With his image gracing bank notes and staring out from Tiananmen Gate, Mao Zedong remains a constant presence in China 120 years after his birth, revered as a hero who founded the communist state and restored national pride – even as China moves ever further from his vision of a communist society. Read Here – AP
The U.S. and China have the most important bilateral relationship in the world. The rising global superpower and the status quo superpower are deeply cooperative and deeply competitive — at the same time. Read Here – Bloomberg
U.S. post-2014 development plans for Central Asia are worthy, but at risk of strategic failure. Read Here – The Diplomat
The essence of President Vladimir Putin‘s annual address to the Federal Assembly on Dec. 12 was that his enchantment with state capitalism and Soviet economics is continuing. Rather than promoting higher economic growth, he wanted to go after the remaining prominent private businessmen Read Here – Moscow Times
Although Mao and Marx have been replaced in many ways by modernization, the great helmsman is still at the center of China. Read Here – The Euroepan
From nearly any point in Lhasa, capital of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, you can see at least two police checkpoints. Read Here – The Atlantic
Silvio Berlusconi is out and Angela Merkel was reelected. Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez passed away. Fidel Castro didn’t. People took to the streets in Kiev and Bangkok, Cairo and Khartoum. The president of Syria ignored Barack Obama’s red line and used chemical weapons, while Iran was willing to engage in negotiations with the United […]
To reveal just how rotten someone so close to the Supreme Leader could become might look unwise. But it also showed that Mr Jang’s execution was a foregone conclusion. The message to the people is that corruption is punishable by death, and that no one is spared—not even family. Read Here – The Economist
Multiple Indias have always existed in Gandhi’s land of 700,000 villages, but never perhaps in such proximity or with such access to one another, a rising class of conspicuous consumers hoisted through a decade of now faltering growth hard by villages where unemployed men dim boredom with alcohol. Read Here – New York Times
According to Perry Anderson’s new book, The Indian Ideology, India’s democracy — routinely celebrated as the world’s largest — is actually a sham. It is fatally compromised by its origins in an anticolonial struggle led by the “monolithically Hindu” Congress party, which Anderson holds largely responsible for the bloodiness of the partition of the British-ruled subcontinent […]
looking beyond borders 