From the January edition of The London Review of Books. Extracts from Tariq Ali's diaries begin with his trip to Pyongyang in 1970. Well worth reading. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/tariq-ali/diary
"Indeed, 22 years after students flocked to Tiananmen Square, online calls for a homegrown Jasmine revolution have gone largely unanswered, though they have produced a thuggish response from local security officials. The country lacks a large constituency of disaffected, Facebook-friendly twentysomethings hankering for regime change.
Rather it is the boom in the property sector, and the resulting political tensions, that will pose Beijing with some of the greatest threats to political stability in the next decade."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/07434446-48f6-11e0-af8c-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rs...
China's rise is no longer just about China -- and over the past year, journalists Heriberto Araújo and Juan Pablo Cardenal, working with a team of photographers, have collected images documenting Beijing's worldwide influence in 24 countries, from logging camps in Mozambique to gold mines in Burma.
Examples of European and US publications using old & unrelated photos to make the "jasmine revolution" demonstrations over the weekend look more serious than they were. Mind you, the cops were nicking journalist's cameras, so maybe they had little choice. Still no excuse for misrepresenting photos like that though.
The last one of a Hong Kong policeman with the caption "demonstration in Beijing" is pretty hilarious though.
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20110226_1.htm
Interesting, if true... "On Saturday, February 12, the day after Hosni Mubarak resigned in Egypt, some of the members of the politburo of the Communist Party of China held a special meeting in Beijing to discuss the events in the Middle East. News of this meeting came via a democracy activist in Beijing, who said that a secretary who was present had leaked a summary of its contents. The democracy activist is a person who is well positioned to judge the authenticity of such a report."
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/feb/20/secret-politburo-meeting-beh...(The+New+York+Review+of+Books)
There is no way, of course, to guess how rockets might have developed, or failed to, were it not for the fact that, during the 1940s, the world's most technically sophisticated nation was under the absolute control of a crazy dictator who decreed that vast physical and intellectual resources should be hurled into the project of creating rockets of hitherto unimagined size.
A new FT series examines the growing influence of China and its impact on economies and markets around the globe. FT correspondents on five continents write about the financial, military, diplomatic and cultural dimensions of the country’s rise, with video reports and interactive graphics.
This year's question is "what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"
There are a lot of answers to read, but some very interesting suggestions. I've linked to the print version so everything's on one page.
http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_print.html#responses
