Their plan – to take control of the area's schools by creating a whole new city – shocked many and opened up old debates split along cultural, financial and racial lines.
In many ways, this election split among cultural lines more than they did among economic ones.
There's a definite cultural split in peoples' attitudes to this ruling.
And in spite of political reunification by Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan, or Mongol, dynasty (beginning in 1206 in the North and comprising the whole of China by 1280), the cultural split persisted.
The Slovenia vote illustrates a cultural split within the European Union in which more established western members are rapidly granting new rights to gays, while eastern newcomers entrench conservative attitudes toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Ballarat was split by a cultural fault line – English and Cantonese, the flutter of cards and the clacking of Mahjong tiles, whiskey and rice wine, opium and tobacco, Confucius and Jesus.
Olivier Roy, a Paris-based specialist on Central Asia, points to the cultural split in the region between the nomads from the steppes and mountains, mainly Kirgizs, Kazakhs and Turkmens, and the sedentary, mainly urban Uzbeks and Tajiks who settled in the river basins of Transoxania.
This cultural split is dangerous for a consumer-facing company.
By the turn of the decade, the punk rock movement had split deeply along cultural and musical lines, leaving a variety of derivative scenes and forms.
It's a cultural split that many Americans will recognize in similar flare-ups over Paula Deen and other celebrities who commit gaffes.
