China: developing a strong socialist culture
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has attached great importance to the development…
N Korea’s ‘socialist utopia’ needs mass labour
In January, thousands of North Korean students travelled to Mount Paektu, a sacred mountain where the ruling family claims its roots and where leader Kim Jong Un is building a…
A (mock) revolution gone awry
Composed on the grandest of scales and couched in the most sublime of languages, the epic represents the highest form of poetry. Typically, this genre describes the glorious saga of…
Changing the past
Here’s a riddle for you. Why do I think of Milan Kundera when I drive past the Teen Talwar roundabout in Karachi and am in a pensive mood? Naturally, when…
The soul’s spokesman
The hunger strike started by Bhagat in Mianwali Jail became a saga of heroic resistance in the Lahore Central Jail against the racism of colonial authorities that imposed undignified labour…
Something else about March 23
MARCH 23 evokes three apparently distinct events in different time zones, which are in a curious way linked. The day marks Pakistan’s national day. That’s when Delhi-based journalists would wait…
China at 75 – and beyond
On October 1, the People’s Republic of China completed 75 years of its establishment. These 75 years have seen China shake off rampant poverty and backwardness to become a major…
Freedom parties
THE role of political parties in winning freedom is well known. But how many of them, on attaining the goal of freedom, put their nations on the path of progress?…
Soviet experiment
EXACTLY 100 years ago today, representatives from the socialist republics of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Transcaucasia (Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia) signed a treaty that set up the Union…
Killing democracy
THE US has never officially been willing to concede that recent history encompasses not one but two 9/11s. There’s the one 22 years ago that everyone is supposed to remember,…
