China Built a Big, Beautiful Wall, Too. It Failed.
From the moment he launched his campaign for president, Donald Trump compared the barrier he wanted to build along the U.S. southern border to China’s Great Wall. With the U.S. government now shuttered by the standoff over funding Trump’s wall, both he and his Democratic opponents might want to take a closer look at the Chinese fortification — and wh eorge Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was an instant success in the UK when it was published in 1937 and has remained in print, although perhaps not often read: a cruel but accurate description of the condition, during the Great Depression, of the working class in northern England.
It opens with a description of the lodging house at 22 Darlington Street in the Scholes district of Wigan, Lancashire, run by Mr and Mrs Brooker, who also owned a tripe shop. Orwell spent a few days there and was so struck that he devoted his first chapter to it. To him, the dirt, the small-minded landlords and the poverty of their lodgers (worn down by exhausting, poorly paid work and harassed by the administrative authorities) epitomised the region, where working conditions were harsh and unemployment high. He described ‘labyrinthine slums’ and ‘dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles’, commenting that ‘it is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.’
'Not afraid of the government': One month of protests in Sudan
y exactly it failed.
The Great Wall visited by tourists today is the handiwork of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and was primarily constructed in the mid- to late 16th century. The common perception is that the wall was conceived as a single, massive infrastructure project to protect China’s tumultuous northern border from foreign invaders. It was nothing of the sort. The Great Wall was built to a great degree by default, by a political system too paralyzed by infighting to come up with anything better.
Border security had been a preoccupation of China’s imperial court from its earliest days. “Barbarians” from the northern steppe — whether Xiongnu, Turk, Jurchen, Mongol or other — routinely threatened the Middle Kingdom. Some, such as Genghis Khan’s Mongols in the 13th century, managed to overrun the entire empire
'Not afraid of the government': One month of protests in Sudan
The current wave of anti-government protests has become the longest since Sudan gained independence in 1956.
by Hiba Morgan
Jihan Abdulrahman sat in her living room, surrounded by family, holding her middle daughter Samah. Both had tears in their eyes as Jihan recalled the last conversation she had with her younger brother Saleh on the morning of January 9.
"I woke him up before 9am because he asked me to," she said, wiping her tears. "He and his brothers wanted to head to Omdurman and join the protests."
They left early because they knew the security forces would eventually block roads to stop the procession, she said. Jihan kept checking up on them via phone but soon her worst fears were confirmed as she learned that 22-year-old Saleh had been shot.
‘We have made despair part of modern life’
The road beyond Wigan Pier
George Orwell wrote about poverty and unemployment in the north of England in 1936. Society there is still as unequal, but the nature of deprivation has changed.
by Gwenaëlle Lenoir
G
eorge Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was an instant success in the UK when it was published in 1937 and has remained in print, although perhaps not often read: a cruel but accurate description of the condition, during the Great Depression, of the working class in northern England.
It opens with a description of the lodging house at 22 Darlington Street in the Scholes district of Wigan, Lancashire, run by Mr and Mrs Brooker, who also owned a tripe shop. Orwell spent a few days there and was so struck that he devoted his first chapter to it. To him, the dirt, the small-minded landlords and the poverty of their lodgers (worn down by exhausting, poorly paid work and harassed by the administrative authorities) epitomised the region, where working conditions were harsh and unemployment high. He described ‘labyrinthine slums’ and ‘dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles’, commenting that ‘it is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.’
Abe, Putin on collision course over islands
By Richard Carter with Ola Cichowlas in Moscow
The leaders of Japan and Russia hold crunch summit talks on Tuesday, with the two countries locked in an undiplomatic war of words over a set of disputed islands.
Simmering tension between Moscow and Tokyo over the islands has ramped up in recent weeks, with Russia angrily accusing Japan of whipping up tension ahead of the summit and failing to accept it lost World War II.
Setting the tone for the talks, Putin's foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov admitted the meeting would "not be easy."
GOOGLE FACES RENEWED PROTESTS AND CRITICISM OVER CHINA SEARCH PROJECT
GOOGLE IS FACING a new campaign of global protests over its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China.
On Friday, a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups organized demonstrations outside Google’s offices in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark.
Google designed the Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.
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