Baloch House

30 July 2020 N SATHIYA MOORTHY The Solih government is under tremendous pressure on multiple fronts — the China factor is one on which it may have the least control. Spencer Platt/Getty Even as the Government of President Ibrahim Solih is battling  Covid-19  pandemic and yet taking courage to  reopen  the famed ‘resort tourism’ sector, Maldives’ economic mainstay, other issues are beginning to dog the nation. While the opposition is busy with itself in a way and is also targeting the Government on India front, the Solih leadership should be concerned even more about the short, medium and long-term fallouts of China asking the Maldivian state to repay at least an instalment of a massive loan granted to a local resort-owner. In what clearly is an unprecedented development, China’s Exim Bank has asked the Maldivian government to pay up $10 million (MVR 154 million), possibly an unpaid instalment from the total $127 million loan to former Yameen ally and parliamentarian, ‘ Sun ’ Ahmed Shya

Xinjiang Under Surveillance July 6, 2020 – International correspondent  Megha Rajagopalan  and investigative journalist  Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian  in conversation on the human rights situation in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. (41 min., 46 sec. https://asiasociety.org/video/xinjiang-under-surveillance

TikTok, XPCC, Fifth Plenum, Lee Teng-hui, HK China Neican Aug 2 China Neican  is a weekly column of the  China Story  blog written by Yun Jiang and Adam Ni. 1. US-China relations update TikTok US policy on Tiktok is still up in the air although a decision will likely be announced in the next week. Trump has reportedly said he will ban TikTok. Some  reports  suggest that Microsoft may purchase the US operation of TikTok from ByteDance.  We have  previously written  about the concerns that some governments have about TikTok — data and privacy, censorship and propaganda. Now the question is what to do about it. It appears that the likely outcome will be one of the two: ByteDance divest TikTok US Government ban TikTok With the first option, if ByteDance only sells the US operation of TikTok, what about its other global operations? How is the separation between TikTok-US and TikTok-global going to be maintained? It would be somewhat unrealistic for TikTok-US to be separated out from the res

Islamabad does not want to move UNSC 1267 committee on getting BLA declared as global terrorist organisation as it feels that this will internationalise Balochistan’s separatist movement. Updated: Aug 02, 2020 13:28 IST By Shishir Gupta, Hindustan Times New Delhi The Balochistan Liberation Army had claimed responsibility for the attack on the Chinese Consulate in November, 2018, in which seven people were killed. With China-Pakistan Economic Corridor at the heart of President Xi Jinping’s plan to consolidate economic relations with Africa and Middle-East via Gwadar, Beijing wants Islamabad to move the UN Security Council’s 1267 Al Qaida, Taliban and affiliates committee to brand Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) a global terrorist organisation. The BLA is engaged in a struggle for self-determination for ethnic Baloch people and has been declared a terrorist organization by Pakistan, UK and US. While Beijing has assured Pakistan of full backing to get the BLA declared as global terroris