Category: Feature
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Information Controls at the Beijing Olympics: What to Watch For
As Beijing prepares to open the 2022 Winter Olympics on February 4, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership will be dialing up the world’s most sophisticated apparatus of information control, using censorship, surveillance, and legal reprisals to curb political, religious, and other speech that deviates from the party line. This apparatus has grown dramatically in…
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US sanctioned China’s top facial recognition firm over Uyghur concerns. It still raised millions
Show caption SenseTime, China’s largest facial recognition startup, claims to have the ability to ‘classify Uyghurs’. Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters China US sanctioned China’s top facial recognition firm over Uyghur concerns. It still raised millions SenseTime raised $512m from non-US investors and recently debuted on the Hong Kong stock exchange Johana Bhuiyan Fri 7 Jan 2022…
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What Lies Behind Beijing’s Assigning of Chinese Names to Indian Places?
Beijing’s assigning of Chinese names to 15 places in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh is aimed at strengthening its territorial claims there. On December 30, China’s state-run Global Times announced that the country’s Ministry of Civil Affairs had “standardized in Chinese characters, Tibetan and Roman alphabet the names of 15 places in Zangnan.” The…
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Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about Dominic Cummings from his £10-a-month blog
Who is the most interesting writer about politics in Britain today? No question, it’s Dominic Cummings. The Substack blog he started in June last year is not cheap – £10 a month for an erratic and irregular output via email – but it’s worth it. Whenever and whatever he does post, you can be sure…
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The Last Soviet Generation
Those who came into adulthood as the USSR collapsed around them 30 years ago recall a time of transition. Every evening, Soviet army vehicles ploughed the white sand beaches at the shoreline of Soviet Lithuania, on the western border of the USSR. Locals knew not to go to the beach at night for leaving footprints…
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From Beijing with love
The autocrat, the artist and the struggle for freedom and justice in China and beyond. Last month, as I followed the much-anticipated Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year anniversary conference and the elevation of the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping , to a prophet-like status, I started listening to the celebrated Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei’s memoir, A Thousand…
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US State Department Study Dismisses China’s ‘Unlawful Maritime Claims’ in South China Sea
In this July 13, 2018, file photo, a globe shows the islands on the South China Sea with nine-dash line claims under Chinese territory on display at a bookstore in Beijing. The U.S. State Department concluded in a new legal analysis that “the PRC asserts unlawful maritime claims in most of the South China Sea,…
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MP Dr. Wijeydasa Rajapakshe lambasts Xi Jinping over economic invasion, corruption and debt-trapping Sri Lanka: “Hambantota Port was a corrupt deal of a high magnitude”
By R. R. M. Lilani MP Dr. Wijayadasa Rajapakshe, President’s Counsel and a stalwart politician in the current regime, warned Chinese President Xi Jinping that the future Sri Lankan leadership would cancel all corrupt Chinese projects and deals in Sri Lanka, and that China should stop invading the island nation economically. He called the Hambantota…
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From stand-in stars to tech titans: The Observer’s faces to watch in 2022
Politics Toby Helm Liz Truss In the latter part of 2021, Liz Truss has been everywhere in the media. And as she sets her sights on reaching No 10 one day, we should expect to see and hear much more of her in 2022. Appointed by Boris Johnson as foreign secretary in September, Truss has…
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In our teens, we dreamed of making peace in the Middle East. Then my friend was shot
On 11 May 2021, I was sitting with a small group in a cafe in southern Tel Aviv, studying Arabic. Our teacher, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had been telling us that he and his pregnant Jewish wife kept getting turned down by landlords who would not rent their property to a “mixed” couple. We…