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L'Orient-Le Jour
2 days ago
- Politics
- L'Orient-Le Jour
Noura Erakat: Palestine recognition unaccompanied by reparations against Israel remains symbolic
Several Western countries have announced they will recognize the State of Palestine this September during the 80th session of the United Nations General human rights lawyer Noura Erakat — author of "Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine" (Stanford University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the electronic magazine Jadaliyya — speaks with L'Orient-Le Jour about the limits and flaws of international law in advancing Palestinian national liberation. She also discusses the opportunities it can offer Palestinians as Israel continues its policy of annihilation in the Gaza Strip. An interview you (may have) missed Raef Zreik: 'Israel has succeeded in turning Gaza into a place beyond geography, morality and law.' Some countries like France, the UK and Canada — all Israel's allies — plan to...
Mint
5 days ago
- Politics
- Mint
Arundhati Roy's Azadi among 25 books banned by J&K for ‘false narratives'
The Jammu and Kashmir government has banned 25 books, claiming they promote a 'false narrative and secessionism' in the Union Territory. Among the banned titles are Azadi by author Arundhati Roy, The Kashmir Dispute 1947–2012 by constitutional expert A.G. Noorani, and political scientist Sumantra Bose's Kashmir at the Crossroads and Contested Lands. According to a notification issued by the Home Department on Tuesday (August 5), the ban was based on 'credible evidence' that such content—often presented as historical or political analysis—has contributed to 'youth participation violence and terrorism.' 'This literature would deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism. Some of the means by which this literature has contributed to the radicalization of youth in J&K include distortion of historical facts, glorification of terrorists, vilification of security forces, religious radicalization, promotion of alienation, pathway to violence and terrorism,' the notification reads. The government has declared 25 books published by various publishing houses — including Routledge, Stanford University Press, and Oxford University Press — as 'forfeited' under Section 98 of the Bhartiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023. According to the notification, the books were 'found to excite secessionism and endanger the sovereignty and integrity of India,' thereby invoking provisions under Sections 152, 196, and 197 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. While Section 98 of the BNSS 2023 empowers the government to declare certain publications as 'forfeited', Sections 152, 196, and 197 of the BNS 2023 relate to 'assault without grave provocation', 'obstruction of public servants', and 'failure to assist them when legally bound', respectively. The government has ordered the forfeiture of 25 books, along with all copies and related documents.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
3 ancient Maya cities discovered in Guatemala, 1 with an 'astronomical complex' likely used for predicting solstices
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of three Maya cities in the Petén jungle of Guatemala. The cities are about 3 miles (5 kilometers) apart and are arranged like a triangle, Guatemala's Ministry of Culture and Sports reported in a translated statement. The cities were settled sometime during a period that archaeologists call the "middle preclassic," which occurred between roughly 1000 and 400 B.C. They were inhabited until around 1,100 years ago, when many Maya cities in the region collapsed. The most important of the three cities is a site archaeologists are calling "Los Abuelos," which means "the grandparents." This name comes from two stone sculptures found at the site: one of a man and another of a woman. They are believed to depict ancestors of those who lived at the site, the statement said, noting that this city may have been a ceremonial center for those who lived in the area. Los Abuelos thrived during the Middle Preclassic (1000 B.C. to 400 B.C.) and Late Preclassic periods (400 B.C. to A.D. 300) before being abandoned and then reinhabited during the Late Classic period (A.D. 600 to 900). It has an astronomical complex with buildings positioned in such a way that solstices and equinoxes can be recorded precisely, the statement said. The remains of a human burial were found at the site, along with the remains of two felines, pottery vessels, shells and arrowheads. Archaeologists also discovered an altar in the shape of a frog and an engraved stone slab known as a stela. Once the Mayan writing on the stela is translated, it may provide more information about the site and the people who lived there. Another newly found city, which archaeologists named "Petnal," has a 108-foot-tall (33 meters) pyramid, the statement said. The top of the pyramid is flat and has a room that houses the remains of murals on its walls. Red, white and black from the murals can still be seen, but more research is needed to determine what the murals depict. Petnal was likely a political center, according to the statement. A frog-shaped altar was also found there. The frog is perceived as a symbol of fertility and rebirth in Maya mythology, wrote researchers Robert Sharer and Loa Traxler in their book "The Ancient Maya: Sixth Edition" (Stanford University Press, 2006). Frog altars have been found at other Maya sites and presumably would have been used in rituals. The third newly found city, which the archaeologists dubbed "Cambrayal," has a network of canals that originates in a water reservoir at the top of a palace, the statement reported. The main purpose of the canals may have been for removing waste. "It's especially exciting to learn about the Los Abuelos site," Megan O'Neil, an associate professor of art history at Emory University who was not part of the excavation team, told Live Science in an email. The stone sculptures found at the site "are especially poignant and are similar to many other examples of Maya people making offerings to vital sculptures and connecting with their ancestors by interacting with sculptures from the past." RELATED STORIES —'Stunning' discovery reveals how the Maya rose up 4,000 years ago —Ancient Maya 'blood cave' discovered in Guatemala baffles archaeologists —Genomes from ancient Maya people reveal collapse of population and civilization 1,200 years ago O'Neil noted that it was important that archaeologists found the remains of intact ceramic vessels during their excavation. In the past, this region was heavily looted and the pottery made by the ancient Maya was taken and sold on the international market. The new finds may "help reconnect items in private and museum collections with their places of origin and deposition, helping return memory to those ceramics, to these sites, and to Maya people living in this region and across the world," O'Neil said. The discoveries of the three cities, along with other newly found sites in the region, were made by a team of archaeologists from Slovakia and Guatemala who were part of the Uaxactún Archaeological Project (PARU), which searches for Maya ruins near the Maya city of Uaxactún. Since 2009, PARU has discovered 176 sites, although only 20 have been excavated. Live Science reached out to archaeologists involved with the research, but they did not answer questions by the time of publication.
Business Times
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
How an agonising relationship with his dad shaped Xi Jinping
The Party's Interests Come First By Joseph Torigian; Stanford University Press; 718 pages; US$50 and £41 BY THE time Xi Zhongxun was in his 70s, his teeth were failing him. Tough, chewy foods were a challenge, so during one family meal, he extracted some half-masticated garlic ribs from his mouth and gave them to his son to finish. Xi Jinping – by then in his mid-30s and a rising star in the Chinese Communist Party – accepted the morsel without hesitation or complaint. He took the remains of the ribs and swallowed them. Xi Jinping was used to leftovers. As a boy, he would wash in his father's bathwater. (The next morning the water would be used for a third time, to launder the family's clothes.) He also understood the importance of deference, for Xi Zhongxun had taught him that children who did not respect their parents were doomed to fail as adults. Every Chinese new year, Xi Jinping would perform the traditional kowtow ritual, prostrating himself before his parent in a display of reverence. If his technique was off, his father would beat him. These stories are recounted in The Party's Interests Come First, a biography of Xi Zhongxun by Joseph Torigian, an American scholar. Torigian draws on a decade of research using Chinese, English and Russian sources, including official documents, newspapers, diaries and interviews. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject – who was a major figure in the party's history in his own right – but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader. As China's unquestioned ruler, possibly for life, Xi Jinping is arguably the most important person in the world. He will be wielding power long after Donald Trump has retired to Mar-a-Lago. Yet information about him is paltry. His every movement is choreographed by a fawning propaganda machine; in the accounts of his life, interesting details are expunged by overbearing censors. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject – who was a major figure in the party's history in his own right – but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader. There are only a handful of ways to understand Xi Jinping, which involve poring over party records or leaked speeches, learning about key moments in Chinese history that he lived through and studying the people who most influenced him. Few people have shaped Xi Jinping more than his father. Xi Zhongxun's relationship to the party and his thwarted ambitions offer clues as to what his son wants for China. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Like many of his generation, Xi Zhongxun's life was marked by tragedy. Born in 1913 into a family of peasants, he was an ardent believer in communism from a young age. His belief strengthened in his adolescent years, he said, as he witnessed 'the tragic mistreatment of the labouring people'. He took part in violent student protests in 1928 and was imprisoned by the then anti-communist authorities. Xi Zhongxun's parents died when he was a teenager: the result, he thought, of the stress caused by his jailing. Two of his sisters died of hunger. After the civil war, Xi Zhongxun rose fast through the party's ranks and 'entered the very top echelon of the government', Torigian writes. Then, in 1962, he was purged by Mao Zedong for supporting the publication of a novel Mao considered subversive. Four years later, China's paranoid dictator launched the Cultural Revolution, unleashing frenzied gangs who killed between 500,000 and two million people and displaced many more. Xi Zhongxun was kidnapped, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Around 20,000 people were targeted for having supported Xi Zhongxun, the author estimates, and at least 200 'were beaten to death, driven mad or seriously injured'. His family suffered, too. They were forced to denounce Xi Zhongxun; one of his daughters committed suicide. A teenager at the time, Xi Jinping was branded a 'capitalist roader' (essentially, a traitor) because of his father's disgrace. On one occasion, the young Xi Jinping was forced to wear a heavy steel cap and subjected to public humiliation. A crowd ridiculed him, shouting slogans including 'Down with Xi Jinping'. His mother joined in the jeering. Xi Jinping was thrown in prison, where he slept on an icy floor during the winter. 'My entire body was covered in lice,' he wrote. One time, Xi Jinping managed to escape and make his way home. He begged his mother for some food. Not only did she refuse, she also reported him to the authorities, fearful that she would be arrested otherwise. Crying, Xi Jinping ran out into the rain. What doesn't kill you The anguish did not stop there. In 1969, aged 15, Xi Jinping was 'sent down' to the countryside with millions of other young people exiled from the cities. He lived in a cave in a desolate part of the country, where girls were sold into marriage for a dowry calculated by their weight. 'Even if you do not understand, you are forced to understand,' he later recalled of that time. 'It forces you to mature earlier.' Why did both men stay committed to a party that had caused them so much pain? Torigian suggests the answer may lie in What Is to Be Done?, a novel of 1863 by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a Russian journalist. In the story, a young man named Rakhme sleeps on a bed of nails to strengthen his will. Xi Jinping imagined that he was Rakhme as he endured those cold floors, lice, rainstorms and blizzards. Both father and son may have been influenced by a Bolshevik political culture that glamorised 'forging' – the idea that suffering strengthens your willpower and dedication to the cause. Throughout his life, Xi Jinping has been loyal to two groups that demand absolute obedience: the family and the party. Both were often 'unfairly' strict, Xi Jinping has said, yet this did not dent his loyalty. Torigian shows how Xi Jinping balances dedication and realism. 'If I were born in the United States, I would not join the Communist Party of the United States. I would join the Democratic Party or Republican Party,' Xi Jinping once told Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister at the time. Abe concluded that Xi joined the party not because of ideology, but as a way to gain power. After Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, he was put in charge of Guangdong province and began to liberalise the local economy. When Xi Jinping became general secretary of the party in 2012 – the top job in China – many expected him to be an economic reformer like his father. But the assumption that Xi Jinping was any kind of liberal was wrong: he is not interested in creating an open and free country. He believes in restoring China's greatness and thinks that, to this end, the party should use any means necessary. His experience of injustice has not taught him that arbitrary power is undesirable; only that it should be wielded less chaotically than it was under Mao, by someone wise like himself. In a little over a decade, Xi Jinping has become the most autocratic Chinese leader since Mao. His regime ruthlessly represses dissidents at home and activists abroad; it enforces a stifling political conformity, forcing many to study 'Xi Jinping Thought'. Such methods are justified, he thinks, because he sees himself as a man of destiny, with a duty to generations past and future. He often speaks of himself as a protector of Chinese civilisation. 'Whoever throws away those things left behind by our ancestors is a traitor,' he told Ma Ying-jeou, a former president of Taiwan. That attitude is apparent in Xi Jinping's Taiwan policy, which bears his father's influence. Towards the end of his career, Xi Zhongxun was put in charge of unification with Taiwan. The party had ambitious dreams of reclaiming the island, which has been self-governing since China's civil war ended in 1949 and the losing side, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), retreated there. But Xi Zhongxun died in 2002 with this aspiration unfulfilled. His son yearns to fulfil it. Xi Jinping has made it plain he wants to take back Taiwan. Those who rule China must remember that 'the territory left by the ancestors must not shrink', he said in 2012. When or how he may try to seize Taiwan – through war, a blockade or other means – is unclear. What is clear, though, is that his family's suffering has shaped Xi Jinping's dark view of politics. 'For people who rarely encounter power and who are distant from it, they always see these things as very mysterious and fresh,' Xi Jinping once said. 'But what I saw was more than the surface of things. I didn't just see the power, flowers, glory and applause. I also saw the cowsheds (where people were confined during the Cultural Revolution) and the fickleness of the world.' Xi Jinping's formative years made him clear-eyed and cynical, hardened and imperious. The worldview he learned from his father will affect not only 1.4 billion Chinese people, but the whole of humanity. ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
AllAfrica
29-05-2025
- General
- AllAfrica
A 16th-century Chinese writer's take on workplace burnout
We are in the middle of a global workplace burnout epidemic. Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has aptly coined the term 'burnout society.' Four centuries ago, late-Ming Dynasty scholar-official Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) shifted from state administrative work to xiaopin — brief, personal essays celebrating everyday pleasures like gardening, leisurely excursions and long vigils beside a rare blossom. Today, his Ming Dynasty-era practice resonates with uncanny urgency within our burnout epidemic. The cover of The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Stanford University Press). Amid the Wanli Emperor's neglect and escalating bureaucratic infighting in Beijing, Yuan turned away from what today we call a 'toxic workplace.' Instead, he found refuge in Jiangnan's landscapes and literary circles. There he exchanged hierarchical pressures, administrative tedium and cut-throat careerism for moments of unhurried attention. Yuan's xiaopin , alongside those of his contemporaries, transformed fleeting sensory moments into radical acts of resilience, suggesting that beauty, not institutions, could outlast empires. The late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) was an era of contradictions. While Europe hurtled toward colonialism and scientific rationalism, China's Jiangnan region — the fertile Yangtze Delta in today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces — flourished via merchant wealth, global silver trade and a thriving print culture. Bookshops lined city streets like modern cafés. They peddled plays, poetry and xiaopin volumes like Meiyou Pavilion of Arts and Leisure (1630) and Sixteen Xiaopin Masters of the Imperial Ming (1633). The imperial examination system, a civil service written exam — once a path to prestige — had become a bottleneck. Thousands of scholars languished in bureaucratic limbo, channelling their frustrations and exhaustion into xiaopin 's intimate vignettes. Chinese imperial examination candidates gathering around a wall where the results are posted (painting by Qiu Ying, c. 1540). Photo: .National Palace Museum) In his preface to Meiyou Pavilion , editor Zheng Yuanxun (1603–1644) praised the genre's 'flavor beyond flavor, rhythm beyond rhythm' — a poetic nod to its rich sensory detail and subtle musicality — rejecting moralizing orthodox prose by embracing immersive aesthetics. Against neo-Confucianism's rigid hierarchies, xiaopin elevated the private, the ephemeral and the esthetically oblique: a well-brewed pot of tea, the texture of moss on a garden rock and incense wafting through a study. Wei Shang, professor of Chinese culture at Columbia University, has noted that such playful texts flourished among late-Ming literati disillusioned with the era's constraints. The texts reframed idleness and sensory pleasure as subtle dissent within a status-obsessed society. Long before French poet Charles Baudelaire's flâneur used dandyism and idle promenades to resist the alienating pace of western modernity, Ming literati such as Chen Jiru (1558–1639) and Gao Lian (1573–1620) framed idleness as defiance. Drawing on Daoist wu wei (non-action), Gao praised the 'crystal clear retreat' that scrubbed the heart of 'worldly grime' and cultivated 'a tranquil heart and joyful spirit.' For him, human worth lay not in bureaucratic promotions but in savoring tea, listening to crickets or resting against a well-fluffed pillow. A hanging scroll, ink on paper of a plum blossom branch by Chen Jiu (1558–1639). Photo: Yale University Art Gallery/S. Sidney Kahn, 1959 / Christie's, lot 677, 1983 / Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice, 1985), CC BY Hung-tai Wang, a cultural historian at Academia Sinica in Taipei, identifies xiaopin as a 'leisurely and elegant' esthetic rooted in nature's rhythms. Chen Jiru, a Ming Dynasty-era painter and essayist, embodied this framework by disallowing transactional logic. In one essay, Chen lauds those who possess 'poetry without words, serenity without sutras, joy without wine.' In other words, he admired those whose lives resonated through prioritizing lived gestures over abstract ideals. In the late Ming's burgeoning urban and commercial milieu, xiaopin turned everyday objects into remedies for social isolation. In the Jiangnan gardens, late Ming essayists saw landscapes infused with emotion. At the time, essayist Wu Congxian called it 'lodging meaning among mountains and rivers:' moonlight turned into icy jade, oar splashes into cosmic echoes. Chen Jiru had study rituals — fingering a bronze cauldron, tapping an inkstone — and curated what he termed 'incense for solitude, tea for clarity, stone for refinement.' This cultivation of object-as-presence anticipates American literary scholar Bill Brown's 'thing theory,' in which everyday items invite embodied contemplation and challenge the subject-object binary that enables commodification. The Ming Dynasty-era scholar-connoisseur Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645) turned domestic minutiae into philosophical resistance. His xiaopin framed everyday choices — snowmelt for tea, rooms facing narrow water, a skiff 'like a study adrift' — as rejections of abstraction. Through details like cherries on porcelain or tangerines pickled before ripening, he asserted that value lies in presence, not utility. Wen suggests that exhaustion stems not from labour but from disconnection. The Garden of the Inept Administrator (Zhuozheng Yuan) by Wen Zhengming, 1551. Wen painted 31 views of the site, each accompanied by a poem and a descriptive note. (Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1979/MET open source collection), CC BY Just as xiaopin turned domestic rituals into resistance, today's movements recast the mundane as a mode of defiance. In April 2021, China's tang ping ('lying flat') movement surfaced with a post by former factory worker Luo Huazhong: 'Lying flat is justice.' The message was simple and subversive: work had become intolerable, and opting out was not laziness but resistance. In a backlash against China's '996' work model extolled by tech moguls like Jack Ma, tang ping rejects the sacrifice of dignity and mental health for productivity and casts idleness as a quiet revolt against exploitative norms. In the West, the Covid-19 pandemic sparked similar reckonings. The 'Great Resignation' saw millions leave unfulfilling jobs. And 'quiet quitting' rejected unpaid overtime and emotional labor. These movements emerged as a soft refusal of hustle culture. As anthropologist David Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs (2018), the 'moral and spiritual damage' inflicted by meaningless work reflects a profound political failure. Just like the late-Ming literati who poured their lives into a state that repaid them with hollow titles and bureaucratic decay, today's workers withdraw from institutions that exploit their labor yet treat them as disposable. Unlike French philosopher Michel de Montaigne's introspective self-examination in his Renaissance-era Essays , xiaopin refuses utility. In doing so, it inverts the contemporary self-help trend critiqued by Byung-Chul Han, which co-opts personal 'healing' as a form of productivity through neoliberal logic. Xiaopin proposes resistance as an existential shift beyond (self-)optimization. Its most radical gesture is not to demand change but to live as if the system's demands are irrelevant. Xiaopin asks: What is progress without presence? Its fragments — on lotus ponds, summer naps, a cat's shadow — prove that resistance need not be loud. Like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's vision of contemporary literature as 'space of individual recovery,' the genre shelters us from 'hierarchy and efficiency.' Here, time is not spent but reclaimed. To pause in an age of weaponized ambition is in fact revolt. Tracing a petal's vein, sipping tea until bitterness fades, lying flat as the machinery of productivity grinds on — these are not acts of shirking reality but defiant gestures against the systems that feed on our exhaustion. They are affirmations of agency: microcosms where we rehearse what it means to belong to ourselves, and thus, to the world. Xiaopin 's revolution awakens in a flicker of attention: a reminder that presence, too, is a language — one that hums beneath the buzz of progress, waiting to be heard. Jason Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Xiao He is a master's student in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
