"Governance capability" was labeled the top of China's ten most popular expressions in mainstream newspapers, according to a linguistic survey on January 12.

Other nine phrases are:

Athens Olympics;

Liu Xiang, the Chinese gold medalist in men's 110m hurdle in Athens Olympic Games;

Audit storm, the nationwide auditing campaign on major governmental departments;

Scientific concept on development;

Zero tariff;

Allowance for land-losing farmers, a measure adopted by the central government to subsidy farmers who lost lands during urbanization process;

Anti-secession Law;

Chinese-French Culture Years, the year-long cultural gala held to promote the image of France in China;

and Tsunami.

The ten most popular expressions are chosen by computer in term of frequency of usage among 490,000,000 words on 14 mainstream Chinese newspapers, including People's Daily, China Youth Daily, Economic Daily, Global Times and Beijing Youth Daily.

The selection was carried out by a special research group underthe Beijing Language University and supported by several other departments, including the State Language Resource Monitor Center and the Chinese Information Processing Society of China.

Source: Xinhua