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No bilateral meeting scheduled with India, Aziz to leave on Sunday

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Pakistani adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz

Islamabad: Pakistan and India will not hold any bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia Conference being held in Amritsar on December 3-4, it was reported on Thursday. Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz is leading the Pakistani delegation to the two-day meeting that will focus on cooperation between Afghanistan and its neighbours for improving connectivity and tackling security threats in the region.

“For now, we don’t see any willingness on their part… the ball is in India’s court, for they know we are willing but we don’t know whether they are willing,” a foreign office official told Dawn on Wednesday.India on Wednesday clarified that it has not officially received a request for any bilateral meeting from Islamabad.

“Pakistan has not requested for any bilateral meeting so far,” Gopal Baglay, who heads the Indian Ministry of External Affairs division dealing with Pakistan, said at a briefing in New Delhi. Pakistan and India had at the last Heart of Asia ministerial meeting in Islamabad agreed to start “Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue” that was to cover all outstanding issues. The resumption of the dialogue could, however, not take place due to the Pathankot attack in January earlier this year.

Bilateral relations further deteriorated in July following the commencement of unrest in Jammu and Kashmir and India placed the blame for the September 18 Uri military camp attack and continuing infiltration attempts on Pakistan. Things turned worse with the spike in ceasefire violations at the border that have left dozens of people dead in barely two months.

The Pakistan government decided to attend the Heart of Asia conference despite a deep freeze in bilateral ties, even though India had scuttled the Saarc summit that Islamabad was to host in November this year. Aziz had earlier said in Islamabad: “India sabotaged Saarc, but Pakistan would not do the same.”

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Lockdowns in China Force Urban Communities to Defy Censorship and Vent Frustration Online

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Anyip Mobile Proxies

Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.

Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai

Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.

Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.

Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.

WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.

Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.

Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy

Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.

The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.

Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.

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