Take more than 500 types of industrial product and China ranks first for 220 of them, globally. Yet Beijing isn’t satisfied with just being the world’s factory for cheap goods. More than a third of the country’s 800-million workforce produce biblical amounts of stuff, generating $3 trillion annually, but China’s position is slipping. It’s political and […]
Xi Jinping will enter the Chinese Communist Party’s national congress in Beijing on Oct. 18 as the country’s most powerful leader in decades. When it is over, he hopes to emerge as the Mao Zedong of the 21st century. In the five years since the last party congress, when he was named general secretary, Xi […]
As pretty much anyone knows, the truth can be a slippery bastard. Getting to the bottom of something requires what you might generously call a fussy personality. Read Here – Wired
A number of concerns – ranging from exchange rates to accusations of intellectual property theft – are likely to feature prominently when Donald Trump visits Beijing later this year. Read Here – South China Morning Post
The surgical strikes were the first time the political leadership owned trans-LoC operations and marked a huge shift in the sanctity of the LoC as a de-facto international boundary…This could play a significant role in future Indo-Pak negotiations over Kashmir, where India starts asserting its sovereign claim over the whole of J&K, instead of accepting […]
When Ri Yong Ho, the foreign minister of North Korea, called U.S. President Donald Trump’s fiery speech at the United Nations a “declaration of war”, the phrase ricocheted across Twitter…As it turns out, though, North Korean officials refer to actions as a declarations of war roughly as often as Trump claims that CNN is fake […]
We are just as deluded that our model of living in ‘countries’ is inevitable and eternal. Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. This means a blend of ‘nation’ (people with common attributes and characteristics) and ‘state’ (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, […]
The Mattis visit to India comes almost exactly a month after President Trump unveiled a new South Asia and Afghan policy on 22 August, giving India a publicly key role in stabilizing Afghanistan while censuring Pakistan for perpetuating terror camps and sustaining terrorists on its soil—also in public. Coincidentally, Mattis is to travel to Afghanistan […]
The question of a larger Indian role in securing Afghanistan is expected to figure prominently in the talks between the visiting US Defense Secretary James Mattis and the Indian leadership. That Washington and Delhi are talking about collaboration in Afghanistan marks an important shift in the international relations of South Asia. Read Here – The […]
Is Donald Trump reviving the “madman theory” of diplomacy, introduced by Richard Nixon to instill fear in America’s adversaries? North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s description of Trump as “mentally deranged” suggests that such a ploy might be working – or else Kim is more right than he, or the rest of us, would like. Read […]
