By Faran Mahmood in The Express Tribune, April 24th, 2017. The writer is a Cambridge graduate and is working as a management consultant. ISLAMABAD: It was January 2017 and a big day for China as the island nation Sri Lanka handed over the Hambantota deep sea port as well as 15,000 acres of its rich agricultural land to establish a new Chinese-operated industrial zone – in exchange of writing-off its $1.1 billion debt. Sri Lanka’s…
Posts published in “Day: April 24, 2017”
by Stephen Chen in South China Morning Post, April 23, at 11:45pm A major international publisher has retracted 107 research papers by Chinese authors after learning about irregularities in their peer review process. The Springer Nature publishing company said on Thursday the papers were published in the journal Tumor Biology between 2012 and last year. The authors supplied the journal’s editors with made-up contact information of third-party reviewers. “In order to clean up our scientific…
Reuters report in in South China Morning Post, Apr 24, 2017 Global security companies and their smaller Chinese rivals are jostling for business along Beijing’s modern-day “Silk Road”, the grandiose plan for land and sea routes connecting the world’s second largest economy with the rest of Asia and beyond. Representing investments of hundreds of billions of dollars, the pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen boosting economic growth at home, and as positive…
by Laura Zhou in South China Morning Post, April 24, 2017 Near constant patrols by China’s coastguard at Luconia Shoals off the coast of Malaysia are a signal from Beijing that it plans to maintain a maritime presence within its contested claim to most of the South China Sea, analysts say. Three different Chinese vessels were patrolling regularly in the first two months of this year near the shoals, some 1,600km from China but only…
by Minnie Chan in South China Morning Post, Apr 24, 2017 Army corps in China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are likely to have their unit numbers changed for the first time in their history as part of President Xi Jinping’s efforts to reshape the world’s biggest army, military sources said. “Serial numbers for the 13 army corps are likely restart from 71 and end at 83,” a senior retired army officer in Beijing told the…
by Minnie Chan in South China Morning Post, Apr 24, 2017 China was making final preparations to launch its first domestically built aircraft carrier as itmarked the 68th anniversary of the founding of the PLA Navy on Sunday. The scaffolding around the ship, temporarily named the Type 001A, was removed and the deck was cleared, Shanghai-based news portal thepaper.cn reported, suggesting that the launch date was getting close. However, experts said tidal conditions yesterday were…
by TARIQ NAQASH in Dawn, April 24th, 2017 MUZAFFARABAD: The AJK government is being criticised for its ‘generosity’, after the region’s IGP, Bashir Ahmed Memon, declined a post-retirement package. On March 28, the AJK Services and General Administration Department clandestinely issued a notification to supplement the facilities admissible to the chief secretaries under an earlier notification issued on June 15, 2006. Through the June 15, 2006, notification, which was renewed on June 4, 2011, the…