During the recent visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to Washington, the White House seemed bent on trying in every way possible to extend him a cool reception. The Chinese expected a state dinner, normally accorded to a head of state on the first official visit to the United States. Hu got a lunch instead. The White House announcer introduced Hu as the president of not the People's Republic but the Republic of China, which is Taiwan's official name. A known Falun Gong supporter was allowed onto the White House grounds to hackle Hu during his formal reception speech. Adding insult to injury, Vice President Cheney was caught snoozing during Hu's press conference.
China's foreign minister left on Wednesday on a tour of six African nations, underscoring Beijing's accelerating economic and diplomatic presence in a region whose energy and natural resources it covets.
Return to war in Sri Lanka could have more impact on malnutrition than the 2004 tsunami, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday, with new violence already hitting aid programmes.
Three fifth of Bangladesh is now under water. About 50 million people are thrown from bad to worse conditions. Not everybody is suffering; there is a small section of people who feel joy with the rising water. They find their business (from alu-patal to fund stealing to huge (re)construction potential to flood control consultancy) booming.
Modern China has experienced a series of social upheavals since Sun Yat Sen’s democratic revolution and the demise of the Ming Dynasty. It emerged from centuries of feudal penury and the deleterious effects of imperialist occupation by Great Britain as well as extra territorial rights given to all other competing colonialists. The Communist Revolution under Mao Zedong’s leadership inherited a country devastated by civil war, which followed the split of the “KMT” and the Japanese occupation. The victory of the peasant and worker based Red Armies, which defeated Chiang Kai Shek and the Japanese, established a stable state power in a vastly primitive country where the only centers that touched modernization were in the Southeast coastal cities, Shanghai in particular, as well as the off shore territories of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
The world is on the cusp of a new century in which imperialist globalization is under serious challenge. The instruments of world domination, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank (WB) are under open challenge to bend to the need of alleviating the dire economic conditions of former colonial countries seeking a road of development to bring their people out of deepening poverty and indebtedness to the dominant G7 countries. By example, at this very moment, the apparent success of the Chinese experience in development, despite its problems yet to be solved, has injected a new dimension to the struggle against poverty.
