内容摘要：China’s BRI, the biggest multilateral development programme ever undertaken by a single country, is one of President Xi Jinping’s hallmark foreign policy initiatives.

China’s BRI, the biggest multilateral development programme ever undertaken by a single country, is one of President Xi Jinping’s hallmark foreign policy initiatives.

How did we get here?The Trump administration has repeatedly attacked higher education institutions, alleging they fail to curb anti-Semitism, or for “illegal and immoral discrimination” in the form of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes.

Last year, pro-Palestineprotests and encampmentssprang up in several US universities, including Columbia, Yale, New York University (NYU) and Harvard.

On January 29, Trump signed an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism”, ordering executive department heads to submit a report on all criminal and civil authorities and actions available for fighting anti-Semitism.A day after he signed this order, Trump was quoted in a White House fact sheet, saying: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

Trump has since frozen federal funding to several universities, including Columbia and Harvard.

With that funding at risk, universities are even more reliant on their endowment funds to sustain the research they conduct.But if you think what happened earlier this month was merely a military exchange, you’ve missed the real story.

This was a war, yes, but not just of missiles. It was a war of narratives, orchestrated in headlines, hashtags, and nightly newsrooms. The battlefield was the media. The ammunition was discourse. And the casualties were nuance, complexity, and truth.What we witnessed was the culmination of what scholars call discursive warfare — the deliberate construction of identity, legitimacy, and power through language. In the hands of Indian and Pakistani media, every act of violence was scripted, every image curated, every casualty politicised. This wasn’t coverage. It was choreography.

Scene one: The righteous strikeOn May 6, India struck first. Or, as Indian media framed it, India defended first.