Features

Blood-bath in the politburo

Published

4 years ago

2022/10/30

by Kumar David

The Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitutes the power elite of the Party and is the ruling council of the country. The seven members of the standing soon to be ratified at the 20th Party Congress are Xi Jinping (age 69), Li Qiang (tipped to be the next Prime Minister, age 63), Zhao Leji (anti-corruption tsar, age 65), Wang Huning (Marxist theoretician, age 67), Cai Qi (General Secretariat to manage day to day party affairs, age 66), and Ding Xuexiang (Xi factotum and loyalist, age 60)

Four members of Standing Committee will be removed. Among them is current Premier Li Keqiang and members Wang Yang, Han Zheng, and Li Zhanshu. The latter two were expected to step down, having passed the informal age limit of 68 – a requirement not extended to Xi. Wang Yang and current PM Li Keqiang, both 67, could still have continued in the Standing Committee or 25-member Politburo for another five-year term but were pushed out to make space for Xi loyalists. In an acutely embarrassing and unchoreographed incident former Chinese President Hu Jintao was escorted out of the Congress. There is speculation about what’s going on, it could simply be ill health; he is very much a party man and unlikely to rock the boat in a last-minute drama, nevertheless since he has not issued any statement from his place of recuperation we need to wait and see.

I have worked and travelled extensively in Hong Kong and China for 40 years and here is my assessment of the relationship between the CCP and the people. The vast majority, even anti-communists agree that an abrupt internal collapse of the CCP or its sudden fall from power at this moment would lead to domestic chaos and a weakening of China internationally. Most will also agree that China is not democratic and wish to see more democracy but have different views about what democracy in China should look like. The reasons for being wary of a power vacuum are obvious. For three and a half millennia when central power collapsed or a dynasty fell, there was chaos on a gigantic scale. Millions of lives were lost and the land was devastated as warlords and aspirants to power battled it out.

Take just the last two centuries starting with the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 between the Manchu Qing Dynasty allied with its Han beneficiaries, against the Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of the self-proclaimed “younger brother of Jesus Christ”, Hong Xiuquan. Devastation was extreme, it is estimated that 20 million perished. It also marks the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation” since imperialist powers gained control of all the country’s power centres. Then came the Boxer Uprising (1899-1901), an anti-foreign, anti-colonial and anti-Christian uprising which was crushed by the imperialist powers with the loss of over 100,000 Chinese lives. Beijing was occupied and the Imperial Court banished to Xian.

The humiliation goes on in the twentieth century. The 1911 Revolution established the Republic of China identified with Dr Sun Yat Sen, but the gains petered out in internal factional brawls and foreign intervention – Japanese in the North and American in the South and East. Then the Nanjing Massacre or Rape of Nanjing of 1937 when 300,000 to half a million Chinese were massacred by the Imperial Japanese Army. In the meantime, Chinese administrations all over the country were collapsing and the Communist Party had been formed in Shanghai in 23 July 1921 by Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chen Duxiu, Zhou Fohai – 57 Chinese and a few Russian Comintern representatives.

This was followed by the Long March, the civil war and liberation in 1949 (“The Chinese People have stood up”) but hardship did not end. I do not need to detail recent history but enumerate the Great Leap Forward (1958-62 where the best estimate of death from famine is 30 million) and the decade-long (1966-76) Cultural Revolution where the loss of life was not as large as in the Great Leap Forward but political conflict tore the country apart in Mao’s mentally declining years. The Sino-Soviet conflict, the Gang of Four and June 4 Tiananmen Square are well known recent history.

One can appreciate why Chinese people, whatever their views of the Beijing government, communism or the Party shudder at the thought of instability and disorder. My personal reading of the thinking of many Chinese friends is that they cannot forget the humiliation of the last two centuries. However, there is something far more than the notion of “Chinese nationalism” that Westerners reduce it to. My friends not being philosophers do not state it thus, but it is civilizational rather than nationalist. Apart from China (and Hong Kong) there is a flavour of this in all Chinese communities across Asia, Taiwan Province, Singapore (obvious in Lee Kuan Yew) and the hundreds of China Towns in the USA. The resonances overlap sentiments deeply rooted in three and a half millennia of unbroken civilisation. These are civilizational resonances, deeper than nationalism. My blunt matrixes may not make sense to Chinese friends or befuddled foreigners!

Let me move on to something more prosaic that I can write about with confidence: China’s material and economic prospects for the next decade. Whether measured by a PPP yardstick or in nominal dollar values it is very likely that the size of the Chinese economy will surpass the United States in say a decade. The advantages of competent state direction in the initial decades of post-colonial modernisation are bearing fruit. The difference from a basket-case like Sri Lanka is the word competent. Whether under the leadership of the Communist Party, or in say Singapore, Taiwan or South Korea (each for different reasons) the directive-modernising role of the state was different but nowhere was as mismanaged, incompetent and corrupt as in Sri Lanka. But that’s a different story.

That China will catch up and surpass the US economy in size in about 10 years, even if long-term growth in the former is constrained to 4% and falls to 1% in the US, is simple arithmetic. The entire capitalist world including especially the Euro Block and Japan is of course much larger than the US alone and even a China-Russia cooperative strategy will take much longer to reach par. (I argued the prospects for China-Russia economic cooperation in the closing paragraphs of ‘Putin’s Last Stand’ on Oct 16, 2022). Size does matter but it is not the only attractor; there are other factors: technology, investment, military focus and another crucial qualitative aspect. The bread-an- butter technology picture, is mixed. China seems to be pulling ahead in Artificial Intelligence and hard technology for industrial expansion. While the West is hell bent on denying China access to the best in computer-chips and military know-how, there may be ways round this such as joint-ventures and theft of intellectual property. Russian science and technology are no pushover and China-Russia cooperation can yield results. This therefore in not a closed chapter.

American and Western military superiority is also a concern for China. The West spends far more on military research and technology, the US has special agencies such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and its aircrews have hugely more training in the air. Some shortcomings can be addressed, for example military R&D can be increased, an agency similar to ARPA created, though catching up in aircrew training is a tougher job. Still, I grant that the gap can be narrowed.

In closing I would like to look beyond a decade or two and peer past the middle of this Century. The state directed phase is building railways, airports and highways; it is encouraging massive soulless public housing projects by private developers who are lining their pockets with millions of Yuan and dollars. The nagging question on the horizon however is what after the dirigisme phase as served its purpose and is past its use-by date. How is post-dirigisme society, technology and innovation to organise itself?

Marx speculated that “in place of the old bourgeois society, with its class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. And speculated (much abbreviated) in the German Ideology “Each man has a particular, sphere of activity from which he cannot escape. He is hunter, fisherman or critical critic, and must remain so but in a society of plenty he can hunt in the morning, fish in the evening and criticise after dinner without being hunter, fisherman, or critic”. Only if society has progressed to plenty is unencumbered freedom possible; perhaps a century into the future.But leave aside flowery expectations and ponder the immediate circumstances of post-dirigisme China. Innovation is not automatic. Productivity enhancement in China is falling behind and raises questions about what the nature of the freedoms essential for the future. Society has to be set free to flourish.

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Features

The hard challenge of clinching a political settlement in the Middle East

Published

22 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

Bruised hearts: Displaced Palestinian civilians in the Gaza.(Photo by Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Despite some sections of the Trump administration persisting with the view that the possibility could not be entirely ruled out of there being a diplomatic solution to the current US-Iran hostilities in West Asia, the skeptic could not be blamed for thinking otherwise. The intensity, scale and frequency of the tit-for-tat strikes by the antagonists over the past few days against selected military targets and civilian infrastructure in particular in West Asia make the adoption of this stance excusable.

The continuing hostilities render the mentioning of the MOU signed between the warring parties in mid-June a laughable matter. While it could very well be that the foes are wishing privately for a cessation of hostilities before long, what seems to be uppermost on their minds right now is to negotiate with each other from a position of strength. This strategy compels them to incapacitate each other militarily to the extent possible, lest they have to concede too much to each other during negotiations. Hence the stepped-up hostilities.

However, even on the question of there being a negotiated political settlement in the West Asian theatre in the longer term, the skeptic could come to be seen as scoring over the optimist. Developments on the ground account for this.

At the time of writing Israel’s Netanyahu government is going ahead in fairly care-free fashion with the establishment of more Jewish settlements in the Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s all happening under the apparently complacent gaze of the US. In fact, some quarters estimate that Israel is in control of some 65% of the Gaza Strip. Ethnic cleansing, that is, is being drastically stepped-up.

Accordingly, in terms of the power relations of West Asia, the world is almost back to the status quo of the late forties of the last century when the state of Israel was established and the Palestinians were reduced to a microscopic minority in the land they came to inhabit. Therefore, even the impartial observer would be compelled to ask: ‘Will a negotiated peace be ever possible in the Middle East?’

The humanist in the observer would prefer to answer this question in the affirmative and it is indeed the ideal stance to adopt considering the staggering human and material costs of the conflict. But the way ahead to peace could be expected to be highly hazardous and arduous. Among other odds, it would also prove an uphill endeavour to win minds and hearts.

The US’ Trump administration would need to be counted out in this pursuit. This is on account of the fact that it has been far too wayward in its management of West Asian affairs in particular over the past couple of years. Given its unpredictable character it is a matter for conjecture whether it could be counted on to live up to its commitments.

Moreover, Israel could be expected to ‘go it alone’ in the Middle East regardless of whether US help is coming or otherwise. It has indicated as much in recent times and Israel could be doubted on this score only at the doubter’s peril. Because time and again Israel has demonstrated that it could steadfastly defend its interests even single-handedly in the Middle East. History bears this out.

However, a durable alliance with the US would stand Israel in good stead. On the matter of military and intelligence assistance, for example, the US’s help proved invaluable for Israel in the past and going forward this is bound to be so as well. Moreover, it is unlikely that the Trump administration would give up on Israel, considering that a strong Israel is crucial for the furtherance of the US’ strategic and economic interests in West Asia.

But whether the above factors would have a considerable bearing on the question of working out a durable solution to the West Asian tangle is an entirely different matter. Israel, as in the case of the Palestinian enclaves, is acutely security conscious and would need to satisfy itself fully that it could live in a security environment that would guarantee its complete safety, going forward.

The Middle East is badly in need of another peace effort on the lines of the Oslo Accords of the mid-nineties that brought the key actors together and helped hammer out a solution that addressed some of their notable concerns. To be sure, that process did not prove to be the ideal answer to the tangle, but it yielded some respite to the region and drove home that one-time sworn foes could indeed negotiate with a degree of success. The West Bank authority, although falling short of fulfilling some key Palestinian aspirations, is testimony that a degree of success is possible if the intent is right.

Given the current realities of West Asia, peace-making is bound to be an uphill challenge. The violence faced in recent times by the Palestinian community, in particular, has been nothing less than mind-numbing. Merciless has been the violence visited on them by the Israeli side. In such circumstances, durable peace in the region could smack of an idealist’s dream.

Nevertheless, there needs to be urgently, a meeting of minds over the divides. The US would need to be counted out as an honest broker in bringing the sides together but the rest of the West would do well to step up to the challenge.

In this exercise the onus would be on the world’s democracies to take the initiative and doggedly stay the course. An acceptable combination would be the EU and the UN. Given their credentials, the main sides in West Asia ought to find them the least controversial.

Even if the relevant institutional and political arrangements could be shored up to take a reconciliation process forward, winning hearts and minds for the peace drive would prove a grueling challenge. Over the past few years in particular tens of thousands of hearts and minds on both sides of the divide have been bruised badly in the runaway murderous violence that has come to define the Middle East.

These badly scarred personalities would need to experience healing without much delay. It is therefore a multi-faceted challenge that is at hand. Since wide-ranging expertise would be needed in the healing process, people’s participation in peace-making, ranging over the divides, would need to be made a durable reality. It will be a time for enthroning humanity and ensuring the rejection of all forms of violence and coercion.

Features

Amazing Thailand …right here in Colombo

Published

22 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

For many Sri Lankans, Thailand is the go-to holiday — beaches, temples, food, and that famous warm hospitality.

In fact, I’ve been to Amazing Thailand 24 times myself, and was honoured with the Friends of Thailand International Media Award by the Tourism Authority of Thailand for promoting Thai tourism.

The good news I have for you today is that you don’t even need a passport to get a taste of Amazing Thailand.

The Royal Thai Embassy, in Colombo, is bringing a vibrant slice of Thailand, to the city of Colombo, with Thai Festival 2026 — a cultural experience like never before.

Whether you are an avid enthusiast of Thai culture, a total novice, or simply just interested in exploring foreign cultures, Thai Festival 2026 is going to be the perfect opportunity for you to get more than just a glimpse into one of the most celebrated cultural heritages in South East Asia. And ENTRANCE IS FREE.

The festival will be held on the 1st and 2nd of August, 2026, at Siam Nivasa, 43, C.W.W. Kannangara Mawatha, Colombo 7, and the East Parking Area, of the Colombo Municipal Council, from 11:00am to 5:00pm.

Both days will be full of live entertainment, and dispersed throughout with Thai cultural displays, including exhilarating traditional dance performances and breathtaking Muay Thai demonstrations.

Exploring art and craft specific to Thailand, tasting irresistible authentic Thai cuisine, and playing arcade games, are just a few more fun-filled events available for visitors at the festival premises.

An array of Thai products will also be available for purchase.

While at the festival, you will find Sri Lankan Alumni from Thai universities sharing their experiences with you and willing to answer any questions you might have, related to studying abroad in Thailand.

You can also register for the Muay Thai workshop that will be happening on the 7th and 8th of August, 2026, in Colombo.

Irresistible authentic Thai cuisine

Visitors can also stand a chance to win traditional Thai souvenirs, get exclusive photo opportunities, and, the big one — to enter the raffle draw, at the end of each day, for the grand prize of an all-inclusive round trip to Thailand.

Be sure to avail yourself of this exceptional opportunity and add a cultural spin to your weekend.

To keep up with the latest updates on Thai Festival 2026, head over to the Thai Festival official social media pages.

The Royal Thai Embassy in Colombo official webpage:

https://colombo.thaiembassy.org

Official social media:

Facebook: @RTEColombo

Instagram: @thaiembassysrilanka

Thai Festival official social media:

Facebook: Thai Festival in Colombo

Instagram: @thaifestival_colombo

TikTok: @thaifestival.incolombo

Features

Thicker, stronger hair …

Published

22 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

Hair fall, in this heat, can be so frustrating, and noticing a thin patch is even more worrying. The good news is … yes, with a little care and kitchen ingredients, you can nourish your scalp and support healthy regrowth.

Try these four easy home remedies … even our grandmothers trusted:

* Coconut Oil and Curry Leaves Tonic:

Warm 04 tablespoons of coconut oil, with a handful of curry leaves, till the leaves turn black. Cool, strain, and massage into scalp 02-03 times a week. Leave for 01 hour, or overnight.

Why:

Coconut oil deeply nourishes, while curry leaves help strengthen roots and add shine.

* Onion Juice for Spot Treatment:

With cotton, dab the juice of 01 small onion, directly on the thin/bald patches. Leave for 20-30 minutes, and then wash with a mild shampoo. Use twice a week.

Why:

Rich in sulfur, onion juice helps boost blood circulation to the scalp.

* Aloe Vera and Castor Oil Mask:

Mix 02 tablespoons of fresh aloe vera gel and 01 tablespoon castor oil and apply to the scalp, focusing on thinning areas. Leave for 45 minutes, and then rinse with cool water.

Why:

Aloe vera soothes the scalp, while castor oil coats hair to make it look thicker.

* Fenugreek and Curd Strengthening Pack:

You will need 02 tablespoons fenugreek seeds, soaked overnight, and 02 tablespoons plain curd.

Grind to a paste, apply to scalp for 30 minutes, and then wash.

Why:

Fenugreek strengthens strands and reduces breakage.

Extra Tips for Healthy Hair:

Avoid tight hairstyles that pull on the scalp.

Eat iron and protein rich foods: greens, dhal, eggs, fish.

Use lukewarm water, not hot.

Be gentle when brushing and drying.