SHANTOU, China — The idea to build China’s first museum dedicated to the Cultural Revolution — the political campaign begun by Mao Zedong that killed more than a million people — was always risky. Yet Peng Qi’an, a former local Communist Party official and the museum’s founder, spent two decades scraping together donations from private individuals and local government departments to create the Cultural Revolution Museum, which opened in the rolling hills of the Chenghai…
Posts published in “Day: October 4, 2016”
PRINCETON, N.J. — Movie theaters and studios are rarely the focus of geopolitical conflict. But 16 members of Congress are raising this question: Should foreign acquisition of these kinds of American companies be subject to special scrutiny? In a recent letter, those politicians cited the case of the Dalian Wanda Group, the Chinese conglomerate that in January bought Legendary Entertainment, one of Hollywood’s biggest production companies, for as much as $3.5 billion. In 2012, Wanda…
A website popular with Chinese intellectuals became inaccessible on the weekend, with its operator saying yesterday he had no idea whether it would go back online. Consensus Net, or Gongshi Web, a digital platform founded in September 2009 to carry reports and analysis by both left- and right-wing scholars on topics including history, politics and economics, went offline on Saturday. A notice on the site said it was suspended for an upgrade. Zhou Zhixing, founder…
The writers are professors of law and policy at Lums. In the wake of the Uri incident, India has launched a campaign to ‘punish’ Pakistan. The Indian offensive has proceeded swiftly on the diplomatic, political, economic and, as of this writing, militaristic fronts. An early salvo is India’s aggressive stance on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960. Last week, India said it would increase its water withdrawals from three rivers that flow through India…
China has balanced India’s aggressive stance on the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) as the dispute over Kashmir heats up, and they were smart about it. China has blocked a tributary of the Brahmaputra river as part of a major hydroelectric project, whose construction began in 2014.Thus, rather than projecting it as a security measure in favour of an ally, their reasoning is economic.And while we can be cautiously optimistic that China took these measures for…
The issue of construction of dams came under discussion in the Senate after it appeared that the Kalabagh Dam featured on the government’s list of ‘ready for construction’ projects. This was disclosed when a list of under-construction, ready for construction and under-planning hydel power projects was presented before the Senate by the Ministry of Water and Power on Friday. The House was told in a written reply that the detailed design and tender documents of…
The writer is former executive editor of The News Understand the situation. The Indian Line of Control attack is not meant to achieve any goal in the physical sense of the manoeuvre. Nor is the Modi government’s insane promotion of the move as a surgical strike for a mere domestic political purpose. Nor yet indeed is it a ploy to make Occupied Kashmir’s bloody events fall out of global and media focus. The whole episode,…
The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional. He has thrived on politics of hatred and violence. He equates Muslims with puppies and is blamed for one of the worst massacres of Muslims in post-partition India. However, the prime minister of the world’s largest democracy is also a symbol of development and prosperity to his millions of followers. Narendra Modi is the man Pakistan has to contend with at the crossroads of history and…
The writer teaches at the University of Management and Technology, Lahore Indian claim of surgical strike across Line of Control is perhaps the most frenzied buzzword making headlines in the entire world. The raid, according to Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh, Indian army DGMO, entailed carefully chosen targets based on a weeklong surveillance and calibrated destruction of at least seven “launchpads” – located between 1 and 3km across the de-facto border, which caused significant casualties to…
LAHORE – Although foreign ministers of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation recently reaffirmed support to the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination and called for the resolution of the Kashmir dispute between Pakistan and India, and atrocities being perpetrated in Occupied Kashmir are being highlighted by the world media, no change in New Delhi’s policy has been witnessed. Its oppression is going on unabated and, unless effective steps are taken against it, the BJP-government will…
In what has been an ambivalent set of claims and counter claims, Pakistan and India have locked horns over the veracity of the ‘surgical’ strikes that India claims to have supposedly conducted in Pakistan. Absurd as the Indian claim is considering the heavy fencing and surveillance of the Line of Control (LoC), some commentators have suggested that the intensity of the Pakistani reaction to this entire episode shows that it was not routine cross-border firing…