Natural disasters in China was expected in 1996. This yield was anticipated despite torrential summer rains throughout China that flooded 32,500 square kilometres (8 million acres) of cropland, caused thousands of deaths, left millions homeless, and cost billions of yuan in damage. The Yellow River crested at its highest recorded level, inspiring fears of a catastrophic dike breach. Nevertheless, over the past 50 years, natural disasters on average had reduced China's harvests by approximately 1% annually. Work proceeded on the world's largest flood-control and hydroelectric project, the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) above Yichang. Chinese planners were considering huge
What Is to Be Done? belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia. Lars T. Lih, a McGill University course lecturer, has suggested that Lenin's pamphlet has been widely misinterpreted partly by mistranslations of key terms used by Lenin. Lih says that those historians and textbooks that misinterpret the pamphlet follow "three mutually reinforcing strands": Lih argues that "even if we examine the controversial passages in "What is to be Done?" we misunderstand them if we are not alive to the meanings of the words used. Some of these have been translated in such a way as to confuse or even to draw readers to the opposite of