‘China’s financial imperialism’ is a relatively new genre in western journalism. China is providing loans to other countries to build infrastructure. If those countries can not pay back the loans, China offers to lease and manage the infrastructure built with its money. That somehow is supposed to create a “debt trap for vulnerable countries”. Yesterday…
The recent Mainstream Media speculation about the true state of Zambia’s debt might be manipulated by the US to craft the weaponized infowar narrative that the country’s becoming the “African Sri Lanka”, a misleading perception that would be designed to enflame anti-Chinese sentiment as a prelude to the Indo-Japanese “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” making decisive inroads…
Recent inter-communal riots in Sri Lanka have highlighted the problem of religious extremism, particularly among Asia’s Buddhist population. But the Buddhist nationalist point of view has been largely ignored in favour of a discourse which demonises Buddhists as aggressors and portrays Muslims as innocent victims. The reality is far more complex. Part I A state…
“This looks like China, doesn’t it?” Deputy Inspector General Mandip Shrestha has his chest puffed out as he gives a tour of Nepal Armed Police Force’s freshly minted training academy. A swanky sprawl complete with a helipad, swimming pool, football ground, shooting range, soundproof meeting rooms, giant auditoriums and elegant red brick buildings, the hilltop campus…
As it is known, all the states bordering with India are the zones of the Indian-Chinese struggle for the economic, political, and military dominance (except for Pakistan – a traditional opponent of India either with or without China). Even those that have traditionally cooperated with India, such as Bangladesh, the Maldives Republic, Nepal, and Sri…
The “dueling ports” of Gwadar and Chabahar in Pakistani and Iranian Balochistan have come to symbolize the Great Power competition between China and India, respectively, but there are actually two more pairs of ports in the Bay of Bengal which are paid comparatively less attention to by most observers despite their high-level collective importance in…
