“It’s better to go to jail than go to work” “At least allow employees to eat lunch at their leisure.” Strange but true: an employee of the Chinese real estate conglomerate the Wanda Group, was publicly humiliated by his company for going through his mobile phone while having lunch. A picture of him playing on […]Read More

To the world, June 4th 1989 is a day that is carved in infamy! On this day, Chinese troops backed by tanks stormed into Tiananmen Square in Beijing to forcibly clear out thousands of students demanding democracy, freedom and human rights. Estimates of how many died in the massacre that followed vary from many hundreds […]Read More

In most parts of the world, Children’s Day means the focus is on fun and family. Not so in China where Children’s Day on June 1st is an occasion for propaganda and political messaging. The Chinese Communist Party sees this day as another opportunity to educate its young citizens in loyalty and ideology. Children, with […]Read More

“My throat is hurting” “I have no smell” “I am sneezing from past 5 days” NEW DELHI: Over the last week, Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, was inundated with people complaining of all of the above and more. Was it an influenza epidemic? Could it be Covid again? The term trending on Weibo was “Eryang”, meaning […]Read More

The annual summit of the world’s richest countries comprising the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US) wound up over the weekend in Hiroshima, Japan. China, though the world’s second largest economy after the U.S., is not a G7 member, clearly a sore point in Beijing. Nor did it help that the […]Read More