For every Chinese leader, as for every megalomaniac dictator, the thirst for personal power is so high that to enhance it hewillcompromise the future of his country. Mao gave them The Great Famine, the “liberal” DengXiaoping presided o... Continue reading
In the first part of this article we described how China is piling up a debt that has reached 350 percent of its GDP. The borrowing spree, starting with the international financial crisis of 2008, had initially a laudable goal. The massive 4 trill... Continue reading
Laager, meaning an encampment protected by a circle of wagons, is from Afrikaans, the language of Boers of South Africa. As the Zulu tribals frequently attacked these farmers of Dutch origin, they defended their families and cattle from behind a c... Continue reading
France is a copybook democracy; China is thequintessential dictatorship. Democracies have the rule of law, dictatorships have the rule of whims. The possibility that France will treat its minorities fairly is much higher than China doing so, both... Continue reading
During a visit to Beijing in 1993, the present writer asked many residents how they would like their country to be in the 21st century. “Like America”, was their uniform response. I understood it at that time to mean the affluence of t... Continue reading
Building artificial islands on reefs in the South China Sea and the creeping encroachment in Ladakh, Bhutan, Nepal and Mongolia are not the only tricks in the bag for China’s expansionism. These are limited to areas adjacent to China’s... Continue reading
On 1 March 2020, The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China released its 562-page final report. The six members of the Tribunal were experts of international renown in areas of law, transplant surge... Continue reading
Amidst China’s drumbeats about its success and the huge shadow of Xinjiang over the Beijing Winter Olympics, one fact got obscured. A country with less than 2 percent of China’s population, crammed into less 0.4 percent of China’... Continue reading
Humans need to belong but humans have never belonged to humanity. Language evolution, acculturation, adaptation and religion dynamics are some of the reasons due to which a new tribe is calved from the parent human glacier that isnow supposed to b... Continue reading
Sovereignty is the most used and abused concept in international relations. The Qing dynasty in China, comprising ethnic Manchus, conquered Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and today China resents any talk of human rights violations in these re... Continue reading
Everybody knows that China is not a democracy. It was no surprise when the 2022 Freedom in the World Index gave the communist country an overall score of 9 out of 100 and minus 2 out of forty on political rights. Naturally, such a country was excl... Continue reading
Plato had described opinion as the “medium between knowledge and ignorance”. He must have been referring to duly considered opinion and Harlan Wilson must have been dreaming of an opinion utopia when he said, “You are not entitle... Continue reading