When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington on Sept. 24, 2015 on a state visit, hundreds of Chinese students lined the streets for hours, carrying banners and flags to welcome him. It was a remarkable display of seemingly spontaneous patriotism. Except it wasn’t entirely spontaneous. The Chinese Embassy paid students to attend and helped organise […]
The good news for Americans in a new international study of adult skills is that the U.S. ranks near the top in gross domestic product per capita, behind only Norway. The bad news is that Americans are so far behind in their skills that it’s hard to see how they can stay at the top for […]
India’s early engagement with post-Taliban Afghanistan was considered by the United States, Pakistan and the Afghan government to be a strategy to undermine Pakistan. While this may have been true at first, in recent years India has come to accept that Pakistan has a ‘special interest’ in Afghanistan that overshadows its own. The main driver […]
PARISIANS are in a tizz about capitalism. New Yorkers get stressed about sex. In Seoul and San Antonio, Texas, 11,000km apart, citizens fret about the relationship between humans and apes. What goes into school textbooks—and, even more, what is left out—spurs concern and controversy all over the world. And so it should. Few, if any, […]
looking beyond borders 