The Xiaoping model
Pakistan is passing through difficult and unprecedented times. We are facing enormous difficulties with a clear lack of resources, overpopulation, widespread poverty, a huge debt burden, no savings, an uncompetitive…
Dual engine of China’s rise
Over the past three years, Pakistan has lived through one of its most intense periods of political and institutional turbulence since 2007. From the parliamentary removal of Imran Khan in…
The rare earth race
Bill Emmott, in his book ‘The Fate of the West’, cited how America’s collapse almost certainly triggers the collapse of Western civilisation. At the time of writing, however, the book…
A city that was…a city that can be—II
In the aftermath of the 1971 war and from the results of 1970 elections, a fresh wave of displaced persons from East Pakistan, settled in Karachi, from the pains of which the…
Why we need to shift from survival to scale
This article links directly to my article, ‘The real contest of growth’, published in these pages on September 11, where I argued that America invents while China executes. The US…
Two superpowers, one dangerous game
The recent military parade in China and US President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename the Department of Defense have created a spectre of heightened tensions between Beijing and Washington,…
The real contest of growth
China’s modern rise began with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms after 1978. A handful of pragmatic changes turned an inward, centrally planned economy into an export superpower. Beijing created Special Economic Zones…
On a wing and a prayer
WHEN most European countries and Volodymyr Zelensky were praying together with American neocons for the collapse of Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit with Donald Trump, India was vocal in hoping for its success.…
A strategic reset is long overdue
Under prevailing security scenarios at the global and regional levels, Pakistan’s friendship with China undoubtedly constitutes its most important strategic partnership with a foreign country. Over the past seven decades,…
Politics and economy
Perhaps a better caption could have been politicians and economics but a fair sense of judgement prevailed. The subject is one of an incredible juxtaposition. The words apparently contrast each…
