Over lunch in a Beijing backstreet, four Chinese veterans raised glasses to toast their reunion with fiery “baijiu” liquor. They’d not drunk together since they were in the same army unit, fighting skirmishes with Vietnamese forces in the aftermath of a 1979 border war. Now in their 50s, they’d come here shortly before an annual parliament meeting in March to fight a different kind of battle – to demand the welfare support that they say…
Posts published in “Day: April 26, 2016”
BEIJING—China’s stock market was swooning. Investors were panicking. Yet when Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke that first Monday in January, he didn’t address the global angst about the world’s second-largest economy. Clad in an olive-green Mao suit, he was talking instead to Chinese troops about another challenge that consumes his time and political capital: the biggest restructuring of the People’s Liberation Army since the 1950s, a plan that unnerves America and its Asian allies and…
The writer is a Pakistani investigative journalist and academic with extensive reporting experience in the Middle East and North Africa. Fifteen years down the road, families of 9/11 victims continue to demand justice. They are suing Saudi Arabia for allegedly providing material support to al Qaeda to carry out the terrorist attack. Democratic front-runners for the White House, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have backed the legal action although Clinton, being a lawyer, must be…