After high school Wang went on to Berkeley, where after a few weeks' flirtation with a career in music--she played piano--Wang shifted gears and studied economics.

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When Wang Shu won the prize this past February, he was in Los Angeles, about to give a lecture at UCLA. Architect Neil Denari, a professor at the school and Wang's host, was with him that afternoon.

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According to research by Professor Yijiang Wang of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, SMEs are the backbone of the Chinese economy.

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"The number of collapsed buildings this time is less, and most are old houses that were built long before, " added Wang Ruheng, dean of the school of civil engineering and architecture at Southwest University of Science and Technology in the city of Mianyang, in Sichuan province.

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"Peasants are more sophisticated these days, " says Wang Qin, a math teacher in a Hubei village school.

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Rather than drag Wang to Detroit, Charlene found her a slot at the pricey College Preparatory School in Oakland, California.

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Even one of the fiercest critics of CEO compensation, Harvard Law School's Lucian Bebchuk, reports in recent research with Alma Cohen and Charles Wang that golden parachutes do motivate CEOs to find merger-and-acquisition opportunities and, as a result, to extract more takeover premiums for shareholders.

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