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By making Xi Jinping a life-long leader of the China’s Communist Party (CPC) and president of the People’s Republic of China, the party not only endorsed Xi’s ambitious plan to make China the world’s No.1 military and economic power by 2049, far surpassing the United States of America, but also ensured that the programme does not get disturbed by the earlier practice of 10-yearly leadership change. No CPC leader has been as strong as Xi since Mao Zedong, the founder of the communist rule in China in 1949. Barring most unlikely circumstances, 2049 will also be the centenary year of the communist rule in China. The latest military-economic ambition of China is fully attainable if one considers China’s phenomenal growth under the communist regime in the last 71 years. The country’s GDP rose from near the global bottom-end in 1949 to the world’s second largest at over US$13.4 trillion, reports the World Population Review (WPR) 2021. The comparable US economy was worth $20.49 trillion.

The AFI Fest returned to Hollywood for live, in-person screenings and events, although there was also a virtual component for watching many of the feature, documentary, short, indie, studio, and foreign productions that Los Angeles’ largest annual film festival presented in 2021. Some of the screenings were accompanied by talent who introduced and/or spoke about their films when they were shown at the TCL Chinese Theatres.

Tennis Olympian Peng Shuai had complained of sexual assault by a highest ranking Chinese politician.

In Bangladesh, Pakistanis are learning the hard way that even 50 years after their country split, displaying their national flag in the East still remains a bitterly emotive issue.

The just ended climate summit COP26 has largely disappointed the people around the world as there was hardly any attempt to take bold steps to avert rapid global warming. Despite the urgency to halt catastrophic climate change, the pact that was approved at the end of the summit contained compromise and permitted the continued use of coal in coming decades instead of phasing it out along with other fossil fuels. The ambitious initial climate draft seeking commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and phase out fossil fuel use was watered down at the behest of powerful corporate oil and coal lobby.

Mark Zuckerberg wants us to believe he’s figured out how we’ll socialize in the future. On October 28, he outlined his vision for the metaverse, a virtual environment where we can hang out, shop, and work. Yet its realization depends on Facebook and various other companies jumping into the metaverse space to develop the technologies it will depend on, and requires the public to buy into a vision where we spend more time sitting at home with virtual reality headsets on instead of going out into the physical world.

The Pandora Papers has unveiled the story of offshore companies created within Dubai’s corporate enclave casting fresh light on Dubai’s rise as one of the world’s financial capitals— and on the UAE’s role as a nexus for money laundering and other financial crimes.

China has edged well ahead of India in addressing Bangladesh’s core concerns and offering substantive overall assistance to the smaller country. Bangladesh has formally approached China to participate in its ambitious ‘Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration project’ following India’s failure to implement an in-place water sharing agreement.

The McKinsey Co. report on the national wealth of the first ten countries of the world could not have come at a better time than the past Monday for the Chinese leader XiJinping. The long-awaited virtual summit between China and US was taking place between him and the US President Joe Biden and by that time China surpassed the USA in national wealth, defying all the earlier projections made by the World Bank, or Morgan Stanley which indicated a timeline of minimum 2035. By the end of 2020, China’s national wealth totalled $120 trillion as against $90 trillion of USA. The gap is quite wide.

It is a long haul from the BRIC report of Jim O’Neill of Morgan Stanley who had predicted the changing kaleidoscope of the world economy. The report predicted that in a short while of three decades, China and India would become the second and third biggest economies and then over another few decades, China would overtake United States.