The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Pepe Escobar -
Anteing Up, Betting, and Bluffing in the New Great Game
Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China’s far west. Hyperbole did not deter the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan’s...
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed Chinese human rights activist, Liu Xiaobo, has raised tension between China and the West.
Xiabo advocates for human rights, freedom of expression and democracy in China and his activism has resulted in an 11-year jail sentence for what has been described as "subversion" by the Chinese government.
The Nobel Peace Committee, awarded Xiabo the peace prize for using non-violence to demand human rights, raising China's ire....
Saliem Fakir -
President Jacob Zuma’s trip to China happens in the context of China having just overtaken Japan as the second largest economy in the world. By 2030 it may well be the largest.
This trip also follows Zuma’s very recent trip, with an entourage of officials and businessmen, to India. Both countries are held as examples by the government worthy of emulating their growth and development strategies.
This is reinforced by the fact that our own planning commission has drawn from both...
Minqi Li, Professor of Political Economy, from the University of Utah in the US, talks to Paul Jay of the Real News Network about the recent wave of workers' strikes in China. Li is author of the book, "The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy."
In June, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party said that it's time for workers’ wages to go up.
There's been much talk about China restructuring its economy to boost domestic demand. There has been much...
Leonard Gentle -
Quietly, but inexorably, the world is changing. In the past three months a number of events have occurred, which, in and of themselves may go nowhere, but indicate the emergence of tectonic shifts that will change the world as we have known it for much of the 20th century.
These changes may not necessarily be for everyone’s good, they may even portend more frightening developments, but if we don’t know about them we’ll only experience their effects like the...
Saliem Fakir -
They go by different names: IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa), BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China). These formations all amount to more or less the same thing: the new “emerging economies” seeking to redefine relations between themselves and the rest of the world.
They are widely seen as new symbols of power in the global arena.
The shaping of the alliances between these powerful new emerging economies raises...
