The Londoner

In a landmark ceremony, Pakistani authorities will formally hand over 2,281 acres of Gwadar Port’s free trade zone to the Chinese Oversees Ports Holding Company Ltd (COPHCL) on November 11 on a 43-year lease. The ceremony would be held in Gwadar on Wednesday and would be attended by the Chinese delegation headed by National Development and Reform Commission Vice Chairman Wang Xiaodao, who has already arrived in Pakistan. The Chinese delegation comprises of all top level officials of the Chinese government and leaders of private companies. The Pakistani delegation would be led by Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Reform Ahsan Iqbal. A senior official of the ministry said that the event would also be attended by Balochistan Chief Minister Dr Abdul Malik and Federal Minister for Ports and Shipping Kamran Michal. The government has already declared Gwadar Port a free trade zone for the next 23 years. The officer said that in this regard, a high-level meeting of both aut...

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday ceremonially broke ground on a $9.59 billion nuclear power complex to be built in Karachi with China’s help, seeking to ease Pakistan’s long-running energy crisis and signaling a new step by China in becoming a top nuclear supplier. The deal, which officials said was still being finalized, is a major new advance in energy cooperation between the two countries, dwarfing previous reactor projects built along with China at Chashma , in Pakistan’s interior. And it establishes a growing counterpoint to a nuclear axis between the United States and India in recent years that Pakistani officials have seen as an irritant and Chinese officials have seen as a geopolitical challenge. “The beginning of the 2,200-megawatt power project is indeed a proud moment in the energy history of Pakistan,” Mr. Sharif said at the ceremony, adding that the construction was to be completed in six years. The Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, Sun Weidong, and officials fr...

KARACHI :  A conglomerate of two leading Chinese construction companies , China Railway Engineering Corporation and Sinotec , has offered to construct the Gwadar-Khunjrab Rail Link at an estimated cost of Rs250 billion. This cost includes Rs160 billion for infrastructure and Rs90 billion for locomotives on electric traction. This investment is designed on a four-year, soft-loan term basis. The offer was made to Minister for Railways Khwaja Sa’ad Rafique on behalf of the consortium in a detailed presentation carried out by Song Shuan Ping. The loan can be treated as a professional loan, commercial loan or a grant and will be payable in seven years. Pointing out the strategic importance of Gwadar-Khunjrab Rail Link, Ping listed a number of benefits which could be availed once the project was operational. “The main aim of the link is to connect the Central Asian Republics with the Pakistan Railways Network ,” said Ping. “This will immensely improve trade relations between C...

By   EDWARD WONG BEIJING — For almost two years, hackers based in Shanghai went after one foreign defense contractor after another, at least 20 in all. Their target, according to an American cybersecurity company that monitored the attacks, was the technology behind the United States’ clear lead in military drones . “I believe this is the largest campaign we’ve seen that has been focused on drone technology,” said Darien Kindlund, manager of threat intelligenc e at the company,  FireEye , based in California . “It seems to align pretty well with the focus of the Chinese government to build up their own drone technology capabilities.” The hacking operation, conducted by a group called “Comment Crew,” was one of the most recent signs of the ambitions of China’s drone development program. The government and military are striving to put China at  the forefront of drone manufacturing , for their own use and for export, and have made an all-out push to gather domes...

The Chinese government is rapidly building a bigger, more sophisticated military . Here’s what they have, what they want, and what it means for the U.S. In a single generation, China has transformed itself from a largely agrarian country into a global manufacturing and trading powerhouse . China’s economy is 20 times bigger than it was two decades ago and is on track to surpass the United States’ as the world’s largest. But perhaps most startling has been the growth of China’s ambitious and increasingly powerful military . Just 10 years ago, the budget for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was roughly $20 billion. Today, that number is more like $100 billion. (Some analysts think it’s closer to $160 billion.) The PLA’s budget is only a sixth of what the U.S. devotes to defense annually, but defense dollars go much further in China, and in the years ahead, Chinese military spending will grow at the same rate as its economy. Meanwhile, ...

Christmas will be more widely celebrated in China this year than at any time in memory. Everyone who claims any knowledge of the subject believes that the number of Chinese Christians has been growing steadily over the last decade. Communist bureaucrats harass Christians , isolate them, try to manipulate and divide them. And yet by the standards of recent decades, Chinese Christianity now seems remarkably resilient. No one knows how many Chinese are Christian . The State Administration for Religious Affairs, which supervises all religion, says there are about 25 million, apparently the government’s optimistic understatement. Christian activists , on their many blogs, claim 50 million to 100 million. The Global Religious Landscape , a demographic study released this week by the Pew Research Center, estimates 68 million, based on 2010 data. Whatever the real number, no one denies the memorable comparison made on the BBC in September by Tim Gardam, a journalist and...

" ... Young guerrilla girl Kumsuni delivers letters to comrades, and one day is caught by the police. When the policemen demand the girl disclose information about the guerillas , she spits into the faces of her interrogators. As the policemen drag Kumsuni to her execution, the heroic girl cries out ' Long Live General Kim Il Sung! '" ...Pre-teen boy Ri Kwang-ch'un is a member of a secret anti-Japanese children's organization. Along with others, he helps the "Red Guard uncles". However, one day policemen apprehend the boy. When the "bastards" tortur...

What’s Behind the Russian Adoption Ban ? The Magnitsky Act , passed recently by the United States Senate , may have been of little interest to Americans , but its impact and aftermath in Russia has been tempestuous. The act, put very briefly, bars Russians who are implicated in human-rights abuses from entering the United States, and freezes their American bank accounts. Its adoption was accompanied by furious and threatening statements from Russian officials. This week, in a retaliatory move, the Duma, Russia’s lower house, voted almost unanimously for further constraints on non-government organizations that have even the faintest connection to America. Another amendment in the same package introduced a flat ban on the adoption of Russian children by parents in the United States. Read more here. HOME

Unlike in democracies , where politicians vying for office first introduce themselves to their constituents, China's leaders take a rather different approach. Only after the Chinese Communist Party has chosen its top leader in secret does he begin the process of "introducing" himself to the people. The newly enthroned general secretary Xi Jinping has been busy firing corrupt officials, visiting factories and military leaders, boarding a battleship to dine with sailors. And in the process he has been defining his mission, which he calls "the great revival of the Chinese nation ". To the world outside the goal of national revival looks more like an irredentist mission that challenges the resolve of its neighbours. Read the full story here. HOME

World may be on the brink of seeing a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) race If reports in Russian state media last Friday are accurate, the world may be on the brink of seeing a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) race, though of a conventional type rather than the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. According to a report by RIA Novosti , Moscow may be developing a heavy-liquid-fuel, non-nuclear, precision-guided payload capability for a new class of ICBMs, which would give Russia near-global coverage similar to that sought by the U.S. under the controversial “Prompt Global Strike” program. Using rhetoric that harkened back to the dark days of the Cold War, Russian Strategic Missile Forces Commander Colonel General Sergei Karakayev warned that Russia could develop its own strategic conventional ICBM force if the U.S. did not pull back from its efforts to create such a system, which gives the U.S. the ability to strike targets anywhere in the...

In the course of making an argument about the coming collapse of China and Russia , Jackson Diehl made a rather forceful statement about Russia’s “deindustrialiation” under the malignant influence of Vladimir Putin.  I don’t want to get pulled into a larger discussion about the accuracy of Diehl’s thesis, needless to say I’m skeptical that both China and Russia will collapse in the near future, but I did want to focus in on his comment on the supposed death of industrial Russia (emphasis added): For Russia, the dilemma is summed up in the prices of oil and gas, and the role those two commodities have come to play during the Putin era. When Putin first took office in 1999, oil and gas earned less than half of Russia’s export revenue. Now that share is more than two-thirds. In part this increase is due to rising prices and production, but Russia has also deindustrialized under Putin . According to a report in Business New Europe, this year the country ...

BEIJING - Washington's aggressive pursuit of containment of China and Beijing's difficulty in launching major economic and political reforms will likely prove an explosive mixture. Meanwhile, Japan, India, and other Asian powers exploit the logic of "two ovens". The 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was to be the springboard for economic and political renewal in the world's second power. Many Chinese - and others - hoped it would mark the beginning of a new era of reform. The main challenge was, and remains, the fate of st...

On Monday, North Korea announced it was extending the window for its rocket launch due to a technical glitch. On Tuesday, South Korean intelligence officials announced there were indications that the rocket was being dismantled. On Wednesday, North Korea conducted the missile test, which it carried out successfully. What happened here? It could be that this false delay was all about China. North Korea originally announced the missile test only a day after a high-level meeting in Pyongyang between Kim Jong Un and Wang Jiarui, head of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Department. Beijing, in the midst of a leadership transition and already dealing with a period of tense relations with its neighbors and the United States, must have been furious. Although publicly China adopted a mild approach to the coming missile test, behind the scenes it may well have been exerting significant pressure on Pyongyang to scrap the launch. While Beijing does have leverage ...

Narciso Contreras / AP A Free Syrian Army fighter offers evening prayers beside a damaged poster of Syria’s President Bashar Assad during heavy clashes with government forces in Aleppo, Dec. 8, 2012. On the night of Nov. 29, a dozen Syrian opposition figures gathered at a student eatery in Moscow called Picasso, a cheap dive on the campus of the University of People’s Friendship whose walls are decorated with a mashup of images from the artist’s blue period. It may sound odd that enemies of Bashar Assad were gathering in a country that still had the dictator’s back. But these men and their organization may be Russia ’s only hope of influence in a post-Assad Syria. As young men, several of the Syrians at Picasso had studied at the university, which hosted the exchange programs that formed the early bonds between Moscow and Damascus in the 1960s. Indeed, the gathering could have been mistaken for a class reunion, as toa...