Economist, Oct 11, 2014

choi

Chinese Indians | Kings No More; A last-ditch effort to save a dying community. www.economist.com/news/asia/2162 ... unity-kings-no-more

Quote:

“Chinese migrants had begun coming to India in the late 1700s, setting up the first sugar refineries. Then the British, who pressed exports of Indian opium on China in order to pay for purchases of tea and to plug a huge outflow of silver to China, brought back carpenters and tea-plantation workers to Assam in India’s north-east. Most Chinese were Cantonese-speakers from Guangdong in the south. A century ago, they numbered about 100,000 in India.

“By one estimate, barely 4,000 people of Chinese descent now remain in India, about half of them in Kolkata’s Chinatown. ‘Everyone wants to leave [for Canada, Australia and US],’ says Mr [chef George] Ling.

Note:
(a) “More and more stalls in [Culcutta’s Chinatown] are run by Bengalis.”
(i) Bengali (n): "a member of a people living chiefly in Bangladesh and in West Bengal. The West Bengalis are mainly Hindus; the East Bengalis of Bangladesh are mainly Muslims"
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictio ... owCookiePolicy=true
(ii) Bengal
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal
(The region was politically divided in 1947; section 1 Etymology)
(iii) Calcutta is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal.

(b) Assam
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assam
(The precise etymology of "Assam" is unknown)
(c) “In 1962, during a vicious border war between India and China, Chinese Indians suffered the indignity of internment in miserable camps in Rajasthan.”

Rajasthan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajasthan
(literally, "Land of Kings" or "Land of Kingdoms;" is India's largest state by area; comprises most of the wide and inhospitable Thar Desert)

(d) “There is also the redbrick structure of India’s most famous Chinese restaurant, the Nanking, opened in 1924. China’s then prime minister, Zhou Enlai, reportedly ate there in the 1950s; today, vapours rise from a pile of rubbish by its entrance.”
(i) Zeenab Aneez, Schezuan to Sashimi. The Hindu, July 24, 2013
www.thehindu.com/features/metrop ... /article4948914.ece
(The last photo in the photo gallery is the facade of Nanking restaurant)
(ii) Schezuan” is Indian, and Indian only, way of writing. The spelling in the West is Szechuan or Szechwan (the latter being postal map spellings 郵政式拼音, according to en.wikipedia.com). Pinyin is Sichuan.

choi

Vietnam and the United States | Past as Prologue; America partially lifts an arms embargo against a former foe.
www.economist.com/news/asia/2162 ... r-foe-past-prologue

Quote:

“The trouble started in May, when a Chinese state-owned energy company parked a large oil rig within Vietnam’s claimed exclusive economic zone, near the Paracel islands, which Vietnam and China contest. * * * In mid-July the rig was towed back to near China’s Hainan island * * * In August senior officials from India, Japan and America all visited Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.

“The [arms] embargo [which US had imposed on Vietnam], in place since 1984, has persisted even as ties have warmed — Vietnam’s record on human rights, after all, is dismal. The partial easing of the embargo looks largely symbolic. Nine-tenths of Vietnam’s arms purchases are from Russia, according to IHS Jane’s, a consulting firm.

“An American diplomat says that Vietnam has made some progress in terms of its human-rights record, including the release this year of 11 prisoners of conscience. But a full lifting of the lethal-arms embargo, the diplomat says, would depend on ‘additional progress.’ That may be some way off.

Note:
(a) “High above Danang, a city half-way down the country’s long eastern coast that hosted American troops during the Vietnam war, military planes have been tearing about on training missions.”
(i) Da Nang
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Nang
(ii) tear (vi): “to move or act with violence, haste, or force <went tearing down the street>”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tear

(b) “They [US and Vietnam] are partners in the Trans-Pacific Partnership”

“Partners” are a vague term. Vietnam is not a member, nor is Taiwan.
(c) “Cu Huy HA VU, one of the political prisoners who was recently freed, is a Sorbonne [University of Paris]-educated lawyer who was jailed in 2011 for, among other crimes, calling for multiparty government.”