For example, the 14th Dalai Lama, long insistent on Tibet's history being separate from that of China's, conceded in 2005 that Tibet " is a part " of China's " 5000-year history " as part of a new proposal for Tibetan autonomy.

However, China's first official standing navy was not established until the Southern Song Dynasty in the 12th century, a time when gunpowder was a revolutionary new application to warfare.

Construction of new railways and highways has diminished the utility of China's rivers for passenger transport.

State-run Chinese media have publicly questioned whether it is in China's long-term interest to preserve the " new class of monopoly state capitalists " that Li's family represents.

The official view is that China has now reached an economic and political stage, known as the primary stage of socialism, in which China faces new and different problems completely unforeseen by Mao, and as such the solutions that Mao advocated are no longer relevant to China's current conditions.

The Nanking Treaty ended the old Canton System and created a new framework for China's foreign relations and overseas trade which would last for almost a hundred years.

The DF-31 was developed to replace many of China's older ballistic missiles, and served as basis to the new JL-2 ( CSS-NX-4 / CSS-NX-5 ) SLBM.

The new legal status quo gave Yuan, as president, practically unlimited powers over China's military, finances, foreign policy, and the rights of China's citizens.

The new municipality was formed to spearhead China's effort to economically develop its western provinces, as well as to coordinate the resettlement of residents from the reservoir areas of the Three Gorges Dam project.

During China's 1981 volleyball World Cup victories, both the old and new lyrics were sung simultaneously amongst fans.

However, China's strained relations with new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and newfound contradictions between the Chinese and Soviet schools of communism seeded a novel and radical drive to reform China's economic system in its entirety.

Dissatisfied with China's new direction and his own reduced authority, Mao became increasingly annoyed.

Jiang, at the time, was the Shanghai Party Chief, the top figure in China's new economic center.

In 1993, Jiang coined the new term " socialist market economy " to move China's centrally-planned socialist economy into essentially a government-regulated capitalist market economy.

Naturally, governments are responding to the challenges posed by new media technologies by deploying increasingly sophisticated technology of their own ( a notable example being China's attempts to impose control through a state run internet service provider that controls access to the Internet ) but it seems that this will become an ever increasingly difficult task as journalists continue to find new ways to exploit technology and stay one step ahead of the generally slower moving government institutions that attempt to censor them.

Increasingly, however, Soviet bomber and fighter squadrons took over from China's battered units, and in the summer of 1938 Chennault went to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in Western China, to train a new Chinese Air Force from an American mold.

While China's later imperial period does not seem to have broken new ground for innovative approaches to poetry, picking through its vast body of preserved works remains a scholarly challenge, so new treasures may yet be restored from obscurity.

The new State Constitution provides a legal basis for the broad changes in China's social and economic institutions and significantly revises government structure.

Prior to that, food production was expanded by simply cultivating new areas rather than through technical improvements in production methods, which was possible only because of China's vast size.

Albania's leaders abhorred the People's Republic of China's contacts with the United States in the early 1970s, and its press and radio ignored President Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing in 1972.

The strike did secure some concessions, but Mao and other student leaders felt that they were now under threat from the furious Zhang, and were sent as representatives to China's provincial centers ; thus, Mao once again traveled to Peking.

China has counseled North Korea ’ s leaders to gradually open the economy to market forces, and it is possible this path will be successfully followed as well as China's policy of keeping political control firmly in the hands of the Communist Party.

Today the authority of China's leaders is much more tied to their institutional base.

By keeping Li at the upper levels of the Party, China's leaders communicated to the world that the country remained stable and united.

" The party leadership was relatively united in approving the general direction of Mao's agenda, but the charges against esteemed party leaders like Peng Zhen rang alarm bells in China's intellectual community and among the eight non-Communist parties.

On January 15 Deng Xiaoping delivered Zhou's official eulogy in a funeral attended by all of China's most senior leaders with the notable absence of Mao himself, who had grown increasingly critical of Zhou.

In its post-revolutionary period, Mao Zedong's thought is defined in the CPC's Constitution as " Marxism-Leninism applied in a Chinese context ", synthesized by Mao Zedong and China's " first-generation leaders ".

These included infighting between China's qigong establishment and Falun Gong, speculation over blackmailing and lobbying by qigong opponents and " scientists-cum-ideologues with political motives and affiliations with competing central Party leaders ", which caused the shift in the state's position, and the struggles from mid-1996 to mid-1999 between Falun Gong and the Chinese power elite over the status and treatment of the movement.

Public mourners at Hu's funeral lined up ten miles long, a reaction which surprised China's leaders.

Today both SEM's professional and academic programs are considered one of the premier training grounds for China's business leaders.

" In August 2005, a series of items reported factually on coal mining disaster in China ; soon after the channel's leaders received a warning from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that its reports were harming China's international image.

He was influential in the May Fourth Movement, one of the leaders of China's New Culture Movement, was a president of Peking University, and in 1939 was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature.

Along with closing China's schools and universities, and Mao's exhortations to young Chinese to randomly destroy old buildings, temples, and art, and to attack their teachers, school administrators, party leaders, and parents, the Cultural Revolution also increased Mao's prestige so much that entire villiages adopted the practice of offering prayers to Mao before every meal.

Many of the poems seemed to refer to and commemorate ancient Chinese historical events, but most were intended to criticize China's current leaders.

China's leaders, namely Jiang Qing ( Mao Zedong's wife ) and Mao Yuanxin, saw the popular gathering as a threat to the forward movement of the Cultural Revolution.

After Mao's death and the fall of the Gang of Four in October 1976, Party leaders rehabilitated Deng and brought him back to Beijing, where he emerged as China's Paramount Leader in 1978.

Well respected by many Chinese citizens, Zhu has also garnered the respect of prominent Western political and business leaders, many of whom credit Zhu with engineering China's market-opening and ascension to the World Trade Organisation ( WTO ), which has brought foreign capital pouring into the country.

" China's leaders, he reported, are " boosting gasoline prices " and " overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

As one of China's three main decision making bodies the relative influence of the CMC can vary depending on the time period and the leaders.

During the 1962 Sino-Indian war, he was among those leaders who aired China's view on the border issue.

* John Ruwitch ' China's leaders tug strings of power in retirement ' ( Reuters )

There was some disagreement within China's leadership about how to react to the American push to the Chinese border: Mao and Zhou wanted direct military intervention, while most Chinese leaders believed that China should not enter the war unless China was directly attacked.

In December 1958 China's leaders quietly decided to reverse the policies of the Great Leap.