass layoffs. In between, came the worst ethnic unrest in many years and the terrible earthquake in Sichuan, which claimed as many as 90,000 lives…
