The Telegraph
The world’s worst death toll? At least three million people died from Covid in India, says new study
Joe Wallen
Fri, January 7, 2022, 8:07 AM
It has long been feared that India’s death toll is much higher than its official up-to-date figure of 480,000 due to a failure to accurately register deaths, particularly during its devastating second wave last spring when hospitals were overwhelmed.
Prabhat Jha, the director of the Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto, conducted a telephone survey among 140,000 people across India to inquire whether anyone in their household had died from Covid-19.
His team also analysed government reports from hospitals for deaths and compared this with official data.
They concluded that India had actually seen between 2,300 and 2,500 deaths per million citizens up until September 2021 and therefore, nearly three million total fatalities. This would mean India has the highest Covid-19 death toll of any country.
It has long been accepted that India has drastically undercounted its Covid-19 dead. Its public healthcare system is one of the most underfunded in the world and data on deaths has long been patchy.
In 2017, only four-in-five deaths were registered, while only one-in-five registered deaths also had a cause identified, according to Indian government data.
India was plunged into chaos last spring as the delta variant overwhelmed the country and thousands of Indians died outside at capacity hospitals and in their homes.
Many were unable to get tested for Covid-19 before they died while others were hastily buried in makeshift burial sites.
This discrepancy in the death toll has already been noted in state-wise mortality data across India. For example, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh there were almost 24 times the expected deaths during April 2020 and May 2021.
Madhya Pradesh was also one of five states where less than ten per cent of deaths during this period were medically certified.
Meanwhile, India’s ongoing third wave, which is being driven by the more contagious omicron variant, continues to escalate.
On Thursday, the country logged 117,100 new Covid-19 cases – more than triple the daily tally on January 1 – and the most since early June.
Many hospitals in India’s major cities have reported a noticeable uptick in Covid-19 hospitalisations. In Mumbai, the number of people admitted increased from 916 on December 15 to 4,491 on January 4.
The Indian authorities have called for calm and reiterated that there remains plenty of beds available across the country but there is concern that if cases continue to rise at the current rate that facilities could again become overwhelmed.
Modelling by the Indian Institute of Science and Indian Statistical Institute suggests the third wave could peak with anywhere between 300,000 and one million daily cases, likely towards the end of January.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wo ... 16206.html
ASIA
Tajikistan: Testy demonstrations in the Pamirs drag into third day
At least three people have reportedly been killed by government forces to date.
Demonstrations in an eastern city in Tajikistan continued into their third day on November 27 amid mounting anger over the killing of a local resident by law enforcement officers. At least two people have reportedly been killed after an initial attempt by government forces to suppress the rally.
Several thousand people are occupying a central square in Khorog, the capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, or GBAO, in a demand for justice. The authorities have intimated they will remove the crowd with force if it is does not disperse.
The standoff has its roots in an incident in February 2020, when a group of people from the GBAO’s Roshtkala district, confronted and assaulted a deputy prosecutor they said had harassed a young woman, forcing him to issue an apology to camera. The group included a man called Gulbiddin Ziyobekov, who was subsequently named as the object of a criminal investigation.
The investigation was halted at the instigation of then-GBAO governor Yodgor Faizov, who mediated a way out of the impasse. Faizov was appointed to his position in October 2018 in a compromise gesture from the central government in Dushanbe. As a prominent figure emerging from the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, a charity funded by an individual revered by the people of the Pamirs, Faizov was considered somebody who would serve in the interest of the community.
Faizov was removed from the post earlier this month, however. His dismissal appears to have triggered a renewed effort to arrest Ziyobekov, 29. According to a state media account of events, Ziyobekov resisted detention and fired a gun at an arresting officer. He was then shot in return, Khovar news agency reported on November 25. Many people in Khorog dispute the government’s account.
When Ziyobekov died, a crowd of residents mounted a demonstration in front of the mayor’s office with demands that the officer responsible be punished. Ziyobekov’s mother took his body to the site of the gathering and said she would not leave until she was offered an explanation for what had happened. Ziyobekov’s was taken away for burial on the morning of November 27. At least two people – Gulnazar Murodbekov and Tutisho Amirshoev, according to RFE/RL's reporting – were killed after the first day of demonstrations, when government forces opened fire on the crowd. Several police officers have also been injured in clashes.
The authorities have given no indication they are going to cave in. The deputy Interior Ministry spoke on the local state-run television station, Badakhshon, on the evening of November 26 to warn protesters to disperse or that he would unleash riot police.
Tensions escalated anew on November 27 when Faizov’s replacement, Alisher Mirzonabot, a former officer in the security services, went to the square to plead with demonstrators. An eyewitness told Eurasianet in a telephone interview that he promised that a commission would be set up to get to the bottom of the circumstances surrounding Ziyobekov’s killing, but that the crowd was dissatisfied with his pledges and has now expanded demands to include guarantees of enhanced autonomous rule for the GBAO. Angered by Mirzonabot’s perceived intransigence, people in the crowd pelted him with stones as he began to leave the scene. His guards then responded with gunfire. Asia-Plus news agency has reported that Mirzonabot sustained a head wound and that at least two other people were injured in the clash.
Members of the Pamiri community picketed the offices of the United Nations in Dushanbe on November 27, but that rally was quickly broken up by police. Hundreds gathered outside the Tajik Embassy in Moscow on November 25.
A number of serious flareups between the central government and Pamiris have occurred over the past decade. Pamiris are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the majority Tajik population and follow the Ismaili faith, an offshoot of Shia Islam, as opposed to the Sunni Islam professed by Tajiks.
When a grueling civil conflict broke out in the early 1990s, Pamiris took the side of what would go on to become the losing side. Although the GBAO, which has a population of around 227,000 and a long border with eastern Afghanistan, enjoys some formal degree of autonomy, that status exists only on paper and Dushanbe has sought over the years to further consolidate its control over the region.
The bloodiest confrontation in recent history occurred in 2012, when government troops embarked on a mission to capture a group of informal leaders accused by the authorities of being at the head of drug- and gem-smuggling rings. In a sign of public pushback, many thousands of people emerged onto the streets in Khorog to register their discontent over perceptions that the government was seeking to further curtail their autonomy. Around 50 people are believed to have been killed in that violence.
Another flareup occurred in September 2018, when President Emomali Rahmon used a visit to Khorog to dress down top security officials over what he described as a state of lawlessness in the region. A security sweep followed in which the movements of local people were heavily constrained, generating only more resentment.
Kamila Ibragimova is the pseudonym for a journalist in Tajikistan.
Sign up for Eurasianet's free weekly newsletter. Support Eurasianet: Help keep our journalism open to all, and influenced by none.
https://eurasianet.org/tajikistan-testy ... -third-day
At least three people have reportedly been killed by government forces to date.
Demonstrations in an eastern city in Tajikistan continued into their third day on November 27 amid mounting anger over the killing of a local resident by law enforcement officers. At least two people have reportedly been killed after an initial attempt by government forces to suppress the rally.
Several thousand people are occupying a central square in Khorog, the capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, or GBAO, in a demand for justice. The authorities have intimated they will remove the crowd with force if it is does not disperse.
The standoff has its roots in an incident in February 2020, when a group of people from the GBAO’s Roshtkala district, confronted and assaulted a deputy prosecutor they said had harassed a young woman, forcing him to issue an apology to camera. The group included a man called Gulbiddin Ziyobekov, who was subsequently named as the object of a criminal investigation.
The investigation was halted at the instigation of then-GBAO governor Yodgor Faizov, who mediated a way out of the impasse. Faizov was appointed to his position in October 2018 in a compromise gesture from the central government in Dushanbe. As a prominent figure emerging from the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, a charity funded by an individual revered by the people of the Pamirs, Faizov was considered somebody who would serve in the interest of the community.
Faizov was removed from the post earlier this month, however. His dismissal appears to have triggered a renewed effort to arrest Ziyobekov, 29. According to a state media account of events, Ziyobekov resisted detention and fired a gun at an arresting officer. He was then shot in return, Khovar news agency reported on November 25. Many people in Khorog dispute the government’s account.
When Ziyobekov died, a crowd of residents mounted a demonstration in front of the mayor’s office with demands that the officer responsible be punished. Ziyobekov’s mother took his body to the site of the gathering and said she would not leave until she was offered an explanation for what had happened. Ziyobekov’s was taken away for burial on the morning of November 27. At least two people – Gulnazar Murodbekov and Tutisho Amirshoev, according to RFE/RL's reporting – were killed after the first day of demonstrations, when government forces opened fire on the crowd. Several police officers have also been injured in clashes.
The authorities have given no indication they are going to cave in. The deputy Interior Ministry spoke on the local state-run television station, Badakhshon, on the evening of November 26 to warn protesters to disperse or that he would unleash riot police.
Tensions escalated anew on November 27 when Faizov’s replacement, Alisher Mirzonabot, a former officer in the security services, went to the square to plead with demonstrators. An eyewitness told Eurasianet in a telephone interview that he promised that a commission would be set up to get to the bottom of the circumstances surrounding Ziyobekov’s killing, but that the crowd was dissatisfied with his pledges and has now expanded demands to include guarantees of enhanced autonomous rule for the GBAO. Angered by Mirzonabot’s perceived intransigence, people in the crowd pelted him with stones as he began to leave the scene. His guards then responded with gunfire. Asia-Plus news agency has reported that Mirzonabot sustained a head wound and that at least two other people were injured in the clash.
Members of the Pamiri community picketed the offices of the United Nations in Dushanbe on November 27, but that rally was quickly broken up by police. Hundreds gathered outside the Tajik Embassy in Moscow on November 25.
A number of serious flareups between the central government and Pamiris have occurred over the past decade. Pamiris are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the majority Tajik population and follow the Ismaili faith, an offshoot of Shia Islam, as opposed to the Sunni Islam professed by Tajiks.
When a grueling civil conflict broke out in the early 1990s, Pamiris took the side of what would go on to become the losing side. Although the GBAO, which has a population of around 227,000 and a long border with eastern Afghanistan, enjoys some formal degree of autonomy, that status exists only on paper and Dushanbe has sought over the years to further consolidate its control over the region.
The bloodiest confrontation in recent history occurred in 2012, when government troops embarked on a mission to capture a group of informal leaders accused by the authorities of being at the head of drug- and gem-smuggling rings. In a sign of public pushback, many thousands of people emerged onto the streets in Khorog to register their discontent over perceptions that the government was seeking to further curtail their autonomy. Around 50 people are believed to have been killed in that violence.
Another flareup occurred in September 2018, when President Emomali Rahmon used a visit to Khorog to dress down top security officials over what he described as a state of lawlessness in the region. A security sweep followed in which the movements of local people were heavily constrained, generating only more resentment.
Kamila Ibragimova is the pseudonym for a journalist in Tajikistan.
Sign up for Eurasianet's free weekly newsletter. Support Eurasianet: Help keep our journalism open to all, and influenced by none.
https://eurasianet.org/tajikistan-testy ... -third-day
What we're reading The Dawn of Eurasia by Bruno Maçães
Weaving together history, diplomacy and reports from a six-month overland journey across Eurasia from Baku to Samarkand, Vladivostock to Beijing, Bruno Maçães provides a fascinating portrait of this shifting geopolitical landscape.
Throughout the book, he argues that the best word for the emerging global order is 'Eurasian', and shows why we need to begin thinking on a super-continental scale. The Dawn of Eurasia argues that the artificial separation of the world's largest island cannot hold, and the sooner we realise it, the better.
Weaving together history, diplomacy and reports from a six-month overland journey across Eurasia from Baku to Samarkand, Vladivostock to Beijing, Bruno Maçães provides a fascinating portrait of this shifting geopolitical landscape.
Throughout the book, he argues that the best word for the emerging global order is 'Eurasian', and shows why we need to begin thinking on a super-continental scale. The Dawn of Eurasia argues that the artificial separation of the world's largest island cannot hold, and the sooner we realise it, the better.
Re: ASIA
How ‘Multiculturalism’ Became a Bad Word in South Korea
A mosque dispute in a conservative city has forced some South Koreans to confront what it means to live in an increasingly diverse society.
DAEGU, South Korea — Inside the dimly lit house, young Muslim men knelt and prayed in silence. Outside, their Korean neighbors gathered with angry signs to protest “a den of terrorists” moving into their neighborhood.
In a densely populated but otherwise quiet district in Daegu, a city in southeastern South Korea, a highly emotional standoff is underway.
Roughly 150 Muslims, mostly students at the nearby Kyungpook National University, started building a mosque in a lot next door to their temporary house of worship about a year ago. When their Korean neighbors found out, they were furious.
The mosque would turn the neighborhood of Daehyeon-dong into “an enclave of Muslims and a crime-infested slum,” the Korean neighbors wrote on signs and protest banners. It would bring more “noise” and a “food smell” from an unfamiliar culture, driving out the Korean residents.
The Muslim students and their Korean supporters fought back, arguing that they had the right to live and pray in peace in Daegu, one of the most politically conservative cities in South Korea. “There is a difference between protest and harassment,” said Muaz Razaq, 25, a Ph.D. student in computer science who is from Pakistan. “What they were doing was harassment.”
The fault line between the two communities here has exposed an uncomfortable truth in South Korea. At a time when the country enjoys more global influence than ever — with consumers around the world eager to dance to its music, drive its cars and buy its smartphones — it is also grappling with a fierce wave of anti-immigrant fervor and Islamophobia. While it has successfully exported its culture abroad, it has been slow to welcome other cultures at home.
The mosque dispute has become a flash point, part of a larger phenomenon in which South Koreans have had to confront what it means to live in an increasingly diverse society. Muslims have often borne the brunt of racist misgivings, particularly after the Taliban executed two South Korean missionaries in 2007.
The arrival of 500 Yemeni asylum seekers on the island of Jeju in 2018 triggered South Korea’s first series of organized anti-immigrant protests. The government responded to fears that the asylum seekers were harboring terrorists by banning them from leaving the island.
“Their rules on the hijab alone are enough reason that they should never set foot in our country,” said Lee Hyung-oh, the leader of Refugee Out, a nationwide anti-immigration network that opposes the mosque in Daegu.
Many Koreans explain their attitude toward foreigners by citing history: their small nation has survived invasions and occupations for centuries, maintaining its territory, language and ethnic identity. Those who oppose the mosque and immigration more broadly have often warned that an influx of foreigners would threaten South Korea’s “pure blood” and “ethnic homogeneity.”
“We may look exclusionist, but it has made us what we are, consolidating us as a nation to survive war, colonial rule and financial crises and achieve economic development while speaking the same language, thinking the same thoughts,” Mr. Lee said. “I don’t think we could have done this with diversity,” he added. “We are not xenophobic. We just don’t want to mix with others.”
Some say the country does not have much of a choice.
South Korea’s rise as a cultural powerhouse has coincided with a demographic crisis. Years of low birthrates and rising incomes in urban areas have led to shortages of women who want to marry and live in rural towns. Farms and factories have found it difficult to fill low-wage jobs. Universities lack local students.
To help alleviate the challenges, South Korea opened its doors to workers and students from other nations. Some rural men began to marry foreign women, especially from Vietnam. Yet when the government introduced policies to support “multicultural families,” there was a backlash. Suddenly, words like “multiculturalism” and “diversity” became pejorative terms for many South Koreans.
And the antipathy has not been limited to Muslim students in Daegu, a city of more than two million people.
Last year, an anti-China uproar forced a local developer to cancel its plan to build a Chinese cultural center west of Seoul. In Ansan, south of Seoul, all but six of the 450 students in Wongok Elementary School are immigrants’ children because Korean parents have refused to send their children there. In 2020, a Ghanaian entertainer sparked a backlash when he criticized a blackface performance by high school students. He eventually apologized.
“Koreans have deep-rooted xenophobic beliefs that foreigners are inferior,” said Yi Sohoon, a professor of sociology at Kyungpook National University who supports the mosque. “But they value foreigners differently according to their origin. They treat Black people from the United States or Europe differently from Black people from Africa.”
Runaway housing prices, a lack of social mobility and a widening income gap have contributed to the tensions. In a recent Facebook post, Yoon Suk-yeol, a leading conservative candidate in the March 9 presidential election, vowed to stop immigrants from getting “a free ride” with national health care. Lee Jae-myung, his more left-leaning rival, accused Mr. Yoon of fanning “xenophobic right-wing populism.”
The number of foreign residents in South Korea grew to 1.7 million, or 3.3 percent of the total population, in 2020, from 1.4 million in 2017. The government has predicted that the number will grow to 2.3 million by 2040. The overall population fell for the first time on record in 2021, increasing the need for foreign workers and students.
“Human beings are naturally biased, but don’t let the bias lead you to depriving other people of their fundamental human rights,” said Ashraf Akintola, a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering from Nigeria and one of the Muslim worshipers in Daegu. Mr. Akintola said he felt sad when a Korean protester followed him last year shouting, “Leave our country!” Back in Nigeria, he said, K-pop was so popular that his friends learned to speak Korean.
The Muslim students had prayed at an ordinary house in Daehyeon-dong for seven years. In late 2020, after tearing the house down, they began building a mosque, using a building next door as a temporary house of worship during construction. That’s when Korean residents and activists joined forces to make the neighborhood the center of an anti-immigrant campaign.
In January, the neighbors hung a large black-and-white banner across from the proposed mosque site: “Korean people come first!”
“We are not against their religion,” said Kim Jeong-suk, a 67-year-old Korean resident who opposes the mosque. “We just can’t have a new religious facility in our crowded neighborhood, whether it’s Islamic, Buddhist or Christian.” The neighborhood already has 15 Christian churches, including one roughly 30 yards from where the mosque would be.
Many of the offensive signs were removed after the government’s National Human Rights Commission intervened last October. Construction remains suspended as both sides take their case to court, but human rights lawyers say discrimination against immigrants can also be found in South Korean law.
“It’s one thing that Koreans want to be recognized globally, get rich and successful abroad,” said Hwang Pill-kyu, a human rights attorney who tracks abuses against immigrants. “It’s quite another whether they are willing to embrace foreigners.”
An anti-discrimination bill has stalled in Parliament for years amid opposition from a powerful Christian lobby. Under current policy, undocumented people are not afforded the same rights as those who are in South Korea legally, and foreigners detained under immigration laws are not entitled to habeas corpus.
Last year, disturbing closed-circuit TV footage from a detention center for undocumented immigrants showed a Moroccan man hogtied in solitary confinement. The Justice Ministry admitted to human rights abuses and promised reform.
Still, accepting Muslim refugees has become so unpopular that when the government gave asylum to 390 Afghans last year, it refused to call them refugees. Instead it called them “special contributors,” signaling that the country would only welcome those who contributed to national interests.
“Globalization has a positive connotation among South Koreans,” said Ms. Yi, the professor. “But they need to realize that it involves an exchange of not just money and goods, but culture, religion and people.” Ms. Yi was among the liberal politicians, professors and activists who staged rallies supporting the mosque.
Residents, however, appear to be united in their opposition. More than 175,000 people signed a petition addressed to Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, warning that “If we lose Daehyeon-dong, we will lose Daegu.”
“I had never seen people like them before, and I saw no women, only men, swarming in there,” said Park Jeong-suk, a 60-year-old resident who lives next door to the proposed mosque site.
Ms. Park’s neighbor, Namgung Myeon, 59, said he opposed an influx of foreigners as South Korea’s own population declined. “It will unsettle our national foundation,” he said, “enervating our national character and values.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/worl ... iversified
A mosque dispute in a conservative city has forced some South Koreans to confront what it means to live in an increasingly diverse society.
DAEGU, South Korea — Inside the dimly lit house, young Muslim men knelt and prayed in silence. Outside, their Korean neighbors gathered with angry signs to protest “a den of terrorists” moving into their neighborhood.
In a densely populated but otherwise quiet district in Daegu, a city in southeastern South Korea, a highly emotional standoff is underway.
Roughly 150 Muslims, mostly students at the nearby Kyungpook National University, started building a mosque in a lot next door to their temporary house of worship about a year ago. When their Korean neighbors found out, they were furious.
The mosque would turn the neighborhood of Daehyeon-dong into “an enclave of Muslims and a crime-infested slum,” the Korean neighbors wrote on signs and protest banners. It would bring more “noise” and a “food smell” from an unfamiliar culture, driving out the Korean residents.
The Muslim students and their Korean supporters fought back, arguing that they had the right to live and pray in peace in Daegu, one of the most politically conservative cities in South Korea. “There is a difference between protest and harassment,” said Muaz Razaq, 25, a Ph.D. student in computer science who is from Pakistan. “What they were doing was harassment.”
The fault line between the two communities here has exposed an uncomfortable truth in South Korea. At a time when the country enjoys more global influence than ever — with consumers around the world eager to dance to its music, drive its cars and buy its smartphones — it is also grappling with a fierce wave of anti-immigrant fervor and Islamophobia. While it has successfully exported its culture abroad, it has been slow to welcome other cultures at home.
The mosque dispute has become a flash point, part of a larger phenomenon in which South Koreans have had to confront what it means to live in an increasingly diverse society. Muslims have often borne the brunt of racist misgivings, particularly after the Taliban executed two South Korean missionaries in 2007.
The arrival of 500 Yemeni asylum seekers on the island of Jeju in 2018 triggered South Korea’s first series of organized anti-immigrant protests. The government responded to fears that the asylum seekers were harboring terrorists by banning them from leaving the island.
“Their rules on the hijab alone are enough reason that they should never set foot in our country,” said Lee Hyung-oh, the leader of Refugee Out, a nationwide anti-immigration network that opposes the mosque in Daegu.
Many Koreans explain their attitude toward foreigners by citing history: their small nation has survived invasions and occupations for centuries, maintaining its territory, language and ethnic identity. Those who oppose the mosque and immigration more broadly have often warned that an influx of foreigners would threaten South Korea’s “pure blood” and “ethnic homogeneity.”
“We may look exclusionist, but it has made us what we are, consolidating us as a nation to survive war, colonial rule and financial crises and achieve economic development while speaking the same language, thinking the same thoughts,” Mr. Lee said. “I don’t think we could have done this with diversity,” he added. “We are not xenophobic. We just don’t want to mix with others.”
Some say the country does not have much of a choice.
South Korea’s rise as a cultural powerhouse has coincided with a demographic crisis. Years of low birthrates and rising incomes in urban areas have led to shortages of women who want to marry and live in rural towns. Farms and factories have found it difficult to fill low-wage jobs. Universities lack local students.
To help alleviate the challenges, South Korea opened its doors to workers and students from other nations. Some rural men began to marry foreign women, especially from Vietnam. Yet when the government introduced policies to support “multicultural families,” there was a backlash. Suddenly, words like “multiculturalism” and “diversity” became pejorative terms for many South Koreans.
And the antipathy has not been limited to Muslim students in Daegu, a city of more than two million people.
Last year, an anti-China uproar forced a local developer to cancel its plan to build a Chinese cultural center west of Seoul. In Ansan, south of Seoul, all but six of the 450 students in Wongok Elementary School are immigrants’ children because Korean parents have refused to send their children there. In 2020, a Ghanaian entertainer sparked a backlash when he criticized a blackface performance by high school students. He eventually apologized.
“Koreans have deep-rooted xenophobic beliefs that foreigners are inferior,” said Yi Sohoon, a professor of sociology at Kyungpook National University who supports the mosque. “But they value foreigners differently according to their origin. They treat Black people from the United States or Europe differently from Black people from Africa.”
Runaway housing prices, a lack of social mobility and a widening income gap have contributed to the tensions. In a recent Facebook post, Yoon Suk-yeol, a leading conservative candidate in the March 9 presidential election, vowed to stop immigrants from getting “a free ride” with national health care. Lee Jae-myung, his more left-leaning rival, accused Mr. Yoon of fanning “xenophobic right-wing populism.”
The number of foreign residents in South Korea grew to 1.7 million, or 3.3 percent of the total population, in 2020, from 1.4 million in 2017. The government has predicted that the number will grow to 2.3 million by 2040. The overall population fell for the first time on record in 2021, increasing the need for foreign workers and students.
“Human beings are naturally biased, but don’t let the bias lead you to depriving other people of their fundamental human rights,” said Ashraf Akintola, a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering from Nigeria and one of the Muslim worshipers in Daegu. Mr. Akintola said he felt sad when a Korean protester followed him last year shouting, “Leave our country!” Back in Nigeria, he said, K-pop was so popular that his friends learned to speak Korean.
The Muslim students had prayed at an ordinary house in Daehyeon-dong for seven years. In late 2020, after tearing the house down, they began building a mosque, using a building next door as a temporary house of worship during construction. That’s when Korean residents and activists joined forces to make the neighborhood the center of an anti-immigrant campaign.
In January, the neighbors hung a large black-and-white banner across from the proposed mosque site: “Korean people come first!”
“We are not against their religion,” said Kim Jeong-suk, a 67-year-old Korean resident who opposes the mosque. “We just can’t have a new religious facility in our crowded neighborhood, whether it’s Islamic, Buddhist or Christian.” The neighborhood already has 15 Christian churches, including one roughly 30 yards from where the mosque would be.
Many of the offensive signs were removed after the government’s National Human Rights Commission intervened last October. Construction remains suspended as both sides take their case to court, but human rights lawyers say discrimination against immigrants can also be found in South Korean law.
“It’s one thing that Koreans want to be recognized globally, get rich and successful abroad,” said Hwang Pill-kyu, a human rights attorney who tracks abuses against immigrants. “It’s quite another whether they are willing to embrace foreigners.”
An anti-discrimination bill has stalled in Parliament for years amid opposition from a powerful Christian lobby. Under current policy, undocumented people are not afforded the same rights as those who are in South Korea legally, and foreigners detained under immigration laws are not entitled to habeas corpus.
Last year, disturbing closed-circuit TV footage from a detention center for undocumented immigrants showed a Moroccan man hogtied in solitary confinement. The Justice Ministry admitted to human rights abuses and promised reform.
Still, accepting Muslim refugees has become so unpopular that when the government gave asylum to 390 Afghans last year, it refused to call them refugees. Instead it called them “special contributors,” signaling that the country would only welcome those who contributed to national interests.
“Globalization has a positive connotation among South Koreans,” said Ms. Yi, the professor. “But they need to realize that it involves an exchange of not just money and goods, but culture, religion and people.” Ms. Yi was among the liberal politicians, professors and activists who staged rallies supporting the mosque.
Residents, however, appear to be united in their opposition. More than 175,000 people signed a petition addressed to Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, warning that “If we lose Daehyeon-dong, we will lose Daegu.”
“I had never seen people like them before, and I saw no women, only men, swarming in there,” said Park Jeong-suk, a 60-year-old resident who lives next door to the proposed mosque site.
Ms. Park’s neighbor, Namgung Myeon, 59, said he opposed an influx of foreigners as South Korea’s own population declined. “It will unsettle our national foundation,” he said, “enervating our national character and values.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/worl ... iversified
Re: ASIA
How China Embraces Russian Propaganda and Its Version of the War
In much of the world, Russia is losing the information war over Ukraine. In China, though, it’s winning big.
Hours after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the Chinese Communist Party tabloid, Global Times, posted a video saying that a large number of Ukrainian soldiers had laid down their arms. Its source: the Russian state-controlled television network, RT.
Two days later, China’s state broadcaster Central Television Station (CCTV) flashed a breaking news alert, quoting Russia’s parliamentary speaker, that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had fled Kyiv. CCTV then created a related hashtag on the Twitter-like platform Weibo that was viewed 510 million times and used by 163 media outlets in the country.
On Feb. 28, as Russia became an international pariah, the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik shared a message of strength with its 11 million Weibo followers. The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Sputnik said, said Russia still had friends in the world, especially “a real giant” like China.
“Add oil, Russia,” Sputnik’s Weibo follower @fengyiqing cheered on, using a Chinese expression of support. “All the people in the world who love justice are friends of Russia.”
As European and American officials press Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other online platforms to clamp down on Russian disinformation, China has embraced Russia’s propaganda and lies about the war. China’s state-owned media outlets quoted their Russian counterparts’ coverage without verification, helping to magnify their disinformation on the Chinese internet. They put Russian officials on state television networks with little pushback on their claims.
Yet as the world faces one of its most serious geopolitical crises since the end of the Cold War, China let down its digital defenses and allowed Kremlin’s propaganda machine to help shape public perception of the war. No wonder the Chinese internet is overwhelmingly pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.
If China wants to remain officially ambiguous about whether it supports Vladimir V. Putin’s war — refusing to call it an invasion and abstaining from a U.N. vote to condemn the invasion — its state-controlled media nonetheless makes very clear where China stands.
The China-Russia information alliance is forged over a shared worldview of two leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir V. Putin, who, out of deep distrust of the United States, are determined to challenge the West’s dominance in the competition for public opinion.
In a 2013 speech, Mr. Xi urged the country’s propaganda workers to enhance the country’s “international discourse power” under the notion of “telling China’s story well.” During a visit to RT’s headquarters in the same year, Mr. Putin said the network was created to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams.”
In 2015, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin decided the two countries should strengthen their cooperation in media. Since then, they’ve held a Sino-Russian media forum each year, aiming to “redefine the map of the international discourse.”
Last November, a RT executive said at the forum that major Chinese media outlets quoted RT.com on average 2,500 times a week in 2021.
Many Chinese media organizations admire RT and Sputnik, which they believe have broken the West’s information monopoly, or at least muddied the water. Many media experts have analyzed what China’s state-owned media could learn from their successes. One academic paper detailed RT’s coverage of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 to illustrate how the Russian network carefully planned its reporting strategy to increase its seeming credibility and accessibility so it could set its own agenda.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Kremlin’s media machines worked well in China. Combined with Beijing’s censorship of pro-Ukraine content, they wove a web of disinformation that proved difficult for most Chinese online users to escape.
The message they are trying to drive home: Russia’s military actions are anti-West, anti-NATO expansion and anti-Nazi — thus justified and popular.
In China’s state media, there’s very little about the international condemnation of Russia; Ukraine’s success in the battle for public opinion, led by President Zelensky; or antiwar protests in Russia.
The one-two punch is working, keeping the Chinese public from facts while sowing confusion.
On the Chinese social media platforms, many people adopted Mr. Putin’s and Russian media’s language, calling the Ukrainian side extremists and neo-Nazis.
They kept bringing up the Azov Battalion as if it represented all of Ukraine. The battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard, is known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers but remains a fringe presence in the country and its military.
President Zelensky himself is Jewish and won the presidential election in 2019 with 73 percent of the votes. His approval rate soared to over 90 percent recently for his wartime leadership.
The fog of disinformation thickens when Chinese state media portrays Russia’s war as an anti-fascism effort. After Russia’s defense minister announced this week that his country would host the first international anti-fascism conference in August, the CCTV posted a one-paragraph story, then created a Weibo hashtag. Within 24 hours, it had 650 million views and was used by 90 media outlets. Many commenters called Ukraine and the United States fascist countries.
Chinese media is also propagating Russian disinformation that Ukraine has been using civilians as human shields. In its prime-time news program on Feb. 26, CCTV quoted President Putin as making that allegation. A few days later the nationalistic news site, guancha.com, ran a banner headline that said the Russian military was going only after military targets, while the Ukrainian military was using civilians as human shields.
Taken collectively, Chinese online users are seeing a quite different war from much of the world.
While videos circulated outside China purportedly showing Ukrainians’ kind treatment of Russian prisoners of war, the trending social media topic in China was that captured Russians had endured Nazi-like torture. Both CCTV and the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, created hashtags echoing the same, based on a briefing by the Russian defense ministry. They had combined views of more than 200 million.
Sputnik, with 11.6 million followers on Weibo, has been posting more than 100 items a day lately, populating its timeline with words like “criminal Zelensky,” “empire of lies,” “fake news” and “Nazi.”
“We must stand with Russia!” Weibo user @qingdaoxiaowangzi commented on one of Sputnik’s posts, using a popular line on the Chinese internet. “If Russia falls, NATO and the neo-Nazi United States will bully China!”
At the same time, Weibo and other platforms are censoring pro-Ukraine content. The Weibo account of the actor Ke Lan, which has 2.9 million followers, was suspended after she retweeted a video and a photo about an antiwar protest in Russia with the emoticon
. So was the account of a transgender celebrity, Jin Xing, with 13.6 million followers. “Respect all lives and resolutely oppose the war!!!” her last post said.
But as the war continues and China recalibrates its position, some Chinese online users have begun to scrutinize the Russian news media reports. Under a Sputnik Weibo post contending that the Ukrainian military murdered civilians, a user with the handle @jialalabadededashen wrote, “Is this another news item that was tailor made by the Russian news agency for China?”
In a social media discussion, some people called out Russia for waging an information war in China. “Russia’s external propaganda has infiltrated China out-and-out,” wrote a Weibo user called @juediqiangshou. “That’s why all the excuses to justify the invasion are popular here.”
Some people are also raising questions about whether the flood of pro-Russia information would be detrimental to the interests of China and its people.
Even Wang Xiaodong, a famous nationalist writer, suggested on Weibo that the Russia-Ukraine war was more complicated than it seemed. “The Chinese people should have access to comprehensive and diversified information,” he wrote on Wednesday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/busi ... 778d3e6de3
When it comes to information, the Chinese government is a control freak, dictating and censoring what its 1.4 billion people consume. Beijing has silenced and jailed its critics and journalists. It has coerced and co-opted the biggest Chinese online platforms to enforce its censorship guidelines. It blocks nearly all major western news and information websites, including Google, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC.
In much of the world, Russia is losing the information war over Ukraine. In China, though, it’s winning big.
Hours after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the Chinese Communist Party tabloid, Global Times, posted a video saying that a large number of Ukrainian soldiers had laid down their arms. Its source: the Russian state-controlled television network, RT.
Two days later, China’s state broadcaster Central Television Station (CCTV) flashed a breaking news alert, quoting Russia’s parliamentary speaker, that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had fled Kyiv. CCTV then created a related hashtag on the Twitter-like platform Weibo that was viewed 510 million times and used by 163 media outlets in the country.
On Feb. 28, as Russia became an international pariah, the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik shared a message of strength with its 11 million Weibo followers. The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Sputnik said, said Russia still had friends in the world, especially “a real giant” like China.
“Add oil, Russia,” Sputnik’s Weibo follower @fengyiqing cheered on, using a Chinese expression of support. “All the people in the world who love justice are friends of Russia.”
As European and American officials press Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other online platforms to clamp down on Russian disinformation, China has embraced Russia’s propaganda and lies about the war. China’s state-owned media outlets quoted their Russian counterparts’ coverage without verification, helping to magnify their disinformation on the Chinese internet. They put Russian officials on state television networks with little pushback on their claims.
Yet as the world faces one of its most serious geopolitical crises since the end of the Cold War, China let down its digital defenses and allowed Kremlin’s propaganda machine to help shape public perception of the war. No wonder the Chinese internet is overwhelmingly pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.
If China wants to remain officially ambiguous about whether it supports Vladimir V. Putin’s war — refusing to call it an invasion and abstaining from a U.N. vote to condemn the invasion — its state-controlled media nonetheless makes very clear where China stands.
The China-Russia information alliance is forged over a shared worldview of two leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir V. Putin, who, out of deep distrust of the United States, are determined to challenge the West’s dominance in the competition for public opinion.
In a 2013 speech, Mr. Xi urged the country’s propaganda workers to enhance the country’s “international discourse power” under the notion of “telling China’s story well.” During a visit to RT’s headquarters in the same year, Mr. Putin said the network was created to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams.”
In 2015, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin decided the two countries should strengthen their cooperation in media. Since then, they’ve held a Sino-Russian media forum each year, aiming to “redefine the map of the international discourse.”
Last November, a RT executive said at the forum that major Chinese media outlets quoted RT.com on average 2,500 times a week in 2021.
Many Chinese media organizations admire RT and Sputnik, which they believe have broken the West’s information monopoly, or at least muddied the water. Many media experts have analyzed what China’s state-owned media could learn from their successes. One academic paper detailed RT’s coverage of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 to illustrate how the Russian network carefully planned its reporting strategy to increase its seeming credibility and accessibility so it could set its own agenda.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Kremlin’s media machines worked well in China. Combined with Beijing’s censorship of pro-Ukraine content, they wove a web of disinformation that proved difficult for most Chinese online users to escape.
The message they are trying to drive home: Russia’s military actions are anti-West, anti-NATO expansion and anti-Nazi — thus justified and popular.
In China’s state media, there’s very little about the international condemnation of Russia; Ukraine’s success in the battle for public opinion, led by President Zelensky; or antiwar protests in Russia.
The one-two punch is working, keeping the Chinese public from facts while sowing confusion.
On the Chinese social media platforms, many people adopted Mr. Putin’s and Russian media’s language, calling the Ukrainian side extremists and neo-Nazis.
They kept bringing up the Azov Battalion as if it represented all of Ukraine. The battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard, is known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers but remains a fringe presence in the country and its military.
President Zelensky himself is Jewish and won the presidential election in 2019 with 73 percent of the votes. His approval rate soared to over 90 percent recently for his wartime leadership.
The fog of disinformation thickens when Chinese state media portrays Russia’s war as an anti-fascism effort. After Russia’s defense minister announced this week that his country would host the first international anti-fascism conference in August, the CCTV posted a one-paragraph story, then created a Weibo hashtag. Within 24 hours, it had 650 million views and was used by 90 media outlets. Many commenters called Ukraine and the United States fascist countries.
Chinese media is also propagating Russian disinformation that Ukraine has been using civilians as human shields. In its prime-time news program on Feb. 26, CCTV quoted President Putin as making that allegation. A few days later the nationalistic news site, guancha.com, ran a banner headline that said the Russian military was going only after military targets, while the Ukrainian military was using civilians as human shields.
Taken collectively, Chinese online users are seeing a quite different war from much of the world.
While videos circulated outside China purportedly showing Ukrainians’ kind treatment of Russian prisoners of war, the trending social media topic in China was that captured Russians had endured Nazi-like torture. Both CCTV and the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, created hashtags echoing the same, based on a briefing by the Russian defense ministry. They had combined views of more than 200 million.
Sputnik, with 11.6 million followers on Weibo, has been posting more than 100 items a day lately, populating its timeline with words like “criminal Zelensky,” “empire of lies,” “fake news” and “Nazi.”
“We must stand with Russia!” Weibo user @qingdaoxiaowangzi commented on one of Sputnik’s posts, using a popular line on the Chinese internet. “If Russia falls, NATO and the neo-Nazi United States will bully China!”
At the same time, Weibo and other platforms are censoring pro-Ukraine content. The Weibo account of the actor Ke Lan, which has 2.9 million followers, was suspended after she retweeted a video and a photo about an antiwar protest in Russia with the emoticon
. So was the account of a transgender celebrity, Jin Xing, with 13.6 million followers. “Respect all lives and resolutely oppose the war!!!” her last post said.But as the war continues and China recalibrates its position, some Chinese online users have begun to scrutinize the Russian news media reports. Under a Sputnik Weibo post contending that the Ukrainian military murdered civilians, a user with the handle @jialalabadededashen wrote, “Is this another news item that was tailor made by the Russian news agency for China?”
In a social media discussion, some people called out Russia for waging an information war in China. “Russia’s external propaganda has infiltrated China out-and-out,” wrote a Weibo user called @juediqiangshou. “That’s why all the excuses to justify the invasion are popular here.”
Some people are also raising questions about whether the flood of pro-Russia information would be detrimental to the interests of China and its people.
Even Wang Xiaodong, a famous nationalist writer, suggested on Weibo that the Russia-Ukraine war was more complicated than it seemed. “The Chinese people should have access to comprehensive and diversified information,” he wrote on Wednesday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/busi ... 778d3e6de3
When it comes to information, the Chinese government is a control freak, dictating and censoring what its 1.4 billion people consume. Beijing has silenced and jailed its critics and journalists. It has coerced and co-opted the biggest Chinese online platforms to enforce its censorship guidelines. It blocks nearly all major western news and information websites, including Google, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC.
3 Chinese astronauts return to Earth after 6 months in space
Chinese astronaut Ye Guangfu sits outside the return capsule of the Shenzhou-13 space mission after landing at the Dongfeng landing site in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Saturday.
BEIJING — Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after six months aboard their country's newest orbital station in the longest crewed mission to date for China's ambitious space program.
The Shenzhou 13 space capsule landed in the Gobi desert in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, shown live on state TV.
During the mission, astronaut Wang Yaping carried out the first spacewalk by a Chinese woman. Wang and crewmates Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu beamed back physics lessons for high school students.
China has sent a female astronaut for a 6-month stay on its new space station https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/10463078 ... ce-station
China launched its first astronaut into space in 2003 and landed robot rovers on the moon in 2013 and on Mars last year. Officials have discussed a possible crewed mission to the moon.
On Saturday, state TV showed images from inside the capsule as it traveled at 200 meters per second over Africa before entering the atmosphere.
The trio were the second crew aboard Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace. Its core module, Tianhe, was launched in April 2021. Plans call for completing construction this year by adding two more modules.
Authorities have yet to announce a date for launching the next Tiangong crew.
China is excluded from the International Space Station due to U.S. unease that its space program is run by the ruling Communist Party's military wing, the People's Liberation Army.
China Launches First Crew To Live On New Space Station https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/10074711 ... ce-station
China was the third nation to launch an astronaut into space on its own after the former Soviet Union and the United States. Tiangong is China's third space station following predecessors launched in 2011 and 2016.
The government announced in 2020 that China's first reusable spacecraft had landed following a test flight but no photos or details of the vehicle have been released.
On Tuesday, President Xi Jinping visited the launch site in Wenchang on the southern island of Hainan from which the Tianhe module was fired into orbit.
"Persist in pursuing the frontiers of world aerospace development and the major strategic needs of national aerospace," Xi told staff at the site, all of them in military uniform.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/16/10931896 ... ion-return
Tajikistan: UN experts sound alarm about tensions in GBAO, urge protection of Pamiri minority
GENEVA (20 April 2022) – UN experts* today expressed serious concerns over rising tensions in eastern Tajikistan, calling on the authorities to ensure the protection of Pamiri minority and respect for human rights in the autonomous region.
Tensions flared in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) last November when the killing of a Pamiri man by security forces sparked widespread protests. The government responded forcefully, sending military reinforcements and implementing other measures such as shutting down the internet.
“Disregard of the Pamiri minority grievances by Tajik authorities and the securitization of the Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous region where they live could lead to a violent conflict if unaddressed,” the experts said.
“We are deeply troubled by efforts to crack down on protest movements by the Pamiri minority, through arrests, the excessive and unlawful use of force and the involvement of the military. We further call on the authorities to take measures to prevent the spread of the stigmatization against Pamiri protesters.”
The experts expressed concern over reports of an increased military presence and the fortification of security checkpoints in the regional capital Khorog, since the start of the protests in November 2021.
On 25 November 2021, Gulbiddin Ziyobekov, a young Pamiri minority representative was allegedly tortured and killed by Tajik security forces. The same day, thousands marched on Khorog, the capital of the GBAO, to protest the killing. Among the protesters, there were pupils from the same village as Mr. Ziyobekov. Government forces reportedly opened fire on the demonstration, killing two protesters and wounding 17. Dozens of protesters were arrested and sentenced to prison for up to 4 years.
Based on reports from the GBAO, arrests and interrogations have continued, and protesters have been banned from leaving the territory, the experts said. They expressed concern that actions by the state security detention group – which allegedly sanctioned the arrest and murder of Mr. Ziyobekov – and officials who used lethal force against protesters have not yet been investigated. The experts said local residents who actively participated in the protests had been banned from leaving the territory.
“This is happening at a dangerous time, when representatives of the Pamiri minority activists are portrayed as criminals in the media and by public authorities,” they said.
Following the protests, access to the internet had only been available to state institutions and local banks, adversely impacting access to education for Pamiri minority youth and children, the UN experts said.
“We are particularly concerned by the use of internet restrictions to clamp down on protests and the media. Tajik authorities must respect the freedoms of peaceful assembly and of expression,” the experts said.
On 21 March 2022 Internet connectivity was restored to 2G, limiting access to websites, and reports said the harassment and violence against Pamiri activists had spiralled.
“While we welcome the restoration of internet connectivity in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomus Oblast, we urge the central government to immediately implement conflict-prevention measures that meet international human rights standards,” the experts said. “Tajik authorities must act now before it is too late.”
The experts are in contact with the Government of Tajikistan on the issue.
ENDS
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases ... ion-pamiri
Tensions flared in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) last November when the killing of a Pamiri man by security forces sparked widespread protests. The government responded forcefully, sending military reinforcements and implementing other measures such as shutting down the internet.
“Disregard of the Pamiri minority grievances by Tajik authorities and the securitization of the Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous region where they live could lead to a violent conflict if unaddressed,” the experts said.
“We are deeply troubled by efforts to crack down on protest movements by the Pamiri minority, through arrests, the excessive and unlawful use of force and the involvement of the military. We further call on the authorities to take measures to prevent the spread of the stigmatization against Pamiri protesters.”
The experts expressed concern over reports of an increased military presence and the fortification of security checkpoints in the regional capital Khorog, since the start of the protests in November 2021.
On 25 November 2021, Gulbiddin Ziyobekov, a young Pamiri minority representative was allegedly tortured and killed by Tajik security forces. The same day, thousands marched on Khorog, the capital of the GBAO, to protest the killing. Among the protesters, there were pupils from the same village as Mr. Ziyobekov. Government forces reportedly opened fire on the demonstration, killing two protesters and wounding 17. Dozens of protesters were arrested and sentenced to prison for up to 4 years.
Based on reports from the GBAO, arrests and interrogations have continued, and protesters have been banned from leaving the territory, the experts said. They expressed concern that actions by the state security detention group – which allegedly sanctioned the arrest and murder of Mr. Ziyobekov – and officials who used lethal force against protesters have not yet been investigated. The experts said local residents who actively participated in the protests had been banned from leaving the territory.
“This is happening at a dangerous time, when representatives of the Pamiri minority activists are portrayed as criminals in the media and by public authorities,” they said.
Following the protests, access to the internet had only been available to state institutions and local banks, adversely impacting access to education for Pamiri minority youth and children, the UN experts said.
“We are particularly concerned by the use of internet restrictions to clamp down on protests and the media. Tajik authorities must respect the freedoms of peaceful assembly and of expression,” the experts said.
On 21 March 2022 Internet connectivity was restored to 2G, limiting access to websites, and reports said the harassment and violence against Pamiri activists had spiralled.
“While we welcome the restoration of internet connectivity in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomus Oblast, we urge the central government to immediately implement conflict-prevention measures that meet international human rights standards,” the experts said. “Tajik authorities must act now before it is too late.”
The experts are in contact with the Government of Tajikistan on the issue.
ENDS
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases ... ion-pamiri
Re: ASIA
https://eurasianet.org/explainer-why-ta ... government
Tajikistan, Central Asia
Explainer | Why Tajikistan’s Pamiris don’t trust their government
Dushanbe wants obedience but treats the region as something to be exploited and ignored.
Bruce Pannier May 23, 2022
Pamiri men The Tajik government does little to support GBAO, leaving people to fend for themselves. (photo: David Trilling)
For 30 years, eastern Tajikistan has been either on the edge of unrest or the scene of fighting.
Fighting broke out again on May 16. The death toll, in the dozens, may be the highest since the 1992-1997 Tajik civil war. The killing of influential local leader Mamadbokir Mamadbokirov on May 22 puts chances for some sort of enduring resolution even further out of reach.
Reports about the mountainous region – known as GBAO, for Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast – regularly mention that the people there, often referred to as Pamiris, are Shi’ites, Ismaili Muslims, while most Tajikistan’s population are Sunni Muslims.
But that difference is not the cause of problems between the Tajik government and the Pamiris.
GBAO covers more than 40 percent of Tajikistan but only about 230,000 people live there. The regional capital Khorog sits at an elevation of 2,200 meters and some people live at altitudes of 4,000 meters and higher.
The ruins of the ancient fortresses of Yamchun and Khakha overlook the Pyanj River that now is the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. For centuries the peoples living in the high Pamir Mountains in what is now Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and China were isolated from the outside world. They developed their own languages, customs, and traditions.
Khorog GBAO map
Outsiders from the lowlands very rarely made their way so far into the mountains until the end of the 19th century, when Tsarist soldiers claimed the territory for Russia and established their main outpost at Khorog.
The Russians built other garrisons in the Pamirs. After 1917, the region became part of the Soviet Union. Russian-language schools, apartment and administrative buildings, and more foreign soldiers appeared. In 1940, a road was built from Dushanbe to Khorog that remains the sole ground link with the rest of the country. The narrow road is mostly unpaved and often closed due to snow or avalanches. Air connections to Khorog were established before the road was built but remain unreliable due to mountain weather.
In an effort to assimilate the Pamiris into the Soviet system, the resettlement of thousands of Pamiris in the lower lands of western Tajikistan started in the 1970s.
And then in late 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, Tajikistan became an independent country, and a furious period of political activity began.
Tajikistan’s transition to independence did not go smoothly. A former Soviet-era leader seized power and several groups, including the Pamiris, opposed the country’s leadership. On March 26, 1992, there was a large rally outside the president’s residence in Dushanbe and several hundred Pamiris were among the protesters.
The rallies continued, the government bused in supporters and armed them. By May, the civil war was starting.
The group Lali Badakhshan, Rubies of Badakhshan, established in March 1991 to protect the rights of the Pamiri people, sided with the opposition. Together with the Rastokhez (Revival) democratic movement and the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), it formed the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) that fought against Tajik government forces during the civil war.
The Pamiris who had been resettled fled toward their homeland, but pro-government militias called the Popular Front hunted them and slaughtered many. Those who finally reached GBAO had horror stories to tell about the Tajik government and its allies.
Remote GBAO became something of an opposition stronghold. There was often fighting in the western part of GBAO, but the small and ill-equipped Tajik army was never strong enough to penetrate deeply into the mountainous region.
On June 27, 1997, the UTO and Tajik government signed a peace accord that provided the UTO with 30 percent of the places in government.
The weak Tajik government that emerged under President Emomali Rahmon abided by the terms of the peace accord for several years, but as Rahmon consolidated power, he moved against his former opponents, and some of his wartime allies. He now has a firm grip over almost all of Tajikistan.
Except remote and poorly connected GBAO. The best the Tajik government could do to exert some influence there was to make deals with influential locals, dubbed “informal leaders,” who were nominally loyal to Dushanbe, and usually received a state position as a sign of this alliance.
Over the decades, the Tajik government did little to improve the standard of living in GBAO. Huge amounts of money went into rebuilding Dushanbe and Rahmon’s native Danghara area, but hardly any state money arrived in GBAO.
Tajik authorities left it to the spiritual leader of the Ismailis, the Aga Khan, to develop GBAO. The Aga Khan Fund has allocated money for hybrid agricultural programs to develop crops that can grow at the region’s high altitudes, and for construction of small hydropower plants, a university in Khorog, and other infrastructure projects.
Still, unemployment remains a huge problem. The road from Dushanbe now connects to China, but the people of GBAO do not benefit because much of the cargo passing through the region is believed connected to businesses run by President Rahmon’s family, and exempted from local taxes and fees.
In such an environment, the informal leaders have gained great importance. Local leaders, like Mamadbokirov, help find employment, sometimes though illegal trade in gemstones, contraband cigarettes, or narcotics, for which the government brands them criminals and justifies its security operations in GBAO as efforts to rein in lawlessness.
The first large, post-war security operation in GBAO happened in early 2008, shortly after Mamadbokirov, a former UTO member, had been dismissed from his post as a border guard commander, allegedly for trafficking narcotics. Mamadbokirov led a small group of men who attacked the Interior Ministry building in Khorog.
After several tense days, Mamadbokirov’s group handed over some of their weapons, as part of truce reached with the Tajik government.
In June that year, some 800 people rallied in Khorog against the increase of security forces in GBAO that had followed Mamadbokirov’s raid on the Interior Ministry building. Government representatives negotiated with Mamadbokirov and three other informal leaders – Imomnazar Imomnazarov, Tolib Ayombekov, and Yodgorsho Mamadaslamov – to keep the peace in GBAO.
On July 21, 2012, General Abdullo Nazarov, head of security for GBAO, was killed. The primary suspect in the murder was Ayombekov, a former member of the UTO, who was General Nazarov’s deputy commander at the time. The motive for the killing was over a shipment of contraband cigarettes that had come from Afghanistan through a customs post under Ayombekov’s control.
Two days later a security operation was launched in the Khorog area and when it ended at least 30 civilians, and 17 government soldiers were dead. Imomnazarov was killed in an explosion at his home in August.
A truce was brokered, weapons were handed over to authorities, and fragile stability returned to GBAO.
But the situation has become such that the arrests of locals or an increase in security forces is enough to raise tensions.
In September 2018, President Rahmon visited GBAO and criticized regional authorities for allowing a “state of lawlessness” to develop. He sent additional security forces to the region.
On May 25, 2020, a crowd gathered outside the Security Service building in GBAO’s Rushan district after three locals were detained as part of an operation against smugglers. The crowd eventually rushed the building and freed the three men and tensions were raised again for several days.
And this latest violence started in late November 2021, when security forces shot dead 29-year-old Gulbiddin Ziyobekov. Ziyobekov had earlier slapped around a member of the security forces in GBAO who had molested a young local woman and many in GBAO saw the November security operation as a revenge killing.
Several more people died in unrest that followed. Internet connections to GBAO were cut and not restored until March 21. A commission of state representatives and locals was formed to look into the killing, but their investigation went nowhere.
Earlier this month, on May 14, more than 1,000 people gathered in Khorog demanding the dismissal of the GBAO governor and the release of those detained in the November 2021 unrest. The group warned if their demands were not met, they would hold a public protest on May 16, which they did, only to be met with deadly force that started this latest round of fighting.
The Tajik government wants obedience but offers no benefits as incentive. The people of GBAO regard the government as an outsider that has repeatedly wronged them.
Perhaps the most tragic part of the recent violence in GBAO is knowing it will be repeated.
Bruce Pannier studied at Tashkent State University in summer 1990, lived in villages in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in 1992-1993, and has been covering Central Asia as a journalist since 1995.
Tajikistan, Central Asia
Explainer | Why Tajikistan’s Pamiris don’t trust their government
Dushanbe wants obedience but treats the region as something to be exploited and ignored.
Bruce Pannier May 23, 2022
Pamiri men The Tajik government does little to support GBAO, leaving people to fend for themselves. (photo: David Trilling)
For 30 years, eastern Tajikistan has been either on the edge of unrest or the scene of fighting.
Fighting broke out again on May 16. The death toll, in the dozens, may be the highest since the 1992-1997 Tajik civil war. The killing of influential local leader Mamadbokir Mamadbokirov on May 22 puts chances for some sort of enduring resolution even further out of reach.
Reports about the mountainous region – known as GBAO, for Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast – regularly mention that the people there, often referred to as Pamiris, are Shi’ites, Ismaili Muslims, while most Tajikistan’s population are Sunni Muslims.
But that difference is not the cause of problems between the Tajik government and the Pamiris.
GBAO covers more than 40 percent of Tajikistan but only about 230,000 people live there. The regional capital Khorog sits at an elevation of 2,200 meters and some people live at altitudes of 4,000 meters and higher.
The ruins of the ancient fortresses of Yamchun and Khakha overlook the Pyanj River that now is the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. For centuries the peoples living in the high Pamir Mountains in what is now Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and China were isolated from the outside world. They developed their own languages, customs, and traditions.
Khorog GBAO map
Outsiders from the lowlands very rarely made their way so far into the mountains until the end of the 19th century, when Tsarist soldiers claimed the territory for Russia and established their main outpost at Khorog.
The Russians built other garrisons in the Pamirs. After 1917, the region became part of the Soviet Union. Russian-language schools, apartment and administrative buildings, and more foreign soldiers appeared. In 1940, a road was built from Dushanbe to Khorog that remains the sole ground link with the rest of the country. The narrow road is mostly unpaved and often closed due to snow or avalanches. Air connections to Khorog were established before the road was built but remain unreliable due to mountain weather.
In an effort to assimilate the Pamiris into the Soviet system, the resettlement of thousands of Pamiris in the lower lands of western Tajikistan started in the 1970s.
And then in late 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, Tajikistan became an independent country, and a furious period of political activity began.
Tajikistan’s transition to independence did not go smoothly. A former Soviet-era leader seized power and several groups, including the Pamiris, opposed the country’s leadership. On March 26, 1992, there was a large rally outside the president’s residence in Dushanbe and several hundred Pamiris were among the protesters.
The rallies continued, the government bused in supporters and armed them. By May, the civil war was starting.
The group Lali Badakhshan, Rubies of Badakhshan, established in March 1991 to protect the rights of the Pamiri people, sided with the opposition. Together with the Rastokhez (Revival) democratic movement and the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), it formed the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) that fought against Tajik government forces during the civil war.
The Pamiris who had been resettled fled toward their homeland, but pro-government militias called the Popular Front hunted them and slaughtered many. Those who finally reached GBAO had horror stories to tell about the Tajik government and its allies.
Remote GBAO became something of an opposition stronghold. There was often fighting in the western part of GBAO, but the small and ill-equipped Tajik army was never strong enough to penetrate deeply into the mountainous region.
On June 27, 1997, the UTO and Tajik government signed a peace accord that provided the UTO with 30 percent of the places in government.
The weak Tajik government that emerged under President Emomali Rahmon abided by the terms of the peace accord for several years, but as Rahmon consolidated power, he moved against his former opponents, and some of his wartime allies. He now has a firm grip over almost all of Tajikistan.
Except remote and poorly connected GBAO. The best the Tajik government could do to exert some influence there was to make deals with influential locals, dubbed “informal leaders,” who were nominally loyal to Dushanbe, and usually received a state position as a sign of this alliance.
Over the decades, the Tajik government did little to improve the standard of living in GBAO. Huge amounts of money went into rebuilding Dushanbe and Rahmon’s native Danghara area, but hardly any state money arrived in GBAO.
Tajik authorities left it to the spiritual leader of the Ismailis, the Aga Khan, to develop GBAO. The Aga Khan Fund has allocated money for hybrid agricultural programs to develop crops that can grow at the region’s high altitudes, and for construction of small hydropower plants, a university in Khorog, and other infrastructure projects.
Still, unemployment remains a huge problem. The road from Dushanbe now connects to China, but the people of GBAO do not benefit because much of the cargo passing through the region is believed connected to businesses run by President Rahmon’s family, and exempted from local taxes and fees.
In such an environment, the informal leaders have gained great importance. Local leaders, like Mamadbokirov, help find employment, sometimes though illegal trade in gemstones, contraband cigarettes, or narcotics, for which the government brands them criminals and justifies its security operations in GBAO as efforts to rein in lawlessness.
The first large, post-war security operation in GBAO happened in early 2008, shortly after Mamadbokirov, a former UTO member, had been dismissed from his post as a border guard commander, allegedly for trafficking narcotics. Mamadbokirov led a small group of men who attacked the Interior Ministry building in Khorog.
After several tense days, Mamadbokirov’s group handed over some of their weapons, as part of truce reached with the Tajik government.
In June that year, some 800 people rallied in Khorog against the increase of security forces in GBAO that had followed Mamadbokirov’s raid on the Interior Ministry building. Government representatives negotiated with Mamadbokirov and three other informal leaders – Imomnazar Imomnazarov, Tolib Ayombekov, and Yodgorsho Mamadaslamov – to keep the peace in GBAO.
On July 21, 2012, General Abdullo Nazarov, head of security for GBAO, was killed. The primary suspect in the murder was Ayombekov, a former member of the UTO, who was General Nazarov’s deputy commander at the time. The motive for the killing was over a shipment of contraband cigarettes that had come from Afghanistan through a customs post under Ayombekov’s control.
Two days later a security operation was launched in the Khorog area and when it ended at least 30 civilians, and 17 government soldiers were dead. Imomnazarov was killed in an explosion at his home in August.
A truce was brokered, weapons were handed over to authorities, and fragile stability returned to GBAO.
But the situation has become such that the arrests of locals or an increase in security forces is enough to raise tensions.
In September 2018, President Rahmon visited GBAO and criticized regional authorities for allowing a “state of lawlessness” to develop. He sent additional security forces to the region.
On May 25, 2020, a crowd gathered outside the Security Service building in GBAO’s Rushan district after three locals were detained as part of an operation against smugglers. The crowd eventually rushed the building and freed the three men and tensions were raised again for several days.
And this latest violence started in late November 2021, when security forces shot dead 29-year-old Gulbiddin Ziyobekov. Ziyobekov had earlier slapped around a member of the security forces in GBAO who had molested a young local woman and many in GBAO saw the November security operation as a revenge killing.
Several more people died in unrest that followed. Internet connections to GBAO were cut and not restored until March 21. A commission of state representatives and locals was formed to look into the killing, but their investigation went nowhere.
Earlier this month, on May 14, more than 1,000 people gathered in Khorog demanding the dismissal of the GBAO governor and the release of those detained in the November 2021 unrest. The group warned if their demands were not met, they would hold a public protest on May 16, which they did, only to be met with deadly force that started this latest round of fighting.
The Tajik government wants obedience but offers no benefits as incentive. The people of GBAO regard the government as an outsider that has repeatedly wronged them.
Perhaps the most tragic part of the recent violence in GBAO is knowing it will be repeated.
Bruce Pannier studied at Tashkent State University in summer 1990, lived in villages in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in 1992-1993, and has been covering Central Asia as a journalist since 1995.
Where China Is Changing Its Diplomatic Ways (at Least a Little)
As relations with the U.S. and Europe plummet, Beijing is beginning a new wave of diplomacy in Africa, where it dominates trade with resource-rich nations.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, speaking by video to a China-Africa forum in November. China’s campaign to cultivate African allegiances is part of a great geopolitical competition.Credit...Huang Jingwen/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Whirlwind visits to crisis-riven nations in Africa. A sleek training center for the continent’s up-and-coming politicians. The prospect of major debt forgiveness for a favorite African country.
As relations with the United States and Europe plummet, China is starting a new wave of diplomacy in Africa, where it dominates trade with resource-rich nations and keeps friendly ties with mostly authoritarian leaders, unfettered by competition from the West.
China’s campaign to cultivate African allegiances is part of a great geopolitical competition, which has intensified since the start of the war in Ukraine. Already fiercely vying for loyalties in Asia, Beijing and Washington are now jockeying broadly for influence, with the United States, Europe and their democratic allies positioned against China, Russia, Iran and other autocracies. Heightening the competition, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, began a tour of Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo Sunday.
In Africa, China is adjusting its approach, more closely integrating financial and diplomatic efforts. It’s a recognition that just building new expressways, hydropower dams and skyscrapers — as China has tried to do with the Belt and Road Initiative — isn’t sufficient to secure relations.
While the initiative across dozens of countries has helped to relegate the United States to a second-tier position in many places, the projects have also amplified tensions and added to a mounting debt crisis. To complement the rails and roads, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, started a new Global Security Initiative in the spring, a broad effort to bring developing countries together.
A big lender to Africa, Beijing is seeking to protect current and future assets, including demand for the continent’s vast minerals. It also wants to make sure its first overseas naval base, in Djibouti at the entrance of the Red Sea, operates smoothly to ensure shipments of oil.
The opening ceremony of China’s first overseas naval base, in Djibouti, in 2017. It is strategically situated at the entrance of the Red Sea.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
China is reaching from Ethiopia, on the strategically important Horn of Africa, to Zambia, a heavily indebted nation with big copper mines, farther south. Beijing is offering to mediate in civil conflicts that are causing devastating famine, and most significantly, it is signaling a new strategy to resolve billions of dollars in overdue Chinese loans.
“The United States has been saying it’s pivoting to Asia, so there’s the perception of an American retreat on the continent,” said Murithi Mutiga, project director for the Horn of Africa at International Crisis Group, a research group.
“The Chinese have been the main economic partner,” he added. “Now they are making a play on the geopolitical sphere as well.”
Beijing’s strategy is financially grounded. Trade between China and the continent topped $250 billion in 2021, compared with $64.33 billion for the United States. Chinese companies operating in Africa are investing so quickly in lithium mining that by 2030, China is expected to control 75 percent of the mineral, which is largely used in electric vehicles, said Henry Sanderson, executive editor of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
Building off the economic projects, China is changing its diplomatic messaging. Rather than keeping a distance from thornier issues, it is engaging directly, even if it’s not always welcomed.
In January, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, visited three African countries. His message: China wants to help solve their conflicts, many of them internal conflicts.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, center, with his Kenyan counterpart, Raychelle Omamo, standing right, in January, when Mr. Yi visited three African countries.Credit...Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In Ethiopia, the fighting between the central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has forced two million people from their homes and left parts of the country in famine.
China appointed Xue Bing as envoy to the Horn of Africa, a new post, in February. Mr. Xue, a former Chinese ambassador to Papua New Guinea, has flown to several countries, including Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan.
In June, Mr. Xue convened the foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers from five nations in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, boasting that China was taking an evenhanded approach to long-term civil conflicts.
The Chinese official was the latest in a line of outside mediators trying to end the conflict or halt the humanitarian catastrophe in Ethiopia, often with little success.
At the first session in Addis Ababa, Mr. Xue said he would be happy to gather the countries again. “I myself am ready to provide mediation efforts,” he said. But no new date was set, and Ethiopia, which appeared to be Mr. Xue’s major target, did not take up his offer.
China appointed Xue Bing, center table, to a new post, envoy to the Horn of Africa.Credit...Associated Press
China has also promoted its authoritarian model, in contrast to the United States’ defense of democracies.
China is an old hand at teaching the virtues of the one-party state to African leaders, a constant theme when Mao Zedong was alive. Now, China is presenting an updated version at a new training school in Tanzania, started by the International Liaison Department, the powerful body within the Communist Party that promotes China’s ideology and influence abroad.
Named after Julius Nyerere, the founding president of Tanzania and a stalwart supporter of Mao, the school accepted its first batch of future leaders in June, drawn from political parties in six southern African nations that have ruled without serious challenges since independence.
At the opening, the head of the liaison department, Song Tao, addressed the young politicians by video, urging them to follow the governance model embodied by the Chinese Communist Party.
Looming in the background of China’s diplomatic endeavors is debt. Some African nations that signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative are unable to keep up their payments, a crisis compounded by high inflation and depreciating currencies.
Thousands of captured Ethiopian government soldiers were marched under guard by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in Mekelle, Ethiopia, last year. The civil war has left parts of Ethiopia in famine. Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
China is Zambia’s biggest bilateral lender. Beijing has built roads, two airports and a major dam in Zambia, and the country urgently needs to restructure $6 billion of debt. The International Monetary Fund has told Zambia that unless the China debt issue is resolved, it will not provide a $1.3 billion bailout package.
China is working with Zambia’s new president, Hakainde Hichilema, who won after playing up corruption accusations against former President Edgar Lungu, long favored by China. In one of Mr. Hichilema’s first moves, he canceled some Chinese projects.
In December, the Biden administration invited the Zambian president to address its virtual Summit for Democracy, setting up a modicum of competition with Beijing.
Then in May, Mr. Xi spoke by phone with Mr. Hichilema.
“The call reassured Zambia’s new president that the Chinese would come through with a debt relief offer,” said Deborah Brautigam, director of the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
In the past, China has worked on its own — and secretively — with countries on debt relief. That’s in part, Ms. Brautigam said, because many Chinese government entities, as well as companies, hold the debt, complicating efforts to hash out agreements. In Zambia’s case, nearly 20 different Chinese entities are involved, she said.
Edgar Lungu, then the president of Zambia, meeting Chinese workers at a road construction project in 2018. Mr. Lungu’s successor canceled some Chinese projects shortly after becoming president.Credit...Dawood Salim/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Western critiques of China’s lending are regularly rebuffed by Chinese officials as unfair and lacking in understanding.
In Zambia’s case, this was particularly true, said Zhao Yongsheng, a finance expert at the University of International Business and Economics, a Chinese research institute. Mr. Zhao worked on an aid project nearly 40 years ago in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Beijing had deferred Zambia’s debt payments on about $1 billion in loans over the last two years, giving special consideration for the pandemic, Mr. Zhao said.
“The Chinese are actually more able to understand the difficulties and problems faced by African countries such as Zambia, before and now, than European countries and the United States,” he said.
China participated for the first time in a meeting with the Paris Club of creditor nations to start resolving Zambia’s debt issue. The solution is expected to either extend the period of payment for Zambia or reduce the value of the loan for China.
A copper mine in Chingola, Zambia, in 2015. Zambia, a huge copper producer, is heavily indebted to China.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
In a move aimed at mediating the squabbles among the myriad Chinese lenders, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is now involved in the process. A new Chinese ambassador in Zambia, Du Xiaohui, is promoting a swift resolution, Ms. Brautigam said.
If the Zambia debt crisis is handled more openly, China could burnish its image and African countries with huge loans could benefit, said Gyude Moore, a former minister of public works in Liberia and now an analyst at the Center for Global Development in Washington. It could “usher in a period of normalization of debt.”
In the face of looming debt crises across Africa, he added, “this is a big deal.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/worl ... 778d3e6de3
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, speaking by video to a China-Africa forum in November. China’s campaign to cultivate African allegiances is part of a great geopolitical competition.Credit...Huang Jingwen/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Whirlwind visits to crisis-riven nations in Africa. A sleek training center for the continent’s up-and-coming politicians. The prospect of major debt forgiveness for a favorite African country.
As relations with the United States and Europe plummet, China is starting a new wave of diplomacy in Africa, where it dominates trade with resource-rich nations and keeps friendly ties with mostly authoritarian leaders, unfettered by competition from the West.
China’s campaign to cultivate African allegiances is part of a great geopolitical competition, which has intensified since the start of the war in Ukraine. Already fiercely vying for loyalties in Asia, Beijing and Washington are now jockeying broadly for influence, with the United States, Europe and their democratic allies positioned against China, Russia, Iran and other autocracies. Heightening the competition, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, began a tour of Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo Sunday.
In Africa, China is adjusting its approach, more closely integrating financial and diplomatic efforts. It’s a recognition that just building new expressways, hydropower dams and skyscrapers — as China has tried to do with the Belt and Road Initiative — isn’t sufficient to secure relations.
While the initiative across dozens of countries has helped to relegate the United States to a second-tier position in many places, the projects have also amplified tensions and added to a mounting debt crisis. To complement the rails and roads, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, started a new Global Security Initiative in the spring, a broad effort to bring developing countries together.
A big lender to Africa, Beijing is seeking to protect current and future assets, including demand for the continent’s vast minerals. It also wants to make sure its first overseas naval base, in Djibouti at the entrance of the Red Sea, operates smoothly to ensure shipments of oil.
The opening ceremony of China’s first overseas naval base, in Djibouti, in 2017. It is strategically situated at the entrance of the Red Sea.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
China is reaching from Ethiopia, on the strategically important Horn of Africa, to Zambia, a heavily indebted nation with big copper mines, farther south. Beijing is offering to mediate in civil conflicts that are causing devastating famine, and most significantly, it is signaling a new strategy to resolve billions of dollars in overdue Chinese loans.
“The United States has been saying it’s pivoting to Asia, so there’s the perception of an American retreat on the continent,” said Murithi Mutiga, project director for the Horn of Africa at International Crisis Group, a research group.
“The Chinese have been the main economic partner,” he added. “Now they are making a play on the geopolitical sphere as well.”
Beijing’s strategy is financially grounded. Trade between China and the continent topped $250 billion in 2021, compared with $64.33 billion for the United States. Chinese companies operating in Africa are investing so quickly in lithium mining that by 2030, China is expected to control 75 percent of the mineral, which is largely used in electric vehicles, said Henry Sanderson, executive editor of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
Building off the economic projects, China is changing its diplomatic messaging. Rather than keeping a distance from thornier issues, it is engaging directly, even if it’s not always welcomed.
In January, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, visited three African countries. His message: China wants to help solve their conflicts, many of them internal conflicts.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, center, with his Kenyan counterpart, Raychelle Omamo, standing right, in January, when Mr. Yi visited three African countries.Credit...Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In Ethiopia, the fighting between the central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has forced two million people from their homes and left parts of the country in famine.
China appointed Xue Bing as envoy to the Horn of Africa, a new post, in February. Mr. Xue, a former Chinese ambassador to Papua New Guinea, has flown to several countries, including Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan.
In June, Mr. Xue convened the foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers from five nations in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, boasting that China was taking an evenhanded approach to long-term civil conflicts.
The Chinese official was the latest in a line of outside mediators trying to end the conflict or halt the humanitarian catastrophe in Ethiopia, often with little success.
At the first session in Addis Ababa, Mr. Xue said he would be happy to gather the countries again. “I myself am ready to provide mediation efforts,” he said. But no new date was set, and Ethiopia, which appeared to be Mr. Xue’s major target, did not take up his offer.
China appointed Xue Bing, center table, to a new post, envoy to the Horn of Africa.Credit...Associated Press
China has also promoted its authoritarian model, in contrast to the United States’ defense of democracies.
China is an old hand at teaching the virtues of the one-party state to African leaders, a constant theme when Mao Zedong was alive. Now, China is presenting an updated version at a new training school in Tanzania, started by the International Liaison Department, the powerful body within the Communist Party that promotes China’s ideology and influence abroad.
Named after Julius Nyerere, the founding president of Tanzania and a stalwart supporter of Mao, the school accepted its first batch of future leaders in June, drawn from political parties in six southern African nations that have ruled without serious challenges since independence.
At the opening, the head of the liaison department, Song Tao, addressed the young politicians by video, urging them to follow the governance model embodied by the Chinese Communist Party.
Looming in the background of China’s diplomatic endeavors is debt. Some African nations that signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative are unable to keep up their payments, a crisis compounded by high inflation and depreciating currencies.
Thousands of captured Ethiopian government soldiers were marched under guard by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in Mekelle, Ethiopia, last year. The civil war has left parts of Ethiopia in famine. Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
China is Zambia’s biggest bilateral lender. Beijing has built roads, two airports and a major dam in Zambia, and the country urgently needs to restructure $6 billion of debt. The International Monetary Fund has told Zambia that unless the China debt issue is resolved, it will not provide a $1.3 billion bailout package.
China is working with Zambia’s new president, Hakainde Hichilema, who won after playing up corruption accusations against former President Edgar Lungu, long favored by China. In one of Mr. Hichilema’s first moves, he canceled some Chinese projects.
In December, the Biden administration invited the Zambian president to address its virtual Summit for Democracy, setting up a modicum of competition with Beijing.
Then in May, Mr. Xi spoke by phone with Mr. Hichilema.
“The call reassured Zambia’s new president that the Chinese would come through with a debt relief offer,” said Deborah Brautigam, director of the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
In the past, China has worked on its own — and secretively — with countries on debt relief. That’s in part, Ms. Brautigam said, because many Chinese government entities, as well as companies, hold the debt, complicating efforts to hash out agreements. In Zambia’s case, nearly 20 different Chinese entities are involved, she said.
Edgar Lungu, then the president of Zambia, meeting Chinese workers at a road construction project in 2018. Mr. Lungu’s successor canceled some Chinese projects shortly after becoming president.Credit...Dawood Salim/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Western critiques of China’s lending are regularly rebuffed by Chinese officials as unfair and lacking in understanding.
In Zambia’s case, this was particularly true, said Zhao Yongsheng, a finance expert at the University of International Business and Economics, a Chinese research institute. Mr. Zhao worked on an aid project nearly 40 years ago in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Beijing had deferred Zambia’s debt payments on about $1 billion in loans over the last two years, giving special consideration for the pandemic, Mr. Zhao said.
“The Chinese are actually more able to understand the difficulties and problems faced by African countries such as Zambia, before and now, than European countries and the United States,” he said.
China participated for the first time in a meeting with the Paris Club of creditor nations to start resolving Zambia’s debt issue. The solution is expected to either extend the period of payment for Zambia or reduce the value of the loan for China.
A copper mine in Chingola, Zambia, in 2015. Zambia, a huge copper producer, is heavily indebted to China.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
In a move aimed at mediating the squabbles among the myriad Chinese lenders, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is now involved in the process. A new Chinese ambassador in Zambia, Du Xiaohui, is promoting a swift resolution, Ms. Brautigam said.
If the Zambia debt crisis is handled more openly, China could burnish its image and African countries with huge loans could benefit, said Gyude Moore, a former minister of public works in Liberia and now an analyst at the Center for Global Development in Washington. It could “usher in a period of normalization of debt.”
In the face of looming debt crises across Africa, he added, “this is a big deal.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/worl ... 778d3e6de3
South Korea Launches First Lunar Spacecraft
South Korea’s Danuri moon mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carried by a SpaceX rocket. The mission will study the moon’s magnetic field and some of its darkest craters.
Video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/s ... 778d3e6de3
Re: ASIA
The Conversation
75 years ago, Britain's plan for Pakistani and Indian independence left unresolved conflicts on both sides – especially when it comes to Kashmir
Sumit Ganguly, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations, Indiana University
Mon, August 8, 2022 at 7:19 AM
Leaders in New Delhi agree on the plan to partition India: from left, Jawaharlal Nehru, Hastings Ismay, Louis Mountbatten and Ali Jinnah. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
In 1947, the United Kingdom was exhausted. World War II had ravaged its military and economy, and anti-colonial movements had begun to challenge empires. Within the Indian subcontinent, the U.K. faced two powerful, seemingly irreconcilable nationalist movements: one calling for the creation of Pakistan, a homeland for the Muslims of South Asia; the other for India, a pluralist democracy.
The U.K. chose to partition the region and withdraw. Under the terms of the Indian Independence Act, the subcontinent was formally divided into two new dominions at midnight of Aug. 14, 1947 – 75 years ago this month.
You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa.
Dividing a diverse land of hundreds of millions of people was far messier than the partition plan itself. Around 1 million people died, and more than 12 million were displaced, by the mass violence that broke out immediately afterward.
One particularly complicated piece of this history, which I have written about in my work as a scholar of Indian politics, is the fate of the regions known as “princely states,” which had some autonomy under the British. This dilemma still shapes the region, especially in Jammu and Kashmir, which has been ridden with conflict ever since.
Time to choose
Under British rule there had been two classes of states. One set of states, those of British India, were directly ruled from London. The other, the “princely states,” were nominally independent as long as their rulers recognized the “paramountcy” of the British Crown.
A map of India before the partition shows the areas considered ‘British India’ and the ‘princely states,’ also called ‘Indian states.’ Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Under the terms of this doctrine, these “princely states” could largely manage their internal affairs but had to defer to Britain on three critical policy issues: defense, foreign affairs and communications. Around the time of independence and partition there were approximately 562 such states, many of them quite small.
As the British prepared to depart, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy – the British monarch’s representative in India – decreed that the rulers of the princely states had a choice: They could join either India or Pakistan. Independence, as an option, was effectively ruled out.
Moreover, Mountbatten added two important stipulations: that the states could be merged with India or Pakistan on the basis of demographic features and their geographic location. Accordingly, predominantly Muslim states would go to Pakistan and others to India. Finally, he also stipulated that states that were geographically situated inside the borders of one of the two emergent countries, regardless of their demographic composition, had to join that particular country.
Dragging their heels
The vast majority of the rulers of the princely states, despite harboring reservations about this plan, recognized that they had little or no choice and acceded to either India or Pakistan, though a few did have to be prodded or cajoled. However, a small number of them, for a variety of complex reasons, were reluctant to agree to the terms that Mountbatten had spelled out.
Three of them proved to be especially trying. The first of these was the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, in the northwest. Maharaja Hari Singh was a Hindu ruling over a predominantly Muslim population. To compound matters, his state lay between the two emergent countries of India and Pakistan.
India, which was created as a secular state, wanted to incorporate Kashmir to demonstrate that a predominantly Muslim region could thrive in a Hindu-majority country committed to secularism. Pakistan, on the other hand, sought Kashmir because of its physical proximity and Muslim majority.
Singh was unwilling to cast his lot with either of the two states. He did not wish to join India because he was aware that India’s principal nationalist leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, had socialist leanings and would likely induce him to dispense with his vast landed estates. Simultaneously, he was averse to joining Pakistan because he was mostly at odds with his predominantly Muslim subjects.
Even after the independence of Pakistan and India was declared, Singh vacillated about which country to join. In October of 1947 a tribal rebellion broke out in Poonch, a district of Jammu and Kashmir. As his troops sought to quell the rebellion, the insurgents quickly found military support from Pakistan.
As the rebels approached his capital, Srinagar, Singh appealed to India for military assistance. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, agreed to provide assistance as long as two conditions were met. Singh would have to obtain the support of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the leader of the largest popular and secular political party in the state, and he would have to formally sign the Instrument of Accession to India.
After Singh agreed to the conditions, India sent troops into the state, leading to a war with Pakistan – the first of four between the two countries, the most recent in 1999. The first conflict came to a close in 1948 with Pakistan gaining control over a third of Kashmir.
Neither country has wholly reconciled itself to Kashmir’s status. India claims the state in its entirety, as it became a part of its territory legally. Pakistan, however, has historically held the view that Kashmir was ceded to India by a ruler who did not represent its majority Muslim population. Indeed, this dispute between two nuclear-armed powers remains a potential global flashpoint.
Consequential choices
Another contentious case involved the Muslim ruler of the state of Hyderabad, well inside central India, who did not wish to join India. Nehru initially sought to negotiate an end to this impasse. However, when the ruler, the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, proved resistant to his requests, Nehru authorized the use of force to ensure the state’s integration into India.
Finally, a third difficult case was Junagadh, a princely state in western India. The ruler, the Nawab Muhammad Mahabat Khan Babi III, acceded to Pakistan despite its predominantly Hindu population. Unhappy with his decision, which defied the directive that states located within the new dominion of India should accede to it, India’s leaders sent in troops to reverse the outcome. To legitimize the decision, the government held a referendum in 1948, in which over 90% of the citizenry voted in favor of the accession.
The departure of the British from their Indian colony left a host of unresolved issues, ranging from the traumas of the partition to the ongoing dispute over Kashmir. These consequences still shape geopolitics in the region, and beyond.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/75 ... 37072.html
75 years ago, Britain's plan for Pakistani and Indian independence left unresolved conflicts on both sides – especially when it comes to Kashmir
Sumit Ganguly, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations, Indiana University
Mon, August 8, 2022 at 7:19 AM
Leaders in New Delhi agree on the plan to partition India: from left, Jawaharlal Nehru, Hastings Ismay, Louis Mountbatten and Ali Jinnah. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
In 1947, the United Kingdom was exhausted. World War II had ravaged its military and economy, and anti-colonial movements had begun to challenge empires. Within the Indian subcontinent, the U.K. faced two powerful, seemingly irreconcilable nationalist movements: one calling for the creation of Pakistan, a homeland for the Muslims of South Asia; the other for India, a pluralist democracy.
The U.K. chose to partition the region and withdraw. Under the terms of the Indian Independence Act, the subcontinent was formally divided into two new dominions at midnight of Aug. 14, 1947 – 75 years ago this month.
You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa.
Dividing a diverse land of hundreds of millions of people was far messier than the partition plan itself. Around 1 million people died, and more than 12 million were displaced, by the mass violence that broke out immediately afterward.
One particularly complicated piece of this history, which I have written about in my work as a scholar of Indian politics, is the fate of the regions known as “princely states,” which had some autonomy under the British. This dilemma still shapes the region, especially in Jammu and Kashmir, which has been ridden with conflict ever since.
Time to choose
Under British rule there had been two classes of states. One set of states, those of British India, were directly ruled from London. The other, the “princely states,” were nominally independent as long as their rulers recognized the “paramountcy” of the British Crown.
A map of India before the partition shows the areas considered ‘British India’ and the ‘princely states,’ also called ‘Indian states.’ Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Under the terms of this doctrine, these “princely states” could largely manage their internal affairs but had to defer to Britain on three critical policy issues: defense, foreign affairs and communications. Around the time of independence and partition there were approximately 562 such states, many of them quite small.
As the British prepared to depart, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy – the British monarch’s representative in India – decreed that the rulers of the princely states had a choice: They could join either India or Pakistan. Independence, as an option, was effectively ruled out.
Moreover, Mountbatten added two important stipulations: that the states could be merged with India or Pakistan on the basis of demographic features and their geographic location. Accordingly, predominantly Muslim states would go to Pakistan and others to India. Finally, he also stipulated that states that were geographically situated inside the borders of one of the two emergent countries, regardless of their demographic composition, had to join that particular country.
Dragging their heels
The vast majority of the rulers of the princely states, despite harboring reservations about this plan, recognized that they had little or no choice and acceded to either India or Pakistan, though a few did have to be prodded or cajoled. However, a small number of them, for a variety of complex reasons, were reluctant to agree to the terms that Mountbatten had spelled out.
Three of them proved to be especially trying. The first of these was the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, in the northwest. Maharaja Hari Singh was a Hindu ruling over a predominantly Muslim population. To compound matters, his state lay between the two emergent countries of India and Pakistan.
India, which was created as a secular state, wanted to incorporate Kashmir to demonstrate that a predominantly Muslim region could thrive in a Hindu-majority country committed to secularism. Pakistan, on the other hand, sought Kashmir because of its physical proximity and Muslim majority.
Singh was unwilling to cast his lot with either of the two states. He did not wish to join India because he was aware that India’s principal nationalist leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, had socialist leanings and would likely induce him to dispense with his vast landed estates. Simultaneously, he was averse to joining Pakistan because he was mostly at odds with his predominantly Muslim subjects.
Even after the independence of Pakistan and India was declared, Singh vacillated about which country to join. In October of 1947 a tribal rebellion broke out in Poonch, a district of Jammu and Kashmir. As his troops sought to quell the rebellion, the insurgents quickly found military support from Pakistan.
As the rebels approached his capital, Srinagar, Singh appealed to India for military assistance. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, agreed to provide assistance as long as two conditions were met. Singh would have to obtain the support of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the leader of the largest popular and secular political party in the state, and he would have to formally sign the Instrument of Accession to India.
After Singh agreed to the conditions, India sent troops into the state, leading to a war with Pakistan – the first of four between the two countries, the most recent in 1999. The first conflict came to a close in 1948 with Pakistan gaining control over a third of Kashmir.
Neither country has wholly reconciled itself to Kashmir’s status. India claims the state in its entirety, as it became a part of its territory legally. Pakistan, however, has historically held the view that Kashmir was ceded to India by a ruler who did not represent its majority Muslim population. Indeed, this dispute between two nuclear-armed powers remains a potential global flashpoint.
Consequential choices
Another contentious case involved the Muslim ruler of the state of Hyderabad, well inside central India, who did not wish to join India. Nehru initially sought to negotiate an end to this impasse. However, when the ruler, the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, proved resistant to his requests, Nehru authorized the use of force to ensure the state’s integration into India.
Finally, a third difficult case was Junagadh, a princely state in western India. The ruler, the Nawab Muhammad Mahabat Khan Babi III, acceded to Pakistan despite its predominantly Hindu population. Unhappy with his decision, which defied the directive that states located within the new dominion of India should accede to it, India’s leaders sent in troops to reverse the outcome. To legitimize the decision, the government held a referendum in 1948, in which over 90% of the citizenry voted in favor of the accession.
The departure of the British from their Indian colony left a host of unresolved issues, ranging from the traumas of the partition to the ongoing dispute over Kashmir. These consequences still shape geopolitics in the region, and beyond.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/75 ... 37072.html
China Hangs on Xi’s Every Word. His Silence Also Speaks Volumes.
At the important Communist Party congress this week, the Chinese leader didn’t mention two long-repeated maxims. To many, it’s a warning of the turbulent times ahead.
At the opening of the Communist Party congress, Mr. Xi warned of “dangerous storms” ahead.Credit...Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Their exclusion, and Mr. Xi’s somber warning of “dangerous storms” on the horizon, indicated that he believed international hazards have worsened, especially since the start of the war in Ukraine in February, several experts said. Mr. Xi, who is nearly assured re-election on Sunday as its general secretary, sees a world made more treacherous by American support for the disputed island of Taiwan, Chinese vulnerability to technology “choke points,” and the plans of Western-led alliances to increase their military presence around Asia.
“China’s external environment now can be described as unprecedentedly perilous, and that’s also the judgment of China’s high echelon,” Hu Wei, a foreign policy scholar in Shanghai, said in an interview.
In the Communist Party, the leader’s words matter enormously, shaping China’s policies, legislation and diplomacy. And the report to the party congress, every five years, is the fundamental guide for officials. Each phrase, each tweak, each omission is weighed to signal priorities.
In his report, Mr. Xi said several times that China intended to contribute more to global peace and development through its own initiatives, and discussed “strategic opportunities” for trade and diplomatic gains. But his assessment of global trends was laced with warnings.
“This marks a meaningful, and perhaps major, shift in their assessment of the global order,” said Christopher K. Johnson, the president of the China Strategies Group and a former C.I.A. analyst of Chinese politics. “He’s basically hardening the system because the likelihood of conflict is going up.”
President Biden, left, with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India in May at a meeting of the four-nation coalition called the Quad, formed in part to counter China.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
During the congress, Mr. Xi did not publicly mention the United States, nor President Biden’s new national security strategy that describes China as the pre-eminent threat to American primacy. But to Chinese officials, the implied focus will be clear.
“Daring to struggle” was a hallmark of Chinese diplomacy, a vice foreign minister, Ma Zhaoxu, told reporters covering the congress, noting Beijing’s contention with overbearing, “hegemonic” rivals. Jiang Jinquan, a senior aide to Mr. Xi, told a Beijing newspaper that China had “vigorously and effectively” taken on “hostile Western forces.”
Mr. Xi’s warnings have also reflected his underlying political message to the congress: I told you so.
He has positioned himself as the prophetic statesman who in his decade-long rule beat back proliferating threats to China’s rise while overhauling its fractured military and security forces. He has been the leader who toughened up China’s diplomacy, foreseeing that jealous rival powers would try to, as he said in his report, “blackmail, contain, blockade and exert maximum pressure on China.”
The party is promoting Mr. Xi as the nation’s “navigator” for the intensifying threats. The outcome of the congress on Saturday made clear that Mr. Xi will stay in power beyond the 10 years his predecessor served, and also install a new leadership team dominated by his firm allies.
That new team, to be unveiled on Sunday, is likely to elevate officials whom Mr. Xi believes will serve his call to “struggle,” by their loyalty to him and the party, and their ability to advance programs to upgrade high-tech, military modernization and social controls.
Already, People’s Liberation Army commanders and senior officials at the congress have urged China to rally around Mr. Xi’s plans to upgrade the military, accelerate technological self-reliance and strengthen ideological indoctrination to ward off subversive ideas among the young.
Military delegates after the opening of the congress. Commanders and senior officials have urged China to rally around Mr. Xi and his agenda.Credit...Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Mr. Xi had “carried out a historic rescue, reshaping and transformation” of the People’s Liberation Army forces, Gen. Xu Qiliang told military delegates at the congress. “In all actions, absolutely obey the command of Chairman Xi,” he said, using Mr. Xi’s title as head of the military.
In his report, Mr. Xi laid out some of his plans to secure China’s global rise, many building on current policy directions.
He called for accelerating steps to become more self-reliant in core technologies and pressing ahead with military modernization, including, Mr. Xi hinted, upgrading China’s relatively limited nuclear weapons abilities.
Beijing, he said, would also become more active in international affairs and promote its own solutions for global security and development challenges. He repeated that China wanted to win control of Taiwan peacefully, but could use force if compelled.
Taiwan’s national day celebrations in October. Mr. Xi said China, if compelled, could use force to claim Taiwan, a self-ruled island.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Mr. Xi’s new phrases had signaled that China must become more nimble, Wang Wen, the executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies in Beijing, said in written responses to questions.
“We can’t just passively sit back and enjoy a ‘period’ of strategic opportunity,” he said, “and have to actively shape and seize more opportunities.”
Mr. Xi’s report also represented another step in jettisoning language and assumptions from China’s era of market changes and friendly diplomacy with the West.
The phrase that “peace and development” were era-defining themes took hold in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping’s generation of leaders introduced economic liberalization and fostered ties with Washington, Tokyo and other former foes, said Yong Deng, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who wrote “China’s Strategic Opportunity.”
It implied that China “had the permissible international environment to focus on modernizations through reforms and opening,” he said, noting that he did not speak for the navy.
Another leader, Jiang Zemin, first declared in 2002 that China could enjoy about two decades of “strategic opportunity” — free of serious risk of major conflict — soon after he had won its entry into the World Trade Organization. It was a time of expanding commerce and hopes abroad that China would increasingly liberalize, in politics as well as business. Beijing encouraged talk of China’s “peaceful rise.”
Even later last year, Mr. Xi and other senior officials stuck to the formula that China was still in a time of strategic opportunity, while expressing apprehension about geopolitical and economic risks. The two slogans appeared in a textbook issued to officials in April, reflecting contents of Mr. Xi’s secret national security strategy. In late August, the party’s leading doctrinal journal published a speech that Mr. Xi made in 2020 that hinted at internal debate.
[img]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/10 ... &auto=webp[/b]
Military vehicles carrying ballistic missiles during a parade in 2019 in Beijing. Mr. Xi is pressing ahead with military modernization, including upgrading China’s relatively modest nuclear weapons forces.Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
“Now and for some time to come, our country is still in a period of important strategic opportunity,” Mr. Xi said then. “Today, 20 years on, how we assess this period of strategic opportunity is a major issue.”
Mr. Xi’s worries about external risks appeared to come to head in the first half of 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s galvanization to support Kyiv, an examination of Chinese officials’ speeches and policy documents indicates.
The war in Ukraine, global tensions over the coronavirus pandemic and Washington’s tough approach to Beijing intensified debate in China about whether it still had a “period of strategic opportunity,” said Mr. Wang, who recently published a paper on the issue.
“The impact from Russia-Ukraine was that it was a rehearsal for U.S. containment of China,” Mr. Wang said in written answers to questions, reflecting a widespread view in China.
Mr. Xi flagged in a speech in late July that his views had significantly changed to prepare officials for the congress. China still has many opportunities for growth, he said, but he also noted the “dangers and challenges” ahead.
“While some of China’s responses to growing challenges were no doubt already underway before the congress,” said David Gitter, the president of the Center for Advanced China Research, “the dropping of the terms noted will inject new impetus and assertiveness in a way visible from outside China.”
Mr. Xi’s draft report to the congress was endorsed by its nearly 2,400 delegates on Saturday, but the finalized version was not immediately released. There is still some chance that the reassuring stock phrases will be restored in the final version. But making that change now could signify elite discord over a major issue, something that Mr. Xi would not welcome.
The congress issued a concluding statement praising Mr. Xi’s government for, among other things, leading China in “effectively responding to grave and complicated international circumstances, and massive risks and challenges that have followed hard on the heels of each other.”
Claire Fu contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
At the opening of the Communist Party congress, Mr. Xi warned of “dangerous storms” ahead.Credit...Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Their exclusion, and Mr. Xi’s somber warning of “dangerous storms” on the horizon, indicated that he believed international hazards have worsened, especially since the start of the war in Ukraine in February, several experts said. Mr. Xi, who is nearly assured re-election on Sunday as its general secretary, sees a world made more treacherous by American support for the disputed island of Taiwan, Chinese vulnerability to technology “choke points,” and the plans of Western-led alliances to increase their military presence around Asia.
“China’s external environment now can be described as unprecedentedly perilous, and that’s also the judgment of China’s high echelon,” Hu Wei, a foreign policy scholar in Shanghai, said in an interview.
In the Communist Party, the leader’s words matter enormously, shaping China’s policies, legislation and diplomacy. And the report to the party congress, every five years, is the fundamental guide for officials. Each phrase, each tweak, each omission is weighed to signal priorities.
In his report, Mr. Xi said several times that China intended to contribute more to global peace and development through its own initiatives, and discussed “strategic opportunities” for trade and diplomatic gains. But his assessment of global trends was laced with warnings.
“This marks a meaningful, and perhaps major, shift in their assessment of the global order,” said Christopher K. Johnson, the president of the China Strategies Group and a former C.I.A. analyst of Chinese politics. “He’s basically hardening the system because the likelihood of conflict is going up.”
President Biden, left, with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India in May at a meeting of the four-nation coalition called the Quad, formed in part to counter China.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
During the congress, Mr. Xi did not publicly mention the United States, nor President Biden’s new national security strategy that describes China as the pre-eminent threat to American primacy. But to Chinese officials, the implied focus will be clear.
“Daring to struggle” was a hallmark of Chinese diplomacy, a vice foreign minister, Ma Zhaoxu, told reporters covering the congress, noting Beijing’s contention with overbearing, “hegemonic” rivals. Jiang Jinquan, a senior aide to Mr. Xi, told a Beijing newspaper that China had “vigorously and effectively” taken on “hostile Western forces.”
Mr. Xi’s warnings have also reflected his underlying political message to the congress: I told you so.
He has positioned himself as the prophetic statesman who in his decade-long rule beat back proliferating threats to China’s rise while overhauling its fractured military and security forces. He has been the leader who toughened up China’s diplomacy, foreseeing that jealous rival powers would try to, as he said in his report, “blackmail, contain, blockade and exert maximum pressure on China.”
The party is promoting Mr. Xi as the nation’s “navigator” for the intensifying threats. The outcome of the congress on Saturday made clear that Mr. Xi will stay in power beyond the 10 years his predecessor served, and also install a new leadership team dominated by his firm allies.
That new team, to be unveiled on Sunday, is likely to elevate officials whom Mr. Xi believes will serve his call to “struggle,” by their loyalty to him and the party, and their ability to advance programs to upgrade high-tech, military modernization and social controls.
Already, People’s Liberation Army commanders and senior officials at the congress have urged China to rally around Mr. Xi’s plans to upgrade the military, accelerate technological self-reliance and strengthen ideological indoctrination to ward off subversive ideas among the young.
Military delegates after the opening of the congress. Commanders and senior officials have urged China to rally around Mr. Xi and his agenda.Credit...Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Mr. Xi had “carried out a historic rescue, reshaping and transformation” of the People’s Liberation Army forces, Gen. Xu Qiliang told military delegates at the congress. “In all actions, absolutely obey the command of Chairman Xi,” he said, using Mr. Xi’s title as head of the military.
In his report, Mr. Xi laid out some of his plans to secure China’s global rise, many building on current policy directions.
He called for accelerating steps to become more self-reliant in core technologies and pressing ahead with military modernization, including, Mr. Xi hinted, upgrading China’s relatively limited nuclear weapons abilities.
Beijing, he said, would also become more active in international affairs and promote its own solutions for global security and development challenges. He repeated that China wanted to win control of Taiwan peacefully, but could use force if compelled.
Taiwan’s national day celebrations in October. Mr. Xi said China, if compelled, could use force to claim Taiwan, a self-ruled island.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Mr. Xi’s new phrases had signaled that China must become more nimble, Wang Wen, the executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies in Beijing, said in written responses to questions.
“We can’t just passively sit back and enjoy a ‘period’ of strategic opportunity,” he said, “and have to actively shape and seize more opportunities.”
Mr. Xi’s report also represented another step in jettisoning language and assumptions from China’s era of market changes and friendly diplomacy with the West.
The phrase that “peace and development” were era-defining themes took hold in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping’s generation of leaders introduced economic liberalization and fostered ties with Washington, Tokyo and other former foes, said Yong Deng, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who wrote “China’s Strategic Opportunity.”
It implied that China “had the permissible international environment to focus on modernizations through reforms and opening,” he said, noting that he did not speak for the navy.
Another leader, Jiang Zemin, first declared in 2002 that China could enjoy about two decades of “strategic opportunity” — free of serious risk of major conflict — soon after he had won its entry into the World Trade Organization. It was a time of expanding commerce and hopes abroad that China would increasingly liberalize, in politics as well as business. Beijing encouraged talk of China’s “peaceful rise.”
Even later last year, Mr. Xi and other senior officials stuck to the formula that China was still in a time of strategic opportunity, while expressing apprehension about geopolitical and economic risks. The two slogans appeared in a textbook issued to officials in April, reflecting contents of Mr. Xi’s secret national security strategy. In late August, the party’s leading doctrinal journal published a speech that Mr. Xi made in 2020 that hinted at internal debate.
[img]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/10 ... &auto=webp[/b]
Military vehicles carrying ballistic missiles during a parade in 2019 in Beijing. Mr. Xi is pressing ahead with military modernization, including upgrading China’s relatively modest nuclear weapons forces.Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
“Now and for some time to come, our country is still in a period of important strategic opportunity,” Mr. Xi said then. “Today, 20 years on, how we assess this period of strategic opportunity is a major issue.”
Mr. Xi’s worries about external risks appeared to come to head in the first half of 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s galvanization to support Kyiv, an examination of Chinese officials’ speeches and policy documents indicates.
The war in Ukraine, global tensions over the coronavirus pandemic and Washington’s tough approach to Beijing intensified debate in China about whether it still had a “period of strategic opportunity,” said Mr. Wang, who recently published a paper on the issue.
“The impact from Russia-Ukraine was that it was a rehearsal for U.S. containment of China,” Mr. Wang said in written answers to questions, reflecting a widespread view in China.
Mr. Xi flagged in a speech in late July that his views had significantly changed to prepare officials for the congress. China still has many opportunities for growth, he said, but he also noted the “dangers and challenges” ahead.
“While some of China’s responses to growing challenges were no doubt already underway before the congress,” said David Gitter, the president of the Center for Advanced China Research, “the dropping of the terms noted will inject new impetus and assertiveness in a way visible from outside China.”
Mr. Xi’s draft report to the congress was endorsed by its nearly 2,400 delegates on Saturday, but the finalized version was not immediately released. There is still some chance that the reassuring stock phrases will be restored in the final version. But making that change now could signify elite discord over a major issue, something that Mr. Xi would not welcome.
The congress issued a concluding statement praising Mr. Xi’s government for, among other things, leading China in “effectively responding to grave and complicated international circumstances, and massive risks and challenges that have followed hard on the heels of each other.”
Claire Fu contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
How China Is Fighting the Chip War With America
By Keyu Jin
Dr. Jin is a Chinese economist and the author of “The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism.”
BEIJING — President Biden’s early-October decision to impose sweeping export controls aimed at blocking China’s access to advanced semiconductors was eerily timed — a few days before the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th national congress.
The Chinese response to American truculence, flying in the face of the party, is defiance. The Communist Party congress, which concluded last weekend, exuded a sense of national urgency, prioritized security over the economy and focused on looming threats: a tectonic shift in geopolitics, a technology war and an enduring pandemic.
During his speech to the party congress, Xi Jinping, who was granted his third term as the top leader of the country, mentioned “technology” 40 times, promised to “win the battle in key core technologies” and emphasized innovation and technological self-sufficiency.
China has been working over the years to catch up with the United States in advanced technologies, and Beijing established an ambitious Made in China 2025 program in 2015 to refocus its industries to compete in automation, microchips and self-driving cars.
Competition and conflict with the United States have led to the rise of techno-nationalism in China. President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Chinese tech corporations such as Huawei fueled the first wave of techno-nationalism in the country. President Biden’s export controls and addition of other Chinese companies to a list of sanctioned entities has renewed Chinese determination to close the gap in its technological prowess with America.
And for the first time, the Communist Party congress has added a category to its top priorities: “ke jiao xing guo,” which means a great power underpinned by technology, science and education. Science and technology are now at the core of China’s development, and self-reliance has become a national imperative.
A day after Mr. Biden’s export controls, the local government of Shenzhen, China’s prominent technology hub, hammered out an ambitious plan to accelerate breakthroughs of its semiconductors industry, supported by a gamut of detailed financial incentives, preferential tax policies, research and development subsidies and talent programs for enterprises in the entire ecosystem.
President Biden at the site of a new Intel semiconductor manufacturing facility in New Albany, Ohio, in September.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The heavy blow dealt to many semiconductors companies — chip designers, the huge factories in which chips are made and foundries — could extend to other industries that rely on advanced chips, including autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence.
Thirty percent of the revenue of American semiconductor companies comes from sales to China, which imported more than $400 billion worth of chips in 2021. China will have to rely on domestic chip producers now, which are expected to meet about 70 percent of its market demand by 2025.
To meet this challenge, China is turning to its strongest form of techno-nationalism, the juguo tizhi, or “whole of the nation” approach, whereby all national resources are mobilized to achieve a strategic objective. It was used in the past to reap Olympic gold medals but is now also designated for core technologies like quantum information and biotech.
China is placing large bets without expecting immediate returns. A torrent of resources has already flowed into leading-edge sectors: China invested as much as $11 billion in quantum computing between 2009 and 2011, compared with $3 billion by the United States. The government-led Big Fund in semiconductors has channeled almost a trillion renminbi (around $137 billion at current exchange rates) of private and public funding into the industry.
Even the central bank has introduced special low-interest loans on the order of 200 billion renminbi (almost $30 billion) for high-tech firms. Hundreds of national labs, which carry out the most advanced research, are being rolled out to boost basic research. More are sure to come amid a technology war.
Would China’s state-led approach that worked really well for its industrialization prove equally effective for its innovation? The state can roll out infrastructure and coordinate supply chains, but can it pick out winners in technology?
So far, the state-led approach on technological innovation has been successful but also incredibly costly. China is now neck and neck on quantum with America and leading in some areas. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, the foundry and largest chip maker in China, started shipping seven-nanometer chips despite American sanctions; Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation, the state-owned memory chip producer, was on track to supply parts to be used in Apple iPhones before the embargo. Both benefited from billions of dollars of state funding and support.
The latest plan announced last month is to give the juguo system a new twist — a measured, smarter approach that leverages the power of the private sector and market mechanisms. While the state will continue to play the key role of mobilizing large amounts of funding for long, complex and uncertain investments, it will be left to the market and enterprises to determine what technologies are made, how to make them and where the resources flow.
Provincial governments, such as in Shenzhen, make sure that no barriers are too great for promising entrepreneurs: pushing regulators for a fast track to I.P.O., state financing and even jobs for their spouses. But setting limits to their involvement — such as caps on the equity stake they can take or the extent of financial subsidy — is aimed at reducing waste, corruption and overlaps.
Behind the mastery of critical technologies are markets, money and talent. Chinese markets are ready for a big innovation drive: Consumers are more sophisticated and demand higher quality. Only companies with better technologies can win.
Economic maturation means that low-hanging fruit has been plucked and financial resources will flow to more uncertain areas with higher returns. It is no coincidence that last year domestic revenues in China’s semiconductor industry surpassed $157 billion, with 19 of the 20 fastest-growing semiconductor companies globally being Chinese.
But talent and basic research remain China’s weak points. The China Semiconductor Industry Association estimated that there will be a gap of 300,000 experts in the industry by 2025. Last year, the industry that saw the largest surge in wages was semiconductors. Basic research, the bedrock of cutting-edge technologies, is notably lagging. And China is rapidly increasing the state budget for science.
And while the juguo system leverages public and private power unlike anything else in the world, it is usually more effective when costs are not a concern. It might be paramount for space programs and perhaps helpful for building large-scale and complex equipment — even at multiples of the normal cost.
That might save China from being totally incapacitated when severed from international technologies, but it is not so helpful in making advanced chips for end-consumer products where cost competitiveness and volume are vital. In these areas, China may be 10 years or more behind the United States. Techno-nationalism may speed up the rate of convergence, but it is unlikely to close the distance with a fast-moving train. Core technologies take time to develop — years of cumulative learning and knowledge.
China has a motto of “taking over on the bend,” which means surpassing in areas where others have no latent advantage. Germans excel in manufacturing traditional cars, but China has made a significant push in the development for electric vehicles, renewable energy and new materials. It is simultaneously betting on new directions for semiconductors. Advanced packaging techniques make chips with low-end processing nodes perform like high-end ones. Chip materials like silicon may be swapped for new-generation ones.
The Communist Party’s five-year plan revolves around strengthening manufacturing and quality. An American-style financialization and service-oriented economy is not what the Chinese leadership thinks can ensure national strength and security. China wants to become a bigger, smarter Germany, one with industrial capacity, leveraging artificial intelligence, next-generation communications and robotics.
China is now putting its juguo system to the test. It is not only a race for technological supremacy but also the ultimate competition between two radically different systems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Dr. Jin is a Chinese economist and the author of “The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism.”
BEIJING — President Biden’s early-October decision to impose sweeping export controls aimed at blocking China’s access to advanced semiconductors was eerily timed — a few days before the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th national congress.
The Chinese response to American truculence, flying in the face of the party, is defiance. The Communist Party congress, which concluded last weekend, exuded a sense of national urgency, prioritized security over the economy and focused on looming threats: a tectonic shift in geopolitics, a technology war and an enduring pandemic.
During his speech to the party congress, Xi Jinping, who was granted his third term as the top leader of the country, mentioned “technology” 40 times, promised to “win the battle in key core technologies” and emphasized innovation and technological self-sufficiency.
China has been working over the years to catch up with the United States in advanced technologies, and Beijing established an ambitious Made in China 2025 program in 2015 to refocus its industries to compete in automation, microchips and self-driving cars.
Competition and conflict with the United States have led to the rise of techno-nationalism in China. President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Chinese tech corporations such as Huawei fueled the first wave of techno-nationalism in the country. President Biden’s export controls and addition of other Chinese companies to a list of sanctioned entities has renewed Chinese determination to close the gap in its technological prowess with America.
And for the first time, the Communist Party congress has added a category to its top priorities: “ke jiao xing guo,” which means a great power underpinned by technology, science and education. Science and technology are now at the core of China’s development, and self-reliance has become a national imperative.
A day after Mr. Biden’s export controls, the local government of Shenzhen, China’s prominent technology hub, hammered out an ambitious plan to accelerate breakthroughs of its semiconductors industry, supported by a gamut of detailed financial incentives, preferential tax policies, research and development subsidies and talent programs for enterprises in the entire ecosystem.
President Biden at the site of a new Intel semiconductor manufacturing facility in New Albany, Ohio, in September.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The heavy blow dealt to many semiconductors companies — chip designers, the huge factories in which chips are made and foundries — could extend to other industries that rely on advanced chips, including autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence.
Thirty percent of the revenue of American semiconductor companies comes from sales to China, which imported more than $400 billion worth of chips in 2021. China will have to rely on domestic chip producers now, which are expected to meet about 70 percent of its market demand by 2025.
To meet this challenge, China is turning to its strongest form of techno-nationalism, the juguo tizhi, or “whole of the nation” approach, whereby all national resources are mobilized to achieve a strategic objective. It was used in the past to reap Olympic gold medals but is now also designated for core technologies like quantum information and biotech.
China is placing large bets without expecting immediate returns. A torrent of resources has already flowed into leading-edge sectors: China invested as much as $11 billion in quantum computing between 2009 and 2011, compared with $3 billion by the United States. The government-led Big Fund in semiconductors has channeled almost a trillion renminbi (around $137 billion at current exchange rates) of private and public funding into the industry.
Even the central bank has introduced special low-interest loans on the order of 200 billion renminbi (almost $30 billion) for high-tech firms. Hundreds of national labs, which carry out the most advanced research, are being rolled out to boost basic research. More are sure to come amid a technology war.
Would China’s state-led approach that worked really well for its industrialization prove equally effective for its innovation? The state can roll out infrastructure and coordinate supply chains, but can it pick out winners in technology?
So far, the state-led approach on technological innovation has been successful but also incredibly costly. China is now neck and neck on quantum with America and leading in some areas. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, the foundry and largest chip maker in China, started shipping seven-nanometer chips despite American sanctions; Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation, the state-owned memory chip producer, was on track to supply parts to be used in Apple iPhones before the embargo. Both benefited from billions of dollars of state funding and support.
The latest plan announced last month is to give the juguo system a new twist — a measured, smarter approach that leverages the power of the private sector and market mechanisms. While the state will continue to play the key role of mobilizing large amounts of funding for long, complex and uncertain investments, it will be left to the market and enterprises to determine what technologies are made, how to make them and where the resources flow.
Provincial governments, such as in Shenzhen, make sure that no barriers are too great for promising entrepreneurs: pushing regulators for a fast track to I.P.O., state financing and even jobs for their spouses. But setting limits to their involvement — such as caps on the equity stake they can take or the extent of financial subsidy — is aimed at reducing waste, corruption and overlaps.
Behind the mastery of critical technologies are markets, money and talent. Chinese markets are ready for a big innovation drive: Consumers are more sophisticated and demand higher quality. Only companies with better technologies can win.
Economic maturation means that low-hanging fruit has been plucked and financial resources will flow to more uncertain areas with higher returns. It is no coincidence that last year domestic revenues in China’s semiconductor industry surpassed $157 billion, with 19 of the 20 fastest-growing semiconductor companies globally being Chinese.
But talent and basic research remain China’s weak points. The China Semiconductor Industry Association estimated that there will be a gap of 300,000 experts in the industry by 2025. Last year, the industry that saw the largest surge in wages was semiconductors. Basic research, the bedrock of cutting-edge technologies, is notably lagging. And China is rapidly increasing the state budget for science.
And while the juguo system leverages public and private power unlike anything else in the world, it is usually more effective when costs are not a concern. It might be paramount for space programs and perhaps helpful for building large-scale and complex equipment — even at multiples of the normal cost.
That might save China from being totally incapacitated when severed from international technologies, but it is not so helpful in making advanced chips for end-consumer products where cost competitiveness and volume are vital. In these areas, China may be 10 years or more behind the United States. Techno-nationalism may speed up the rate of convergence, but it is unlikely to close the distance with a fast-moving train. Core technologies take time to develop — years of cumulative learning and knowledge.
China has a motto of “taking over on the bend,” which means surpassing in areas where others have no latent advantage. Germans excel in manufacturing traditional cars, but China has made a significant push in the development for electric vehicles, renewable energy and new materials. It is simultaneously betting on new directions for semiconductors. Advanced packaging techniques make chips with low-end processing nodes perform like high-end ones. Chip materials like silicon may be swapped for new-generation ones.
The Communist Party’s five-year plan revolves around strengthening manufacturing and quality. An American-style financialization and service-oriented economy is not what the Chinese leadership thinks can ensure national strength and security. China wants to become a bigger, smarter Germany, one with industrial capacity, leveraging artificial intelligence, next-generation communications and robotics.
China is now putting its juguo system to the test. It is not only a race for technological supremacy but also the ultimate competition between two radically different systems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
India Launches Lunar Mission With a Shot at Winning This Year’s Moon Race
Chandrayaan-3, a partial redo of a 2019 mission that ended in a crash, is the first of as many as six missions that could land on the moon in the coming months.
Video
A rocket lifted off from Sriharikota, India, carrying the Chandrayaan-3 robotic lander and rover toward the moon.CreditCredit...R. Satish Babu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
India is on its way back to the moon after a rocket lifted off from Sriharikota, a launch site off the country’s East Coast, on Friday afternoon local time.
The mission, Chandrayaan-3, is largely a do-over after the country’s first attempt at putting a robotic spacecraft on the surface of the moon nearly four years ago ended in a crash and a crater.
Chandrayaan-3 is taking place amid renewed interest in exploring the moon. The United States and China are both aiming to send astronauts there in the coming years, and a half dozen robotic missions from Russia, Japan and the United States could head there this year and next.
ImageA spacecraft leaves a flume of smoke and fire as it enters a mass of clouds.
In late August, the Launch Vehicle Mark III will attempt to land on the moon with its robotic lander and rover intact.Credit...R. Satish Babu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
If the robotic lander and rover aboard Chandrayaan-3 succeed in landing intact, that will be an accomplishment that no country other than China has pulled off this century, adding to the national pride India takes in its homegrown space program. A cadre of commercial space start-ups is also popping up in India.
Last month, India reached an agreement with the United States to send a joint mission to the International Space Station next year. The Indian Space Research Organization — India’s equivalent of NASA — is also developing its own spacecraft to take astronauts to orbit.
On Friday, at 2:35 p.m. local time (5:05 a.m. Eastern time), a rocket called Launch Vehicle Mark III lifted off from the Indian space base on an island north of the metropolis of Chennai.
As crowds waving Indian flags and colorful umbrellas cheered, the rocket rose into the sky. Sixteen minutes later, the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage, and a round of cheering and clapping erupted in the mission control center.
“It is indeed a moment of glory for India,” Jitendra Singh, the minister of state for India’s Ministry of Science of Technology, said in remarks after the launch, “and a moment of destiny for all of us over here at Sriharikota who are part of the history in the making.”
Over the coming weeks, the spacecraft will perform a series of engine firings to elongate its orbit before heading toward the moon. A landing attempt is scheduled to occur on Aug. 23 or 24, timed to coincide with sunrise at the landing site in the moon’s south polar region.
Chandrayaan means “moon craft” in Hindi. Chandrayaan-1, an orbiter, launched in 2008, and the mission lasted less than year. The Chandrayaan-2 mission lifted off successfully on July 22, 2019, and the spacecraft successfully entered orbit around the moon.
Image
The Chandrayaan-3 lander, which has four legs sticking out to the side and looks like it is wrapped in gold foil, sits in a white-walled building.
The Chandrayaan-3 lander’s design is largely the same as its predecessor’s, though changes include stronger landing legs, more propellant, additional solar cells and improved sensors.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Image
A white, ovular lander sits in the bed of an orange truck as it is taken out of a building painted with a pink triangle pattern.
The lander en route to be fitted onto the Launch Vehicle Mark III that will carry it to space.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
The landing attempt on Sept. 6, 2019, appeared to be going well until the lander was about 1.3 miles above the surface, when its trajectory diverged from the planned path.
The problems arose because one of the lander’s five engines had thrust that was slightly higher than expected, S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian space agency, said during a news conference a few days ago.
The spacecraft tried to correct, but the software specified limits on how quickly it could turn. And because of the higher thrust, the craft was still some distance from its destination even as it was approaching the ground.
“The craft is trying to reach there by increasing velocity to reach there, whereas it was not having enough time to,” Mr. Somanath said.
Months later, an amateur internet sleuth used imagery from a NASA spacecraft to locate the crash site, where the debris of the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover sit to this day.
The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter continues to travel around the moon, where its instruments are being used for scientific study. For that reason, the Chandrayaan-3 mission has a simpler propulsion module that will push a lander and a rover out of Earth’s orbit and then allow it to enter orbit around the moon.
Although the design of the lander is largely the same, changes include stronger landing legs, more propellant, additional solar cells to gather energy from the sun and improved sensors to measure the altitude.
The software was also changed so that the spacecraft could turn faster if needed, and the allowed landing area has been expanded.
If they get to the moon, the lander and the rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements of the area.
Image
A woman sits with one hand covering her mouth as she looks toward the camera.
People gathered at the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network command center in Bengaluru, waiting for news after communications with the Vikram lander were lost in 2019.Credit...Jagadeesh Nv/EPA, via Shutterstock
Image
A large satellite can be seen rising from a white building against the night sky, with the moon glowing above. The area is surrounded by lush trees and plants.
The ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network facility in Bengaluru.Credit...Manjunath Kiran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The mission is to conclude two weeks after the landing when the sun sets on the solar-powered lander and rover. If something comes up while Chandrayaan-3 is in orbit around the moon, the landing could be delayed a month until the next sunrise, in September, so that the spacecraft can spend a full two weeks operating on the surface.
While scientists will benefit from the lunar data collected by Chandrayaan-3, India, like other countries, is also exploring the solar system for reasons of national pride.
When the country’s Mangalyaan spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in 2014, children across India were asked to arrive at school by 6:45 a.m., well before the usual starting time, to watch the event on state television.
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, was at the mission control center in Bengaluru and hailed the Mars mission “as a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation.”
For the failed Chandrayaan-2 landing attempt, Mr. Modi was again at the space center, but his address afterward was more subdued. “We came very close, but we will need to cover more ground in the times to come,” he said to the scientists, engineers and staff.
Later in his address, Mr. Modi added: “As important as the final result is the journey and the effort. I can proudly say that the effort was worth it and so was the journey.” He was later seen embracing and consoling K. Sivan, then the chief of ISRO.
On Friday, the mood in the mission control room was jubilant after the spacecraft’s successful trip to orbit was confirmed. Optimism about Chandrayaan-3 also pervaded some Indian space enthusiasts who traveled to view the launch in person.
Neeraj Ladia, 35, the chief executive of Space Arcade, an astronomy equipment maker, was parked among around 100 cars viewing the launch five miles from the ISRO campus at Sriharikota.
“This time it will be a soft landing, definitely,” he said, referring to setting down on the moon in one piece. He added, “That is why the mood is very positive this time.”
Beyond Chandrayaan-3, the Indian space agency has other plans in motion. It is developing a spacecraft, Gaganyaan, for taking astronauts to orbit, but it has fallen behind its original goal of a crewed flight by 2022, and the mission is now expected no earlier than 2025.
India is increasing its collaboration with the United States for space missions. Earlier this year, the White House announced that NASA would provide training for Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston “with a goal of mounting a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024.”
Image
An engineer in a blue jumpsuit looks up into a large piece of equipment he is working on in a workshop.
The Indian Space Research Organization manufactured components to the Chandrayaan-3 mission at a Godrej Aerospace facility in Mumbai.Credit...Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
India has also signed the Artemis Accords, an American framework that sets out general guidelines for civil space exploration. The accords reinforce the United States’ view that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty allows countries to use resources like minerals and ice mined on asteroids, the moon, Mars and elsewhere in the solar system.
Another collaboration is the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, or NISAR, which will use advanced radar to precisely track changes in the Earth’s land and ice surfaces. The satellite is scheduled to launch from India in 2024. India also has ambitions for missions to study the sun and Venus.
Several moon missions could be right at India’s heels. Russia is planning to launch Luna 25 in August, the latest in a long line of robotic missions to the moon. But it has been a long time since the last one: Luna 24 took place in August 1976, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Also scheduled to head to the moon in August is the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, from the Japanese space agency JAXA.
Three NASA-financed missions are also on the way as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program — missions put together by private companies to take NASA instruments to the moon. Intuitive Machines of Houston has scheduled its first C.L.P.S. mission for no earlier than the third quarter of this year, heading for the south polar region.
Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh has its lander ready but is waiting on its ride — a new rocket developed by United Launch Alliance called Vulcan, which is not yet ready to fly.
A second Intuitive Machines mission is also penciled in for the fourth quarter of this year, but that seems likely to slide into next year.
There has been one landing attempt on the moon this year, in April, by the Japanese company Ispace. But that spacecraft crashed when its navigation system became confused.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/14/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Video
A rocket lifted off from Sriharikota, India, carrying the Chandrayaan-3 robotic lander and rover toward the moon.CreditCredit...R. Satish Babu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
India is on its way back to the moon after a rocket lifted off from Sriharikota, a launch site off the country’s East Coast, on Friday afternoon local time.
The mission, Chandrayaan-3, is largely a do-over after the country’s first attempt at putting a robotic spacecraft on the surface of the moon nearly four years ago ended in a crash and a crater.
Chandrayaan-3 is taking place amid renewed interest in exploring the moon. The United States and China are both aiming to send astronauts there in the coming years, and a half dozen robotic missions from Russia, Japan and the United States could head there this year and next.
ImageA spacecraft leaves a flume of smoke and fire as it enters a mass of clouds.
In late August, the Launch Vehicle Mark III will attempt to land on the moon with its robotic lander and rover intact.Credit...R. Satish Babu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
If the robotic lander and rover aboard Chandrayaan-3 succeed in landing intact, that will be an accomplishment that no country other than China has pulled off this century, adding to the national pride India takes in its homegrown space program. A cadre of commercial space start-ups is also popping up in India.
Last month, India reached an agreement with the United States to send a joint mission to the International Space Station next year. The Indian Space Research Organization — India’s equivalent of NASA — is also developing its own spacecraft to take astronauts to orbit.
On Friday, at 2:35 p.m. local time (5:05 a.m. Eastern time), a rocket called Launch Vehicle Mark III lifted off from the Indian space base on an island north of the metropolis of Chennai.
As crowds waving Indian flags and colorful umbrellas cheered, the rocket rose into the sky. Sixteen minutes later, the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage, and a round of cheering and clapping erupted in the mission control center.
“It is indeed a moment of glory for India,” Jitendra Singh, the minister of state for India’s Ministry of Science of Technology, said in remarks after the launch, “and a moment of destiny for all of us over here at Sriharikota who are part of the history in the making.”
Over the coming weeks, the spacecraft will perform a series of engine firings to elongate its orbit before heading toward the moon. A landing attempt is scheduled to occur on Aug. 23 or 24, timed to coincide with sunrise at the landing site in the moon’s south polar region.
Chandrayaan means “moon craft” in Hindi. Chandrayaan-1, an orbiter, launched in 2008, and the mission lasted less than year. The Chandrayaan-2 mission lifted off successfully on July 22, 2019, and the spacecraft successfully entered orbit around the moon.
Image
The Chandrayaan-3 lander, which has four legs sticking out to the side and looks like it is wrapped in gold foil, sits in a white-walled building.
The Chandrayaan-3 lander’s design is largely the same as its predecessor’s, though changes include stronger landing legs, more propellant, additional solar cells and improved sensors.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Image
A white, ovular lander sits in the bed of an orange truck as it is taken out of a building painted with a pink triangle pattern.
The lander en route to be fitted onto the Launch Vehicle Mark III that will carry it to space.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
The landing attempt on Sept. 6, 2019, appeared to be going well until the lander was about 1.3 miles above the surface, when its trajectory diverged from the planned path.
The problems arose because one of the lander’s five engines had thrust that was slightly higher than expected, S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian space agency, said during a news conference a few days ago.
The spacecraft tried to correct, but the software specified limits on how quickly it could turn. And because of the higher thrust, the craft was still some distance from its destination even as it was approaching the ground.
“The craft is trying to reach there by increasing velocity to reach there, whereas it was not having enough time to,” Mr. Somanath said.
Months later, an amateur internet sleuth used imagery from a NASA spacecraft to locate the crash site, where the debris of the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover sit to this day.
The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter continues to travel around the moon, where its instruments are being used for scientific study. For that reason, the Chandrayaan-3 mission has a simpler propulsion module that will push a lander and a rover out of Earth’s orbit and then allow it to enter orbit around the moon.
Although the design of the lander is largely the same, changes include stronger landing legs, more propellant, additional solar cells to gather energy from the sun and improved sensors to measure the altitude.
The software was also changed so that the spacecraft could turn faster if needed, and the allowed landing area has been expanded.
If they get to the moon, the lander and the rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements of the area.
Image
A woman sits with one hand covering her mouth as she looks toward the camera.
People gathered at the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network command center in Bengaluru, waiting for news after communications with the Vikram lander were lost in 2019.Credit...Jagadeesh Nv/EPA, via Shutterstock
Image
A large satellite can be seen rising from a white building against the night sky, with the moon glowing above. The area is surrounded by lush trees and plants.
The ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network facility in Bengaluru.Credit...Manjunath Kiran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The mission is to conclude two weeks after the landing when the sun sets on the solar-powered lander and rover. If something comes up while Chandrayaan-3 is in orbit around the moon, the landing could be delayed a month until the next sunrise, in September, so that the spacecraft can spend a full two weeks operating on the surface.
While scientists will benefit from the lunar data collected by Chandrayaan-3, India, like other countries, is also exploring the solar system for reasons of national pride.
When the country’s Mangalyaan spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in 2014, children across India were asked to arrive at school by 6:45 a.m., well before the usual starting time, to watch the event on state television.
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, was at the mission control center in Bengaluru and hailed the Mars mission “as a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation.”
For the failed Chandrayaan-2 landing attempt, Mr. Modi was again at the space center, but his address afterward was more subdued. “We came very close, but we will need to cover more ground in the times to come,” he said to the scientists, engineers and staff.
Later in his address, Mr. Modi added: “As important as the final result is the journey and the effort. I can proudly say that the effort was worth it and so was the journey.” He was later seen embracing and consoling K. Sivan, then the chief of ISRO.
On Friday, the mood in the mission control room was jubilant after the spacecraft’s successful trip to orbit was confirmed. Optimism about Chandrayaan-3 also pervaded some Indian space enthusiasts who traveled to view the launch in person.
Neeraj Ladia, 35, the chief executive of Space Arcade, an astronomy equipment maker, was parked among around 100 cars viewing the launch five miles from the ISRO campus at Sriharikota.
“This time it will be a soft landing, definitely,” he said, referring to setting down on the moon in one piece. He added, “That is why the mood is very positive this time.”
Beyond Chandrayaan-3, the Indian space agency has other plans in motion. It is developing a spacecraft, Gaganyaan, for taking astronauts to orbit, but it has fallen behind its original goal of a crewed flight by 2022, and the mission is now expected no earlier than 2025.
India is increasing its collaboration with the United States for space missions. Earlier this year, the White House announced that NASA would provide training for Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston “with a goal of mounting a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024.”
Image
An engineer in a blue jumpsuit looks up into a large piece of equipment he is working on in a workshop.
The Indian Space Research Organization manufactured components to the Chandrayaan-3 mission at a Godrej Aerospace facility in Mumbai.Credit...Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press
India has also signed the Artemis Accords, an American framework that sets out general guidelines for civil space exploration. The accords reinforce the United States’ view that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty allows countries to use resources like minerals and ice mined on asteroids, the moon, Mars and elsewhere in the solar system.
Another collaboration is the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, or NISAR, which will use advanced radar to precisely track changes in the Earth’s land and ice surfaces. The satellite is scheduled to launch from India in 2024. India also has ambitions for missions to study the sun and Venus.
Several moon missions could be right at India’s heels. Russia is planning to launch Luna 25 in August, the latest in a long line of robotic missions to the moon. But it has been a long time since the last one: Luna 24 took place in August 1976, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Also scheduled to head to the moon in August is the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, from the Japanese space agency JAXA.
Three NASA-financed missions are also on the way as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program — missions put together by private companies to take NASA instruments to the moon. Intuitive Machines of Houston has scheduled its first C.L.P.S. mission for no earlier than the third quarter of this year, heading for the south polar region.
Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh has its lander ready but is waiting on its ride — a new rocket developed by United Launch Alliance called Vulcan, which is not yet ready to fly.
A second Intuitive Machines mission is also penciled in for the fourth quarter of this year, but that seems likely to slide into next year.
There has been one landing attempt on the moon this year, in April, by the Japanese company Ispace. But that spacecraft crashed when its navigation system became confused.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/14/scie ... 778d3e6de3
India Is on the Brink
At a memorial in the Churachandpur district of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, portraits of victims who lost their lives during recent ethnic clashes, between the predominantly Hindu Meitei majority and the mainly Christian Kuki minority.Credit...Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Indian social media is a brutal place, a window on the everyday hatred and violence that has come to colonize the country in the nine years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government came to power. But the images from the northeastern state of Manipur that began circulating in July were shocking even by those low standards.
A video clip showed two women being sexually assaulted as they were paraded, naked, by a crowd of men who later gang-raped one of them, according to a police complaint. The horrific scene was part of an explosion of ethnic violence since May that has turned the small state into a war zone, killing more than 150 people and displacing tens of thousands.
The state has a long history of ethnic animosities that predate Mr. Modi’s rise. But the fuse for the current unrest in Manipur was lit by the politics of Hindu supremacy, xenophobia and religious polarization championed by his Bharatiya Janata Party.
India is a diverse nation, crisscrossed by religious, ethnic, caste, regional and political fault lines. Since Mr. Modi took office in 2014, his ruling party has torn those asunder with dangerous exclusionary politics intended to charge up the party’s base and advance its goal of remaking India’s secular republic into a majoritarian Hindu state. The repugnant nature of this brand of politics has been clear for some time, but the situation in Manipur shows what’s ahead for India: The world’s most populous country is slowly degenerating into a conflict zone of sectarian violence.
Image
A crowd of women hold protest signs, white wooden crosses and tall white candles during a nighttime protest.
Christian activists take part in a candlelight vigil in protest over sexual violence against women and for the ongoing ethnic violence in India’s northeastern state of Manipur, during a demonstration in Amritsar, India.Credit...Narinder Nanu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Under Mr. Modi’s government, the state monopoly on violence is being surrendered to extremists and vigilantes. Those targeted by the kind of mob violence that we are seeing in India may conclude that equal rights are no longer guaranteed, that political differences can no longer be peacefully reconciled or fairly mediated and that violence is the only way for them to resist.
The targeting of minorities — particularly Muslims — by right-wing Hindu extremists is now a way of life in many states. Vigilante mobs, who often assemble provocatively in front of mosques, regularly assault Muslims as understaffed and underequipped police fail to intervene. Lynchings and open calls for genocide are common. India now ranks among the top 10 countries at the highest risk of mass killings, according to Early Warning Project, which assesses such risks around the world.
In Manipur, Christians are bearing the brunt as the state’s B.J.P. government stokes the insecurities of the majority ethnic Meitei, who are predominantly Hindu. State leaders have branded the Kuki tribes who populate the hill districts, and who are mostly Christian, as infiltrators from Myanmar, have blamed them for poppy cultivation intended for the drug trade and evicted some of them from their forest habitats. The specific trigger for the current violence was a court ruling in the state in favor of granting the Meitei affirmative action provisions and other benefits that have long been enjoyed by the Kuki and other tribes, which sparked a protest by tribal communities opposed to the ruling. The Manipur government this year also launched a citizenship verification drive that infringes on the privacy of Kuki. A similar drive in neighboring Assam state targeting Muslims has already reportedly disenfranchised nearly two million people.
Emboldened by the state government’s rhetoric, Meitei militias in Manipur have gone on a rampage of raping, pillaging, looting police armories and burning villages. More than 250 churches have been burned down. Those were Meitei men in the horrific 26-second video, sexually assaulting two Kuki women. (The video was shot in early May but only came to light in July, possibly delayed by a government internet ban imposed in the state in response to the violence). Many similar attacks on Kuki women have been reported. Mr. Modi has called the rape incident “shameful” but has otherwise said little about the chaos in Manipur
The violent impact of his party’s polarizing politics is acutely felt in India’s heartland, too. The area near a tech and finance hub on the outskirts of New Delhi was rocked by violence last week as Hindu supremacists staging a religious procession clashed with Muslims. Mosques were attacked, an imam was killed, businesses were burned and looted and hundreds of Muslims have fled.
In tandem with the B.J.P.’s demonizing of India’s nearly 200 million Muslims, television, cinema and social media are deployed to radicalize the Hindu majority, pumping out a steady stream of Islamophobia and vile dog whistles. Extremist groups, at least one of which appears to have received the public support of the prime minister, run amok. Muslims have been arrested for praying, had their livelihoods and businesses destroyed and their homes razed. Bulldozers, used to demolish homes, have become an anti-Muslim symbol, proudly paraded by B.J.P. supporters at political rallies.
As John Keane and I argue in our book “To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism,” it’s a signature tactic of modern-day despots: tightening their grip on power by redefining who belongs to the polity, and ostracizing others. In the ultimate subversion of democracy, the government chooses the people, rather than the people choosing the government.
India is already a complex federation of regional identities, many of which consider themselves distinct from Hindi-speaking north India, the power base of Mr. Modi’s party. This federal structure is held together by delicate bonds of social and political accommodation. But they are fraying fast under Mr. Modi, who has no appetite for either, shrinking the space for nonviolent political contestation. Some regional political parties see the Bharatiya Janata Party’s centralizing and homogenizing Hindu-first thrust as a cultural imposition from outside and are assailing it with the same divisive us-versus-them vocabulary.
Due to its giant and growing population, India will only become more important to the rest of the world, both geopolitically and due to the promise of its massive market. And so Western leaders like President Biden — who staged a lavish welcome for Mr. Modi on a state visit to Washington in June — engage with the prime minister, downplaying his government’s assaults on liberalism.
But a political strategy of conspicuous humiliation and subjugation of ethnic and religious minorities that make up around one-fifth of the population is dangerously deluded. India can either be a conflict zone or an economic powerhouse — not both. It is increasingly clear which of those two destinies awaits India.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
‘India Is on the Moon’: Lander’s Success Moves Nation to Next Space Chapter
The Chandrayaan-3 mission makes India the first country to reach the lunar south polar region in one piece and adds to the achievements of the country’s homegrown space program.
Schoolchildren watching a live feed of the Chandrayaan-3 mission to the moon celebrated its success in Guwahati, India, on Wednesday.Credit...Anupam Nath/Associated Press
Two visitors from India — a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan — landed in the southern polar region of the moon on Wednesday. The two robots, from a mission named Chandrayaan-3, make India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece — and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon.
“We have achieved soft landing on the moon,” S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, said after a roar ripped through the ISRO compound just past 6 p.m. local time. “India is on the moon.”
The Indian public already takes great pride in the accomplishments of the nation’s space program, which has orbited the moon and Mars and routinely launches satellites above the Earth with far fewer financial resources than other space-faring nations.
But the achievement of Chandrayaan-3 may be even sweeter, as it comes at a particularly important moment in the South Asian giant’s diplomatic push as an ambitious power on the rise.
Video
TRANSCRIPT
0:00/0:56
India Successfully Lands Spacecraft on Moon’s Surface
The control room at the Indian Space Research Organization erupted in cheers when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the southern polar region of the moon.
The altitude is being brought down from 800 meters. And we are nearing and approaching the lunar surface. He hung up a painting for the exact day. He the. People are applauding. From the Secretary department of space and chairman isro Somnath. I’m confident. That all countries in the world. Including those from the Global South. Are capable of achieving such feats. We can all aspire. Part of the moon and beyond.
India Successfully Lands Spacecraft on Moon’s Surface
0:57
The control room at the Indian Space Research Organization erupted in cheers when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the southern polar region of the moon.CreditCredit...Indian Space Research Organization
Indian officials have been advocating in favor of a multipolar world order in which New Delhi is seen as indispensable to global solutions. In space exploration, as in many other fields, the message of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been clear: The world will be a fairer place if India takes on a leadership role, even as the world’s most populous nation works to meet its people’s basic needs.
That assertiveness on the world stage is a central campaign message for Mr. Modi, who is up for re-election to a third term early next year. He has frequently fused his image with that of India’s rise as an economic, diplomatic and technological power.
Mr. Modi has been physically present at mission control for other recent moments in India’s space history, including during a successful orbit of Mars in 2014 and a failed moon landing in 2019 where he was seen consoling the scientists and hugging the chief of ISRO, who was weeping.
But the Chandrayaan-3 landing coincided with his trip to South Africa for a meeting of the group of nations known as BRICS. Mr. Modi’s face beamed into the control room in Bengaluru during the landing’s final minutes, where he was split-screen with the animation of the lander.
“Chandrayaan-3’s triumph mirrors the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians,” Mr. Modi said when the landing was complete, declaring the event as “the moment for new, developing India.”
Image
An image of the surface taken from the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, whose solar panels are visible in the left of the frame. The ISRO logo is in the top right corner.
A view of the moon as seen by the Chandrayaan-3 lander on Aug. 5.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization, via Reuters
Image
Students in chairs watch a large screen where an animation of the Chandrayaan-3 moon landing is displayed.
Watching the live feed from Gujarat Science City in Ahmedabad, India.Credit...Amit Dave/Reuters
In a country with a deep tradition of science, the excitement and anticipation around the landing provided a rare moment of unity in what has otherwise been fraught times of sectarian tension stoked by divisive policies of Mr. Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party.
Prayers were offered for the mission’s success at Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras and Muslim mosques. Schools held special ceremonies and organized live viewings of the moon landing, with an official YouTube video of the event racking up tens of millions of views. The police band in the city of Mumbai, India’s commercial and entertainment hub, sent a “special musical tribute” to the scientists, performing a popular patriotic song.
“There is full faith,” the song, in Hindi, says. “We will succeed.”
The Indian mission launched in July, taking a slow, fuel-conscious route toward the moon. But Chandrayaan-3 out-endured its Russian counterpart, Luna-25, which launched 12 days ago. Luna-25 was scheduled to land on the moon on Monday in the same general vicinity as the Indian craft but crashed on Saturday following an engine malfunction.
That India managed to outdo Russia, which as the Soviet Union put the first satellite, man and woman in space, speaks to the diverging fortunes of the two nations’ space programs.
Much of India’s foreign policy in recent decades has been shaped by a delicate balancing act between Washington and Moscow, but the country is grappling more with an increasingly aggressive China at its borders. The two countries’ militaries have been stuck in a standoff in the Himalayas for three years now, and the vulnerability to a threat from China is a major driving factor in India’s calculations.
A shared frustration with Beijing has only increased U.S. and Indian cooperation, including in space, where China is establishing itself in direct competition with the United States.
And with the success of Chandrayaan-3, Mr. Modi can reap benefits in leaning into India’s scientific prowess to “more confidently assert Indian national interest on the world stage,” said Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor of national security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The control room in Bengaluru became a joyous scene among the engineers, scientists and technicians of the Indian Space Research Organization.
Speaking after the landing, members of the ISRO leadership who managed Chandrayaan-3 made clear that the failure of their last moon landing attempt, in 2019, was a major driving force behind their work.
“From the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after Chandaryaan-2 experience, it has been breathe in, breathe out Chandrayaan-3 for our team,” said Kalpana Kalahasti, the mission’s associate project director.
Four views of the lunar surface taken by Chandrayaan-3’s lunar hazard detection and avoidance cameras on Aug. 19.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Chandrayaan-3 has been orbiting the moon since early August. On Sunday, an engine burn pushed the lander into an elliptical orbit that passed within 15 miles of the surface. On Wednesday, as the spacecraft approached the low point of the orbit, moving at more than 3,700 miles per hour, a preprogrammed sequence of maneuvers commenced.
The craft’s four engines fired again at the start of what ISRO called the “rough braking” portion of the descent, its speed of fall accelerating. After 11.5 minutes, the lander was just over 4.5 miles above the surface and started rotating from a horizontal to a vertical position while continuing its descent.
The spacecraft stopped to hover about 150 yards above the surface for a few seconds, then resumed its downward journey until it settled gently on the surface, about 370 miles from the south pole. The landing sequence took about 19 minutes.
Chandrayaan-3 is a scientific mission, timed for a two-week period when the sun will shine on the landing site and provide energy for the solar-powered lander and rover. The lander and rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements.
India and ISRO have many other plans afoot.
Although an Indian astronaut flew to orbit on a Soviet spacecraft in 1984, the country has never sent people to space on its own. India is preparing its first astronaut mission, called Gaganyaan. But the project, which aims to send three Indian astronauts to space on the country’s own spacecraft, has faced delays, and ISRO has not announced a date.
The country is also working on launching a solar observatory called Aditya-L1 in early September, and later, an Earth observation satellite built jointly with NASA. India is also planning a follow-up to its recently concluded Mars orbiter mission.
Image
Acoustic testing of the stacked Chandrayaan-3 lander and propulsion module.
Acoustic testing of the stacked Chandrayaan-3 lander and propulsion module.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Image
The Aditya-L1, the first space-based Indian observatory to study the sun.
The Aditya-L1, the first space-based Indian observatory to study the sun.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Mr. Somanath has described the current moment as an inflection point, with the country opening its space efforts to private investors after half a century of state monopoly that made advances but at “a shoestring budget mode of working.”
“These are very cost-effective missions,” Mr. Somanath said after the landing. “No one in the world can do it like we do.”
When pressed by reporters about the cost of Chandrayaan-3, Mr. Somanath deflected with laughter: “I won’t disclose such secrets, we don’t want everyone else to become so cost-effective!”
While ISRO will continue exploring the solar system, the accomplishments of India’s private sector may soon garner as much attention. A younger generation of space engineers, inspired by SpaceX, have started going into business on their own. While ISRO’s budget in the past fiscal year was less than $1.5 billion, the size of India’s private space economy is already at least $6 billion and is expected to triple as soon as 2025.
And the pace of change is quickening. Mr. Modi’s government wants India to harness the private sector’s entrepreneurial energy to put more satellites and investment into space — and faster.
Up on the moon Vikram and Pragyan were set to get to work, with the rover possibly rolling onto the lunar surface in the coming hours or sometime on Thursday according to Mr. Somanath. The landing site, on a plateau south of the Manzinus crater and to the west of the Boguslawsky crater, is at about the same latitude as the edge of Antarctica on Earth.
To date, spacecraft have successfully landed on the moon closer to the equator. The polar regions are intriguing because there is frozen water at the bottom of permanently shadowed craters. If such water can be found in sufficient quantities and extracted, astronauts could use it for future space exploration.
The lunar south pole is the intended destination for astronauts who could visit the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, and also for upcoming Chinese and Russian missions. In the nearer term, as many as three robotic missions, one from Japan and two from private U.S. companies working with NASA, could head to the moon later this year.
But in Bengaluru after the launch, Mr. Somanath hinted that India had its eyes on worlds beyond the moon.
“It is very difficult for any nation to achieve. But we have done so with just two attempts,” he said. “It gives confidence to land on Mars and maybe Venus and other planets, maybe asteroids.”
Image
People wave flags and point cameras in a field while looking toward a partly cloudy sky and watching a pillar of smoke beneath the bright rocket exhaust of the launch of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft lifting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, last month.Credit...R. Satish Babu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/scie ... nding.html
Schoolchildren watching a live feed of the Chandrayaan-3 mission to the moon celebrated its success in Guwahati, India, on Wednesday.Credit...Anupam Nath/Associated Press
Two visitors from India — a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan — landed in the southern polar region of the moon on Wednesday. The two robots, from a mission named Chandrayaan-3, make India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece — and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon.
“We have achieved soft landing on the moon,” S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, said after a roar ripped through the ISRO compound just past 6 p.m. local time. “India is on the moon.”
The Indian public already takes great pride in the accomplishments of the nation’s space program, which has orbited the moon and Mars and routinely launches satellites above the Earth with far fewer financial resources than other space-faring nations.
But the achievement of Chandrayaan-3 may be even sweeter, as it comes at a particularly important moment in the South Asian giant’s diplomatic push as an ambitious power on the rise.
Video
TRANSCRIPT
0:00/0:56
India Successfully Lands Spacecraft on Moon’s Surface
The control room at the Indian Space Research Organization erupted in cheers when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the southern polar region of the moon.
The altitude is being brought down from 800 meters. And we are nearing and approaching the lunar surface. He hung up a painting for the exact day. He the. People are applauding. From the Secretary department of space and chairman isro Somnath. I’m confident. That all countries in the world. Including those from the Global South. Are capable of achieving such feats. We can all aspire. Part of the moon and beyond.
India Successfully Lands Spacecraft on Moon’s Surface
0:57
The control room at the Indian Space Research Organization erupted in cheers when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the southern polar region of the moon.CreditCredit...Indian Space Research Organization
Indian officials have been advocating in favor of a multipolar world order in which New Delhi is seen as indispensable to global solutions. In space exploration, as in many other fields, the message of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been clear: The world will be a fairer place if India takes on a leadership role, even as the world’s most populous nation works to meet its people’s basic needs.
That assertiveness on the world stage is a central campaign message for Mr. Modi, who is up for re-election to a third term early next year. He has frequently fused his image with that of India’s rise as an economic, diplomatic and technological power.
Mr. Modi has been physically present at mission control for other recent moments in India’s space history, including during a successful orbit of Mars in 2014 and a failed moon landing in 2019 where he was seen consoling the scientists and hugging the chief of ISRO, who was weeping.
But the Chandrayaan-3 landing coincided with his trip to South Africa for a meeting of the group of nations known as BRICS. Mr. Modi’s face beamed into the control room in Bengaluru during the landing’s final minutes, where he was split-screen with the animation of the lander.
“Chandrayaan-3’s triumph mirrors the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians,” Mr. Modi said when the landing was complete, declaring the event as “the moment for new, developing India.”
Image
An image of the surface taken from the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, whose solar panels are visible in the left of the frame. The ISRO logo is in the top right corner.
A view of the moon as seen by the Chandrayaan-3 lander on Aug. 5.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization, via Reuters
Image
Students in chairs watch a large screen where an animation of the Chandrayaan-3 moon landing is displayed.
Watching the live feed from Gujarat Science City in Ahmedabad, India.Credit...Amit Dave/Reuters
In a country with a deep tradition of science, the excitement and anticipation around the landing provided a rare moment of unity in what has otherwise been fraught times of sectarian tension stoked by divisive policies of Mr. Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party.
Prayers were offered for the mission’s success at Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras and Muslim mosques. Schools held special ceremonies and organized live viewings of the moon landing, with an official YouTube video of the event racking up tens of millions of views. The police band in the city of Mumbai, India’s commercial and entertainment hub, sent a “special musical tribute” to the scientists, performing a popular patriotic song.
“There is full faith,” the song, in Hindi, says. “We will succeed.”
The Indian mission launched in July, taking a slow, fuel-conscious route toward the moon. But Chandrayaan-3 out-endured its Russian counterpart, Luna-25, which launched 12 days ago. Luna-25 was scheduled to land on the moon on Monday in the same general vicinity as the Indian craft but crashed on Saturday following an engine malfunction.
That India managed to outdo Russia, which as the Soviet Union put the first satellite, man and woman in space, speaks to the diverging fortunes of the two nations’ space programs.
Much of India’s foreign policy in recent decades has been shaped by a delicate balancing act between Washington and Moscow, but the country is grappling more with an increasingly aggressive China at its borders. The two countries’ militaries have been stuck in a standoff in the Himalayas for three years now, and the vulnerability to a threat from China is a major driving factor in India’s calculations.
A shared frustration with Beijing has only increased U.S. and Indian cooperation, including in space, where China is establishing itself in direct competition with the United States.
And with the success of Chandrayaan-3, Mr. Modi can reap benefits in leaning into India’s scientific prowess to “more confidently assert Indian national interest on the world stage,” said Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor of national security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The control room in Bengaluru became a joyous scene among the engineers, scientists and technicians of the Indian Space Research Organization.
Speaking after the landing, members of the ISRO leadership who managed Chandrayaan-3 made clear that the failure of their last moon landing attempt, in 2019, was a major driving force behind their work.
“From the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after Chandaryaan-2 experience, it has been breathe in, breathe out Chandrayaan-3 for our team,” said Kalpana Kalahasti, the mission’s associate project director.
Four views of the lunar surface taken by Chandrayaan-3’s lunar hazard detection and avoidance cameras on Aug. 19.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Chandrayaan-3 has been orbiting the moon since early August. On Sunday, an engine burn pushed the lander into an elliptical orbit that passed within 15 miles of the surface. On Wednesday, as the spacecraft approached the low point of the orbit, moving at more than 3,700 miles per hour, a preprogrammed sequence of maneuvers commenced.
The craft’s four engines fired again at the start of what ISRO called the “rough braking” portion of the descent, its speed of fall accelerating. After 11.5 minutes, the lander was just over 4.5 miles above the surface and started rotating from a horizontal to a vertical position while continuing its descent.
The spacecraft stopped to hover about 150 yards above the surface for a few seconds, then resumed its downward journey until it settled gently on the surface, about 370 miles from the south pole. The landing sequence took about 19 minutes.
Chandrayaan-3 is a scientific mission, timed for a two-week period when the sun will shine on the landing site and provide energy for the solar-powered lander and rover. The lander and rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements.
India and ISRO have many other plans afoot.
Although an Indian astronaut flew to orbit on a Soviet spacecraft in 1984, the country has never sent people to space on its own. India is preparing its first astronaut mission, called Gaganyaan. But the project, which aims to send three Indian astronauts to space on the country’s own spacecraft, has faced delays, and ISRO has not announced a date.
The country is also working on launching a solar observatory called Aditya-L1 in early September, and later, an Earth observation satellite built jointly with NASA. India is also planning a follow-up to its recently concluded Mars orbiter mission.
Image
Acoustic testing of the stacked Chandrayaan-3 lander and propulsion module.
Acoustic testing of the stacked Chandrayaan-3 lander and propulsion module.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Image
The Aditya-L1, the first space-based Indian observatory to study the sun.
The Aditya-L1, the first space-based Indian observatory to study the sun.Credit...Indian Space Research Organization
Mr. Somanath has described the current moment as an inflection point, with the country opening its space efforts to private investors after half a century of state monopoly that made advances but at “a shoestring budget mode of working.”
“These are very cost-effective missions,” Mr. Somanath said after the landing. “No one in the world can do it like we do.”
When pressed by reporters about the cost of Chandrayaan-3, Mr. Somanath deflected with laughter: “I won’t disclose such secrets, we don’t want everyone else to become so cost-effective!”
While ISRO will continue exploring the solar system, the accomplishments of India’s private sector may soon garner as much attention. A younger generation of space engineers, inspired by SpaceX, have started going into business on their own. While ISRO’s budget in the past fiscal year was less than $1.5 billion, the size of India’s private space economy is already at least $6 billion and is expected to triple as soon as 2025.
And the pace of change is quickening. Mr. Modi’s government wants India to harness the private sector’s entrepreneurial energy to put more satellites and investment into space — and faster.
Up on the moon Vikram and Pragyan were set to get to work, with the rover possibly rolling onto the lunar surface in the coming hours or sometime on Thursday according to Mr. Somanath. The landing site, on a plateau south of the Manzinus crater and to the west of the Boguslawsky crater, is at about the same latitude as the edge of Antarctica on Earth.
To date, spacecraft have successfully landed on the moon closer to the equator. The polar regions are intriguing because there is frozen water at the bottom of permanently shadowed craters. If such water can be found in sufficient quantities and extracted, astronauts could use it for future space exploration.
The lunar south pole is the intended destination for astronauts who could visit the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, and also for upcoming Chinese and Russian missions. In the nearer term, as many as three robotic missions, one from Japan and two from private U.S. companies working with NASA, could head to the moon later this year.
But in Bengaluru after the launch, Mr. Somanath hinted that India had its eyes on worlds beyond the moon.
“It is very difficult for any nation to achieve. But we have done so with just two attempts,” he said. “It gives confidence to land on Mars and maybe Venus and other planets, maybe asteroids.”
Image
People wave flags and point cameras in a field while looking toward a partly cloudy sky and watching a pillar of smoke beneath the bright rocket exhaust of the launch of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft lifting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, last month.Credit...R. Satish Babu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/scie ... nding.html
Japan Joins the New Moon Race, and Launches an X-Ray Telescope, Too
The telescope will help astronomers study some of the most energetic places in the cosmos, while the lunar mission will aid the development of pinpoint moon landing technologies.
On Thursday morning in Japan, a bus-size telescope with X-Ray vision soared into space.
It wasn’t alone. Along for the ride was a robotic moon lander about the size of a small food truck. The two missions — XRISM and SLIM — would soon part ways, one headed off to spy on some of the hottest spots in our universe, the other to help Japan’s space agency, JAXA, test technologies that are to be used in larger-scale lunar landings in the future.
The liftoff from the shores of Tanegashima, an island in the southern part of the Japanese archipelago, was picturesque, with the Japanese H-IIA rocket soaring over the remote launch site and disappearing into the blue skies that were punctuated by a few clouds. About 47 minutes after the flight began, launch officials were shown in a live video stream to be celebrating in the mission control room as the XRISM and SLIM spacecrafts headed toward their diverging cosmic destinations.
🩻
The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission — XRISM for short (and pronounced like “chrism”) — is the launch’s primary passenger. From an orbit 350 miles above Earth, XRISM will study exotic environments that emit X-Ray radiation, including the accretion of material swirling around black holes, the blistering plasma permeating galaxy clusters, and the remnants of exploding massive stars.
Data from the telescope will shed light on the motion and chemistry of these cosmic locales with a technique called spectroscopy, which relies on changes in the brightness of sources at different wavelengths to extract information about their composition. The technique gives scientists a view into some of the universe’s highest energy phenomena and will add to astronomers’ comprehensive, multiwavelength picture of the universe.
XRISM’s spectroscopy will “reveal energy flows among the celestial objects in different scales” with unprecedented resolution, Makoto Tashiro, the telescope’s principal investigator and an astrophysicist at JAXA, wrote in an email.
The Japanese space agency is leading the mission in collaboration with NASA. The European Space Agency contributed to the telescope’s construction, which means that astronomers from Europe will be allotted a portion of the telescope’s observing time.
XRISM is a rebuild of the Hitomi mission, a JAXA spacecraft that launched in 2016. The Hitomi telescope spun out of control weeks into its mission, and Japan lost contact with the spacecraft.
“It was a devastating loss,” said Brian J. Williams, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who was on the Hitomi team and is now a XRISM project scientist. The little data collected from Hitomi was a tantalizing taste of what a mission like it could offer.
“We realized that we really had to go and build this mission again, because this is the future of X-ray astronomy,” Dr. Williams said.
ImageA computer image of a foil-covered satellite sporting a solar panel against a starry background.
An artist’s concept of the bus-sized XRISM space telescope.Credit...JAXA
Unlike other wavelengths of light, cosmic X-rays can only be detected from above Earth’s atmosphere, which shields us from the harmful radiation. XRISM will join a slew of other X-ray telescopes already in orbit, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which launched in 1999, and NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, which joined the party in 2021.
What distinguishes XRISM from those missions is a tool called Resolve, which must be cooled to just a fraction above absolute zero so that the instrument can measure tiny changes in temperature when X-rays hit its surface. The mission team expects Resolve’s spectroscopic data to be 30 times as sharp as the resolution of Chandra’s instruments.
Lia Corrales, an astronomer at the University of Michigan who was selected as a participating scientist on the mission, sees XRISM as “a pioneer vehicle” that represents “the next step in X-ray observations.” With its state-of-the-art spectroscopy, Dr. Corrales will analyze the composition of interstellar dust to glean insight into the chemical evolution of our universe.
Jan-Uwe Ness, an astronomer at the European Space Agency who will be managing the proposal selection process for Europe’s allotted observing time, said that the superior quality of data collected by XRISM’s spectroscopy may feel almost like visiting these extreme environments themselves.
“I’m looking forward to the spectral revolution,” he said, adding that it will set the stage for even more ambitious X-ray telescopes in the future.
XRISM also carries a second instrument named Xtend that will operate simultaneously with Resolve. While Resolve zooms in, Xtend will zoom out, providing scientists with complementary views of the same X-ray sources over a larger area. According to Dr. Williams, Xtend is less powerful than the imager on the older Chandra telescope, which has generated some of the most striking views of the X-ray universe to date. But, Xtend will photograph the cosmos with a resolution comparable to the way our eyes might perceive it if we were to have X-ray vision.
Once XRISM arrives at low-Earth orbit, researchers will spend the next few months turning the instruments on and running tests of their performance. Science operations will begin in January, but initial studies from the data might not appear for a year or more, Dr. Tashiro said. Ahead of any discoveries, he’s just excited to see the instruments up and running, adding that “we will surely see the new world of X-ray astronomy once they work.”
More than anything, Dr. Williams is looking forward to the “unknown unknowns” that XRISM might unearth. “Every time we launch a new capability, we discover something new about the universe,” he said. “What will it be for this one? I don’t know, but I’m excited to find out.”
Image
A digitally rendered illustration of SLIM, a lander that is gold with solar panels on its top side, on the rocky lunar surface.
An artist’s concept of SLIM on the surface of the moon.Credit...JAXA
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, is the next robotic spacecraft headed for the moon but may not be the next one to land.
SLIM will be taking a long, roundabout journey of at least four months that requires less propellant. The lander will take several months to reach lunar orbit, then spend a month circling the moon before attempting to set down on the surface near Shioli crater on the lunar near side.
That means two American spacecraft, by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines of Houston, which might launch later this year and will take more direct trajectories to the moon, could beat SLIM to the surface.
Although SLIM is carrying a camera that can identify the composition of rocks around the landing site, the primary objectives of the mission are not scientific. Rather, it is to demonstrate a pinpoint navigation system, aiming to set down within about the length of a football field of the targeted site.
Currently, lunar landers can try to set down within several miles of a selected landing site. For example, the landing zone for India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which last month became the first to successfully set down in the moon’s south polar region, was seven miles wide and 34 miles long.
The vision-based systems on many landing craft are limited because space-hardened computer chips possess only about one one-hundredth of the processing power of top-of-the-line chips used on Earth, JAXA said in its press kit.
For SLIM, JAXA developed image-processing algorithms that can run quickly on the slower space chips. As SLIM nears its landing, a camera will help guide the spacecraft’s descent to the lunar surface; radar and a laser will measure the spacecraft’s altitude and downward velocity.
Because of the risks of a crash that come with current systems, lunar landers are typically directed to flatter, less interesting terrain. A more precise navigation system would enable future spacecraft to land closer to rugged terrain that is of scientific interest, like the craters that contain frozen water near the moon’s south pole.
At launch, SLIM weighs more than 1,500 pounds; more than two-thirds of the weight is propellant. By contrast, the Indian lunar lander and its small rover weighed about 3,800 pounds, and the accompanying propulsion module that pushed the two out of Earth’s orbit toward the moon added 4,700 pounds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/scie ... 778d3e6de3
On Thursday morning in Japan, a bus-size telescope with X-Ray vision soared into space.
It wasn’t alone. Along for the ride was a robotic moon lander about the size of a small food truck. The two missions — XRISM and SLIM — would soon part ways, one headed off to spy on some of the hottest spots in our universe, the other to help Japan’s space agency, JAXA, test technologies that are to be used in larger-scale lunar landings in the future.
The liftoff from the shores of Tanegashima, an island in the southern part of the Japanese archipelago, was picturesque, with the Japanese H-IIA rocket soaring over the remote launch site and disappearing into the blue skies that were punctuated by a few clouds. About 47 minutes after the flight began, launch officials were shown in a live video stream to be celebrating in the mission control room as the XRISM and SLIM spacecrafts headed toward their diverging cosmic destinations.
🩻
The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission — XRISM for short (and pronounced like “chrism”) — is the launch’s primary passenger. From an orbit 350 miles above Earth, XRISM will study exotic environments that emit X-Ray radiation, including the accretion of material swirling around black holes, the blistering plasma permeating galaxy clusters, and the remnants of exploding massive stars.
Data from the telescope will shed light on the motion and chemistry of these cosmic locales with a technique called spectroscopy, which relies on changes in the brightness of sources at different wavelengths to extract information about their composition. The technique gives scientists a view into some of the universe’s highest energy phenomena and will add to astronomers’ comprehensive, multiwavelength picture of the universe.
XRISM’s spectroscopy will “reveal energy flows among the celestial objects in different scales” with unprecedented resolution, Makoto Tashiro, the telescope’s principal investigator and an astrophysicist at JAXA, wrote in an email.
The Japanese space agency is leading the mission in collaboration with NASA. The European Space Agency contributed to the telescope’s construction, which means that astronomers from Europe will be allotted a portion of the telescope’s observing time.
XRISM is a rebuild of the Hitomi mission, a JAXA spacecraft that launched in 2016. The Hitomi telescope spun out of control weeks into its mission, and Japan lost contact with the spacecraft.
“It was a devastating loss,” said Brian J. Williams, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who was on the Hitomi team and is now a XRISM project scientist. The little data collected from Hitomi was a tantalizing taste of what a mission like it could offer.
“We realized that we really had to go and build this mission again, because this is the future of X-ray astronomy,” Dr. Williams said.
ImageA computer image of a foil-covered satellite sporting a solar panel against a starry background.
An artist’s concept of the bus-sized XRISM space telescope.Credit...JAXA
Unlike other wavelengths of light, cosmic X-rays can only be detected from above Earth’s atmosphere, which shields us from the harmful radiation. XRISM will join a slew of other X-ray telescopes already in orbit, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which launched in 1999, and NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, which joined the party in 2021.
What distinguishes XRISM from those missions is a tool called Resolve, which must be cooled to just a fraction above absolute zero so that the instrument can measure tiny changes in temperature when X-rays hit its surface. The mission team expects Resolve’s spectroscopic data to be 30 times as sharp as the resolution of Chandra’s instruments.
Lia Corrales, an astronomer at the University of Michigan who was selected as a participating scientist on the mission, sees XRISM as “a pioneer vehicle” that represents “the next step in X-ray observations.” With its state-of-the-art spectroscopy, Dr. Corrales will analyze the composition of interstellar dust to glean insight into the chemical evolution of our universe.
Jan-Uwe Ness, an astronomer at the European Space Agency who will be managing the proposal selection process for Europe’s allotted observing time, said that the superior quality of data collected by XRISM’s spectroscopy may feel almost like visiting these extreme environments themselves.
“I’m looking forward to the spectral revolution,” he said, adding that it will set the stage for even more ambitious X-ray telescopes in the future.
XRISM also carries a second instrument named Xtend that will operate simultaneously with Resolve. While Resolve zooms in, Xtend will zoom out, providing scientists with complementary views of the same X-ray sources over a larger area. According to Dr. Williams, Xtend is less powerful than the imager on the older Chandra telescope, which has generated some of the most striking views of the X-ray universe to date. But, Xtend will photograph the cosmos with a resolution comparable to the way our eyes might perceive it if we were to have X-ray vision.
Once XRISM arrives at low-Earth orbit, researchers will spend the next few months turning the instruments on and running tests of their performance. Science operations will begin in January, but initial studies from the data might not appear for a year or more, Dr. Tashiro said. Ahead of any discoveries, he’s just excited to see the instruments up and running, adding that “we will surely see the new world of X-ray astronomy once they work.”
More than anything, Dr. Williams is looking forward to the “unknown unknowns” that XRISM might unearth. “Every time we launch a new capability, we discover something new about the universe,” he said. “What will it be for this one? I don’t know, but I’m excited to find out.”
Image
A digitally rendered illustration of SLIM, a lander that is gold with solar panels on its top side, on the rocky lunar surface.
An artist’s concept of SLIM on the surface of the moon.Credit...JAXA
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, is the next robotic spacecraft headed for the moon but may not be the next one to land.
SLIM will be taking a long, roundabout journey of at least four months that requires less propellant. The lander will take several months to reach lunar orbit, then spend a month circling the moon before attempting to set down on the surface near Shioli crater on the lunar near side.
That means two American spacecraft, by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines of Houston, which might launch later this year and will take more direct trajectories to the moon, could beat SLIM to the surface.
Although SLIM is carrying a camera that can identify the composition of rocks around the landing site, the primary objectives of the mission are not scientific. Rather, it is to demonstrate a pinpoint navigation system, aiming to set down within about the length of a football field of the targeted site.
Currently, lunar landers can try to set down within several miles of a selected landing site. For example, the landing zone for India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which last month became the first to successfully set down in the moon’s south polar region, was seven miles wide and 34 miles long.
The vision-based systems on many landing craft are limited because space-hardened computer chips possess only about one one-hundredth of the processing power of top-of-the-line chips used on Earth, JAXA said in its press kit.
For SLIM, JAXA developed image-processing algorithms that can run quickly on the slower space chips. As SLIM nears its landing, a camera will help guide the spacecraft’s descent to the lunar surface; radar and a laser will measure the spacecraft’s altitude and downward velocity.
Because of the risks of a crash that come with current systems, lunar landers are typically directed to flatter, less interesting terrain. A more precise navigation system would enable future spacecraft to land closer to rugged terrain that is of scientific interest, like the craters that contain frozen water near the moon’s south pole.
At launch, SLIM weighs more than 1,500 pounds; more than two-thirds of the weight is propellant. By contrast, the Indian lunar lander and its small rover weighed about 3,800 pounds, and the accompanying propulsion module that pushed the two out of Earth’s orbit toward the moon added 4,700 pounds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Young People in China Can’t Find Work, and Xi Jinping Has Only One Response
In August the Chinese government released a shocking piece of data: A record 21.3 percent of Chinese citizens between the ages of 16 and 24 in cities were unemployed. It promptly decided to suspend future publication of its urban youth unemployment rate. The current data is bad enough; it’s about the same youth unemployment rate across the Middle East on the eve of the Arab Spring.
The Chinese Communist Party knows very well that young, educated and unemployed people concentrated in big cities have the capacity to challenge authority. After all, that is how their own party started. For decades, the party-state’s legitimacy depended on economic growth and improving living standards that are now in jeopardy. Instead of meeting the needs of frustrated youth by generating new jobs and opportunities, the aging leadership has doubled down on authoritarian repression as its primary policy response to a worsening economic crisis.
This isn’t the first time the C.C.P. has had to contend with urban unemployment. For more than 70 years now, the problem has bubbled up only to be either contained by a political crackdown or relieved by favorable economic developments.
After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Chinese peasants fled the dilapidated countryside to find work in the big cities. To restrain this migration, the party imposed new rules that prevented citizens from obtaining social services away from their registered home cities. Spared from the competition of rural job seekers, city dwellers had more secure employment.
New shocks to the economy and demographics raised the threat of youth unemployment yet again through the 1950s and ’60s. With the economy faltering after the disastrous Great Leap Forward and loss of Soviet aid, a generation of Chinese urban baby boomers were about to graduate into a worsening job market. In 1966, Mao Zedong started the Cultural Revolution to partially redirect these youths, who ended up causing so much turmoil that Mao shifted course, beginning a nationwide “down to the countryside” movement to force a whole generation of urban youth to till rural fields.
In the late ’90s, state-owned enterprises, which were pillars of the Mao-era economy, conducted widespread layoffs as a part of market reforms, threatening urban employment yet again. The Asian financial crisis compounded things, and laid-off state workers and pensioners protested in rust belt cities in northeastern China. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 — which brought a surge of foreign investment and jobs — saved the day.
China is once again repeating this cycle, and the government is predictably responding with repression. This time the party appears to have no policy card up its sleeve, and with China’s boom times over, it will be increasingly difficult for China’s economy to grow its way out of trouble.
China’s G.D.P. growth has slowed significantly since the early 2010s, and the economic rebound after the pandemic lockdowns has been disappointing. At the same time, an expanding higher education system is churning out ever larger numbers of graduates who are not settling for the tedious factory jobs of yesteryear.
Many recent graduates had turned instead to jobs in the fast-growing tech, real estate and tutoring sectors. But the Chinese government has cracked down on those three industries since 2021 to curb what President Xi Jinping calls the “disorderly expansion of capital.” Last year Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, ended up laying off more than 10,000 employees. Country Garden, one of the country’s largest property developers, cut its head count by over 30,000. A top education company shed 60,000 jobs in 2021.
The government is also resorting to an old playbook. As early as 2018, Mr. Xi called for a campaign to send urban youth to the countryside with renewed appeals every couple of years. Even if young city dwellers were actually interested in answering that call, this is not the countryside of their parents’ youth: Arable farmland has been shrinking.
If the government does not boost household consumption or ease its grip on China’s private sector, high urban unemployment — youth discontentment — is here to stay. In recent years, many disillusioned young Chinese have joined in an antiwork movement known as lying flat, slacking off as a form of silent resistance. A Peking University economist studying this movement estimated that when those who are willingly lying flat are taken into account, almost half of all Chinese youths may be jobless.
Problems like these invite speculation that Communist Party control is under threat, but that is premature. From late imperial times to today, scattered protests rarely posed a substantive challenge to central government control; protesters’ demands were often directed at local officials. They became a serious problem only in rare cases when disillusioned intellectuals linked isolated protests into an organized movement demanding a fundamental change of the system, which is what communist activists did in the early 20th century.
There is no such threat on the horizon today. Aware of these dynamics, the C.C.P. has cracked down harshly on intellectuals. Rights lawyers, feminists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and even young Marxists have been rounded up or had their organizations disbanded. New technologies like facial recognition, widespread security cameras and cellphone tracking give the government expanded capacity to monitor individuals’ movements and thoughts. This totalitarian turn has been so complete that China is increasingly compared to North Korea. Given the party’s history, it is clear that these actions are aimed at least in part at containing the political fallout of a worsening economy.
Autocratic, economically distressed governments in Myanmar, Iran, Venezuela and Russia have all managed to beat back large-scale protests brutally. There is little reason Mr. Xi’s regime, which has single-mindedly perfected the infrastructure of repression over the last decade, could not do the same.
The C.C.P. seems intent on using repression as its main policy response to the economic slowdown. But while this may prevent threats to the regime, it will put the party in an even deeper hole by ensuring further strangulation of the country’s economic dynamism.
The tug of war between increasingly disgruntled youth and a ruthless and insecure regime will define not only China’s political trajectory but also its economic future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/opin ... 778d3e6de3
With Surge in Attacks, Militants Begin New Era of Bloodshed in Pakistan
For nearly a decade, the country had seemingly broken the cycle of violence, but extremist groups have bounced back since the Taliban regained control in neighboring Afghanistan.
Praying on Sunday for the victims of a suicide attack that killed more than 50 people last week.Credit...Arshad Butt/Associated Press
It was a bloody reminder that the dark days of extremist violence appeared to have returned to Pakistan: a suicide attack on a religious festival in the country’s southwest this past week that left around 60 people dead.
For nearly a decade, Pakistan had seemingly broken the cycle of such deadly attacks. In 2014, the country’s security forces carried out a large-scale military operation in the tribal areas near Afghanistan, forcing militants across the border and returning a relative peace to the restive frontier region.
But since the Taliban seized power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021, offering some groups safe haven on Afghan soil and starting a crackdown on others that pushed their fighters into neighboring Pakistan, the violence has roared back. The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan rose by around 50 percent during the Taliban’s first year in power, compared with the year before, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
This year, the pace of attacks has continued to rise. The attacks themselves have also become bolder, reviving the fears of a terrorism-scarred nation. In January, a suicide bombing at a heavily guarded mosque killed more than 100 people. A month later, militants struck the heart of Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, waging an hourslong siege at the police headquarters. Another suicide blast, at a political rally, killed more than 50 people in July.
In the latest massacre, on Friday, a suicide bomber set off an explosion at a religious procession that left carnage in the street. No group has claimed responsibility yet.
Visiting the families of victims, Gen. Syed Asim Munir, the Pakistani Army chief, reiterated a government commitment to carry out a nationwide military operation against the armed groups.
“The armed forces, intelligence and law enforcement agencies shall not rest until the menace of terrorism is rooted out from the country,” General Munir said.
Image
A view of the inside of a mosque that has been damaged. People stand amid the rubble on the ground level.
In January, a suicide bombing at a heavily guarded mosque killed more than 100 people in Peshawar, Pakistan.Credit...Abdul Majeed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The violence has stoked fears that the region — already home to one of the highest concentrations in the world of groups on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list — is becoming a hotbed of international terrorism. It has also fueled growing tensions between the Pakistani government and Taliban officials, who deny offering shelter to militant groups, including their ally, the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P.
So far, there is little evidence of significant action by the Pakistani military to stamp out the militants. Pakistan can no longer count on the American military support that helped it drive out the militants a decade ago, and many believe that the country — already grappling with entrenched political and economic crises — is largely powerless to stop the violence.
//More on Pakistan
//Imran Khan Corruption Case: An appeals court suspended Imran Khan’s three-year prison sentence, the latest twist in the political showdown between the former prime minister and the military establishment.
//Caretaker Prime Minister: The Pakistani government named Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar as the country’s interim leader, a move that kicks off preparations for the next general elections.
//Attack at Political Rally: An Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a political rally in northwestern Pakistan that killed dozens of people, in the latest sign of the country’s deteriorating security situation.
//Train Derailment: At least 30 people were killed after a train derailed in southern Pakistan, thrusting the dilapidated state of the country’s railway infrastructure back into the spotlight.
T//he Pakistani government’s military efforts are hindered “mainly because of political divisions and financial constraints,” said Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “It’s doubtful whether they could sustain a full-fledged campaign against the T.T.P.,” he added.
The Pakistani Taliban, an ideological twin of the Taliban in Afghanistan, seeks to impose strict Islamist rule in Pakistan’s border areas and has been behind most of the attacks over the past two years. Founded in 2007, the group controlled swaths of the tribal areas along the border until the military crackdown in 2014.
With the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, the group has resurged. Hundreds of Pakistani Taliban fighters were freed from Afghan prisons during the takeover. They armed themselves with American military equipment once provided to the U.S.-backed Afghan government, according to the Pakistani authorities. The group’s current leader, Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud, has also intensified efforts to bolster the group’s ranks, successfully luring outfits affiliated with Al Qaeda, as well as fighters from anti-Shia groups and several Pakistani militants who were part of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
Image
Police officers with guns stand behind a car. Vans and more officers are in the background.
Police officers taking positions during an hourslong siege by militants in February at the police headquarters in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In recent months, the Pakistani Taliban has carried out relentless attacks, mostly targeting Pakistani security forces in the tribal areas along the border. The clashes have led the security forces to suffer their worst casualties in eight years — nearly 400 army, police and other personnel have been killed so far this year, according to a report by the Center for Research and Security Studies, a think tank based in Islamabad.
Many police officers and soldiers say they feel underequipped to combat the insurgents.
Muhammad, a 34-year-old police officer in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of northwestern Pakistan, said that defending the mountainous district against well-armed insurgents was all but hopeless. A lingering ache in his leg reminds him of the peril — he sustained the injury when militants believed to be with the Pakistani Taliban opened fire on him and his colleagues during a routine night patrol in April.
“The attackers remained invisible to us, yet they had a clear sight of us — likely using night vision goggles,” said Muhammad, who asked to use only his first name because he feared reprisals and was not authorized to speak to the news media.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly asked the Taliban administration to rein in the Pakistani militants. Instead, Taliban officials in Afghanistan have suggested Pakistani officials address the militant group’s demands and offered to mediate talks. In recent months, frustration in Pakistan has seemed to boil over: officials announced last week that they would deport as many as 1.1 million Afghans residing illegally in Pakistan — a move many saw as retaliation against the Taliban administration in Afghanistan.
Deepening the crisis, Pakistan has also faced a fresh wave of violence from the Islamic State affiliate in the region, which is known as the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K. Unlike the Pakistani Taliban, the Islamic State has been antagonistic toward the Taliban in Afghanistan, saying they are not implementing true Sharia law, and has faced a brutal crackdown by Taliban security forces.
Image
A pile of shoes and clothes on the ground beneath a tarp. Red chairs and people are in the background.
Police officials on the scene of a suicide bombing at a political rally in July in Bajaur, a district in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. More than 50 people were killed. Credit...Abdul Majeed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Taliban have killed eight of the Islamic State’s leaders since the beginning of the year, according to American officials. But their offensive has also pushed some ISIS fighters into Pakistan, analysts say, where they have stepped up their attacks.
For ordinary Pakistanis in the tribal areas, the return of the militant violence has felt like a devastating slide back to when insurgents operated almost freely in the region, instilling a simmering sense of fear into residents’ daily lives. In recent months, the militants have restarted their extortion schemes, threatening businessmen and local leaders by demanding large sums of money to keep their families from being targeted.
In April, Mr. Ali, a rice trader who asked, for security reasons, that only his surname be used, received a menacing call that he said originated from a phone number in Afghanistan. The voice on the line delivered an ultimatum: pay $8,500, or his home would be attacked.
Initially, Mr. Ali alerted his local police station to the call and brushed off the threat. Then, a small explosion destroyed the entrance of his home. He called the number back, ultimately paying the extorter around $2,200.
My family was “jolted from their sleep and left traumatized by the midnight explosion at our home,” Mr. Ali said. “I cannot forget those horrific moments.”
The episode left him with an unsettling feeling that the militants had deployed informants in his neighborhood and market to identify wealthy targets to extort, he added. The police response was scant: Officers recommended that he install a security camera and advised him to limit his movements. Beyond that, there was nothing the police could do, they told him.
In response to the surging violence, some people have opted to pack up and leave their homes in the tribal areas — fearing for their lives if the militants overrun the area once more.
Saeed Wazir, a construction contractor from the North Waziristan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, left for Islamabad after an explosion that appeared to be intended for a military convoy but instead hit a truck carrying laborers. He said the current violence was almost more terrifying than before because the militants were working in the shadows, making the danger and his paranoia feel ever more present.
“They now operate underground and employ hit-and-run tactics,” Mr. Wazir said. “There’s a constant fear of stumbling upon a roadside explosive device or getting caught in gunfire or a suicide bombing.”
Image
People stand in rows with their heads bowed behind an orange frame that contains a body shrouded in a black-and-white cloth.
A funeral on Friday for one of the victims of a suicide attack at a religious gathering in Mastung, Pakistan. More than 50 people were killed in the attack.Credit...Reuters
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Praying on Sunday for the victims of a suicide attack that killed more than 50 people last week.Credit...Arshad Butt/Associated Press
It was a bloody reminder that the dark days of extremist violence appeared to have returned to Pakistan: a suicide attack on a religious festival in the country’s southwest this past week that left around 60 people dead.
For nearly a decade, Pakistan had seemingly broken the cycle of such deadly attacks. In 2014, the country’s security forces carried out a large-scale military operation in the tribal areas near Afghanistan, forcing militants across the border and returning a relative peace to the restive frontier region.
But since the Taliban seized power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021, offering some groups safe haven on Afghan soil and starting a crackdown on others that pushed their fighters into neighboring Pakistan, the violence has roared back. The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan rose by around 50 percent during the Taliban’s first year in power, compared with the year before, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
This year, the pace of attacks has continued to rise. The attacks themselves have also become bolder, reviving the fears of a terrorism-scarred nation. In January, a suicide bombing at a heavily guarded mosque killed more than 100 people. A month later, militants struck the heart of Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, waging an hourslong siege at the police headquarters. Another suicide blast, at a political rally, killed more than 50 people in July.
In the latest massacre, on Friday, a suicide bomber set off an explosion at a religious procession that left carnage in the street. No group has claimed responsibility yet.
Visiting the families of victims, Gen. Syed Asim Munir, the Pakistani Army chief, reiterated a government commitment to carry out a nationwide military operation against the armed groups.
“The armed forces, intelligence and law enforcement agencies shall not rest until the menace of terrorism is rooted out from the country,” General Munir said.
Image
A view of the inside of a mosque that has been damaged. People stand amid the rubble on the ground level.
In January, a suicide bombing at a heavily guarded mosque killed more than 100 people in Peshawar, Pakistan.Credit...Abdul Majeed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The violence has stoked fears that the region — already home to one of the highest concentrations in the world of groups on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list — is becoming a hotbed of international terrorism. It has also fueled growing tensions between the Pakistani government and Taliban officials, who deny offering shelter to militant groups, including their ally, the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P.
So far, there is little evidence of significant action by the Pakistani military to stamp out the militants. Pakistan can no longer count on the American military support that helped it drive out the militants a decade ago, and many believe that the country — already grappling with entrenched political and economic crises — is largely powerless to stop the violence.
//More on Pakistan
//Imran Khan Corruption Case: An appeals court suspended Imran Khan’s three-year prison sentence, the latest twist in the political showdown between the former prime minister and the military establishment.
//Caretaker Prime Minister: The Pakistani government named Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar as the country’s interim leader, a move that kicks off preparations for the next general elections.
//Attack at Political Rally: An Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a political rally in northwestern Pakistan that killed dozens of people, in the latest sign of the country’s deteriorating security situation.
//Train Derailment: At least 30 people were killed after a train derailed in southern Pakistan, thrusting the dilapidated state of the country’s railway infrastructure back into the spotlight.
T//he Pakistani government’s military efforts are hindered “mainly because of political divisions and financial constraints,” said Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “It’s doubtful whether they could sustain a full-fledged campaign against the T.T.P.,” he added.
The Pakistani Taliban, an ideological twin of the Taliban in Afghanistan, seeks to impose strict Islamist rule in Pakistan’s border areas and has been behind most of the attacks over the past two years. Founded in 2007, the group controlled swaths of the tribal areas along the border until the military crackdown in 2014.
With the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, the group has resurged. Hundreds of Pakistani Taliban fighters were freed from Afghan prisons during the takeover. They armed themselves with American military equipment once provided to the U.S.-backed Afghan government, according to the Pakistani authorities. The group’s current leader, Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud, has also intensified efforts to bolster the group’s ranks, successfully luring outfits affiliated with Al Qaeda, as well as fighters from anti-Shia groups and several Pakistani militants who were part of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
Image
Police officers with guns stand behind a car. Vans and more officers are in the background.
Police officers taking positions during an hourslong siege by militants in February at the police headquarters in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In recent months, the Pakistani Taliban has carried out relentless attacks, mostly targeting Pakistani security forces in the tribal areas along the border. The clashes have led the security forces to suffer their worst casualties in eight years — nearly 400 army, police and other personnel have been killed so far this year, according to a report by the Center for Research and Security Studies, a think tank based in Islamabad.
Many police officers and soldiers say they feel underequipped to combat the insurgents.
Muhammad, a 34-year-old police officer in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of northwestern Pakistan, said that defending the mountainous district against well-armed insurgents was all but hopeless. A lingering ache in his leg reminds him of the peril — he sustained the injury when militants believed to be with the Pakistani Taliban opened fire on him and his colleagues during a routine night patrol in April.
“The attackers remained invisible to us, yet they had a clear sight of us — likely using night vision goggles,” said Muhammad, who asked to use only his first name because he feared reprisals and was not authorized to speak to the news media.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly asked the Taliban administration to rein in the Pakistani militants. Instead, Taliban officials in Afghanistan have suggested Pakistani officials address the militant group’s demands and offered to mediate talks. In recent months, frustration in Pakistan has seemed to boil over: officials announced last week that they would deport as many as 1.1 million Afghans residing illegally in Pakistan — a move many saw as retaliation against the Taliban administration in Afghanistan.
Deepening the crisis, Pakistan has also faced a fresh wave of violence from the Islamic State affiliate in the region, which is known as the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K. Unlike the Pakistani Taliban, the Islamic State has been antagonistic toward the Taliban in Afghanistan, saying they are not implementing true Sharia law, and has faced a brutal crackdown by Taliban security forces.
Image
A pile of shoes and clothes on the ground beneath a tarp. Red chairs and people are in the background.
Police officials on the scene of a suicide bombing at a political rally in July in Bajaur, a district in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. More than 50 people were killed. Credit...Abdul Majeed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Taliban have killed eight of the Islamic State’s leaders since the beginning of the year, according to American officials. But their offensive has also pushed some ISIS fighters into Pakistan, analysts say, where they have stepped up their attacks.
For ordinary Pakistanis in the tribal areas, the return of the militant violence has felt like a devastating slide back to when insurgents operated almost freely in the region, instilling a simmering sense of fear into residents’ daily lives. In recent months, the militants have restarted their extortion schemes, threatening businessmen and local leaders by demanding large sums of money to keep their families from being targeted.
In April, Mr. Ali, a rice trader who asked, for security reasons, that only his surname be used, received a menacing call that he said originated from a phone number in Afghanistan. The voice on the line delivered an ultimatum: pay $8,500, or his home would be attacked.
Initially, Mr. Ali alerted his local police station to the call and brushed off the threat. Then, a small explosion destroyed the entrance of his home. He called the number back, ultimately paying the extorter around $2,200.
My family was “jolted from their sleep and left traumatized by the midnight explosion at our home,” Mr. Ali said. “I cannot forget those horrific moments.”
The episode left him with an unsettling feeling that the militants had deployed informants in his neighborhood and market to identify wealthy targets to extort, he added. The police response was scant: Officers recommended that he install a security camera and advised him to limit his movements. Beyond that, there was nothing the police could do, they told him.
In response to the surging violence, some people have opted to pack up and leave their homes in the tribal areas — fearing for their lives if the militants overrun the area once more.
Saeed Wazir, a construction contractor from the North Waziristan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, left for Islamabad after an explosion that appeared to be intended for a military convoy but instead hit a truck carrying laborers. He said the current violence was almost more terrifying than before because the militants were working in the shadows, making the danger and his paranoia feel ever more present.
“They now operate underground and employ hit-and-run tactics,” Mr. Wazir said. “There’s a constant fear of stumbling upon a roadside explosive device or getting caught in gunfire or a suicide bombing.”
Image
People stand in rows with their heads bowed behind an orange frame that contains a body shrouded in a black-and-white cloth.
A funeral on Friday for one of the victims of a suicide attack at a religious gathering in Mastung, Pakistan. More than 50 people were killed in the attack.Credit...Reuters
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Pakistan Orders More Than a Million Afghans Out of the Country
Migrants from Afghanistan living illegally in Pakistan, many of whom fled the Taliban takeover, have been given four weeks to leave.
Afghan families departing for their homeland on Friday in Karachi, Pakistan.Credit...Fareed Khan/Associated Press
Hundreds of police officers flooded into a Karachi slum around midnight, surrounding the homes of Afghan migrants and pounding at their doors. Under the harsh glare of floodlights, the police told women to stand to one side of their homes and demanded the men present immigration papers proving they were living in Pakistan legally. Those without documents were lined up in the street, some shaking with fear for what was to come: Detention in a Pakistani prison and deportation to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
The police raid on Friday in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, followed an abrupt decision by the Pakistani authorities last week to deport the more than one million Afghan migrants living illegally in the country.
“Police entered every house without warning,” said Abdul Bashar, an Afghan migrant whose two cousins were among the 51 people who the police said were arrested during the neighborhood sweep. “The fear has left us restless, making it difficult for us to sleep peacefully at night.”
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry announced that migrants residing illegally in the country had 28 days to leave voluntarily, and it offered a “reward” for information leading to their arrests once that deadline passed.
Though Pakistani officials say the crackdown applies to all foreign citizens, the policy is largely believed to be targeting Afghans, who make up the vast majority of migrants in Pakistan.
While Afghans have faced harassment in Pakistan for decades, this announcement was the government’s most far-reaching and explicit action affecting Afghan migrants. It was widely seen as a sign of the increasing hostility between the Pakistani government and the Taliban authorities in neighboring Afghanistan as they clash over extremist groups operating across their borders.
Image
A bearded man in a robe walks by an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi last month.
At an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi last month.Credit...Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Over the past year, Pakistan has experienced a surge in terrorist attacks, both by militant groups that have found haven in Afghanistan under the Taliban administration and by others whose fighters have been pushed into Pakistan following a brutal Taliban-led crackdown on their ranks. Some former Taliban fighters have also migrated to Pakistan to wage jihad against the Pakistani government.
For months, the Pakistani authorities have pleaded with the Taliban to rein in extremist violence stemming from Afghan soil. But Taliban officials have rebuffed those calls, instead offering to mediate talks between the Pakistani authorities and the militants.
The growing animosity between the two countries has threatened to further destabilize a region that is already a political tinderbox.
//More on Pakistan
//Imran Khan Corruption Case: An appeals court suspended Imran Khan’s three-year prison sentence, the latest twist in the political showdown between the former prime minister and the military establishment.
//Caretaker Prime Minister: The Pakistani government named Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar as the country’s interim leader, a move that kicks off preparations for the next general elections.
//Attack at Political Rally: An Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a political rally in northwestern Pakistan that killed dozens of people, in the latest sign of the country’s deteriorating security situation.
//Train Derailment: At least 30 people were killed after a train derailed in southern Pakistan, thrusting the dilapidated state of the country’s railway infrastructure back into the spotlight.
On one side of the contested border, the Taliban administration in Afghanistan is armed with a vast arsenal of American-made weapons left during the U.S. withdrawal and feels encouraged by its victory over a global superpower. Many within the Taliban have also harbored resentment toward Pakistan for decades.
On the other is nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has struggled with military coups, volatile politics and waves of sectarian violence since its founding 75 years ago.
Caught in between are the roughly 1.7 million Afghans living in Pakistan illegally, according to Pakistani officials. Among them are around 600,000 people — including journalists, activists and former policemen, soldiers and former officials with the toppled U.S.-backed government — who fled after the Taliban seized power, according to United Nations estimates.
Many of those migrants face a stark choice: Either return to Afghanistan, where they fear persecution by the Taliban, or remain in Pakistan and face harassment from the Pakistani authorities.
“We have been left in the lurch,” said Mahmood Kochai, an Afghan journalist who fled to Pakistan with his wife and six children after the Taliban seized power.
Image
Afghan children, sitting on a classroom floor before desks, studying the Quran before their teacher in Karachi.
Afghan children studying the Quran at an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi.Credit...Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Like many Afghan migrants in the capital, Islamabad, Mr. Kochai arrived in Pakistan on a temporary visa, anticipating an asylum decision from Western embassies in Islamabad. Soon after arriving, he applied for sanctuary in the United States under a refugee program for Afghans who worked with the U.S. government or U.S.-funded organizations.
But since he applied more than a year ago, he has not heard anything back, Mr. Kochai said. Now, he is concerned about the expiration of their Pakistani visas in two months.
In Karachi, home to a sizable population of Afghan migrants, news of migrants’ getting arrested at security checkpoints on roads and in markets during routine outings has stoked panic.
Ali, a former Afghan security official who would give only his first name because of his immigrant status in Pakistan, said he and his neighbors — also Afghan migrants — had barely gone outside for two weeks, fearing getting arrested and being sent back to Afghanistan. If he is deported, he worries he faces arrest — or worse — because of his affiliation with the U.S.-backed government.
The new policy has in fact drawn criticism from human rights groups, which say deporting Afghans could put them at risk in Afghanistan. Despite the Taliban’s policy of blanket amnesty for Afghans who worked with the U.S.-backed government, human rights monitors have documented hundreds of abuses against former government officials since the Taliban seized power.
Pakistani officials have defended the policy as necessary to protect Pakistan from extremist violence. In a news conference on Tuesday, the Pakistani caretaker government’s interior minister, Sarfraz Bugti, asserted that Afghans were involved in 14 of the 24 major terrorist attacks in Pakistan this year.
“There are attacks on us from Afghanistan, and Afghan nationals are involved in those attacks,” he said. Taliban officials denied those claims.
Image
A young Afghan girl is given a sip of water from a bottle offered by a man in Peshawar, Pakistan.
An Afghan family near Peshawar, Pakistan, on Friday.Credit...Abdul Majeed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The aggressive approach echoes similar crackdowns on Afghan migrants in years past, observers say. After a string of major terrorist attacks in 2016, the Pakistani authorities began a sweeping campaign to uproot Afghan migrants, forcing around 600,000 back to Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch characterized Pakistan’s actions as the world’s “largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees” in recent times.
“Afghans always get stuck when foreign relations break down between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Sanaa Alimia, researcher and author of “Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan.”
“That usually manifests itself as harassment of ordinary Afghans in the country and those getting harassed are usually in the lowest income groups, they are an easy target,” she added.
Pakistan has not signed the 1951 Geneva Convention and its 1967 protocol covering the status of refugees, which protects people seeking asylum. Instead, Pakistan’s Foreigners’ Act grants the authorities the right to apprehend, detain and expel foreigners — including refugees and asylum seekers — who lack valid documentation.
After previous crackdowns, many Afghans have either remained in Pakistan or returned after being deported — underlining the limit of the Pakistani government’s ability to repatriate Afghans, experts say.
Now, with the government facing dueling economic and political crises, it is unclear how the Pakistani authorities would repatriate such a large number of refugees, a deportation campaign requiring substantial personnel as well as military and intelligence resources.
Maulvi Abdul Jabbar Takhari, the Taliban’s consul general in Karachi, said that many Afghans who had been arrested possess legal documents allowing them to live in Pakistan and that Taliban officials had been trying to secure their release.
Mr. Takhari, who lived as a refugee in Karachi for several years, urged Pakistan’s government “to provide a specific time frame for undocumented refugees so that they can peacefully and respectfully wind up their businesses and return to their homeland.”
But for Afghan migrants, the wave of arrests has been a chilling reminder of their precarious status in Pakistan. Many arrived in the country decades ago, after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and after the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal.
Abdullah Bukhari, 51, came to Karachi in 1980 from Kunduz Province fleeing violence during the Soviet-Afghan war. The notion of uprooting his life in less than a month feels absurd and heartbreaking.
“How can they uproot everything in such a short period?” Mr. Bukhari asked. “We’ve spent our lives as refugees and amid conflict, but our biggest concern is for our children. They have never experienced Afghanistan even for a day.”
Image
Three children walk along a dirt road along with three women in a refugee camp in Karachi.
At an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi.Credit...Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/worl ... ugees.html
Afghan families departing for their homeland on Friday in Karachi, Pakistan.Credit...Fareed Khan/Associated Press
Hundreds of police officers flooded into a Karachi slum around midnight, surrounding the homes of Afghan migrants and pounding at their doors. Under the harsh glare of floodlights, the police told women to stand to one side of their homes and demanded the men present immigration papers proving they were living in Pakistan legally. Those without documents were lined up in the street, some shaking with fear for what was to come: Detention in a Pakistani prison and deportation to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
The police raid on Friday in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, followed an abrupt decision by the Pakistani authorities last week to deport the more than one million Afghan migrants living illegally in the country.
“Police entered every house without warning,” said Abdul Bashar, an Afghan migrant whose two cousins were among the 51 people who the police said were arrested during the neighborhood sweep. “The fear has left us restless, making it difficult for us to sleep peacefully at night.”
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry announced that migrants residing illegally in the country had 28 days to leave voluntarily, and it offered a “reward” for information leading to their arrests once that deadline passed.
Though Pakistani officials say the crackdown applies to all foreign citizens, the policy is largely believed to be targeting Afghans, who make up the vast majority of migrants in Pakistan.
While Afghans have faced harassment in Pakistan for decades, this announcement was the government’s most far-reaching and explicit action affecting Afghan migrants. It was widely seen as a sign of the increasing hostility between the Pakistani government and the Taliban authorities in neighboring Afghanistan as they clash over extremist groups operating across their borders.
Image
A bearded man in a robe walks by an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi last month.
At an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi last month.Credit...Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Over the past year, Pakistan has experienced a surge in terrorist attacks, both by militant groups that have found haven in Afghanistan under the Taliban administration and by others whose fighters have been pushed into Pakistan following a brutal Taliban-led crackdown on their ranks. Some former Taliban fighters have also migrated to Pakistan to wage jihad against the Pakistani government.
For months, the Pakistani authorities have pleaded with the Taliban to rein in extremist violence stemming from Afghan soil. But Taliban officials have rebuffed those calls, instead offering to mediate talks between the Pakistani authorities and the militants.
The growing animosity between the two countries has threatened to further destabilize a region that is already a political tinderbox.
//More on Pakistan
//Imran Khan Corruption Case: An appeals court suspended Imran Khan’s three-year prison sentence, the latest twist in the political showdown between the former prime minister and the military establishment.
//Caretaker Prime Minister: The Pakistani government named Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar as the country’s interim leader, a move that kicks off preparations for the next general elections.
//Attack at Political Rally: An Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a political rally in northwestern Pakistan that killed dozens of people, in the latest sign of the country’s deteriorating security situation.
//Train Derailment: At least 30 people were killed after a train derailed in southern Pakistan, thrusting the dilapidated state of the country’s railway infrastructure back into the spotlight.
On one side of the contested border, the Taliban administration in Afghanistan is armed with a vast arsenal of American-made weapons left during the U.S. withdrawal and feels encouraged by its victory over a global superpower. Many within the Taliban have also harbored resentment toward Pakistan for decades.
On the other is nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has struggled with military coups, volatile politics and waves of sectarian violence since its founding 75 years ago.
Caught in between are the roughly 1.7 million Afghans living in Pakistan illegally, according to Pakistani officials. Among them are around 600,000 people — including journalists, activists and former policemen, soldiers and former officials with the toppled U.S.-backed government — who fled after the Taliban seized power, according to United Nations estimates.
Many of those migrants face a stark choice: Either return to Afghanistan, where they fear persecution by the Taliban, or remain in Pakistan and face harassment from the Pakistani authorities.
“We have been left in the lurch,” said Mahmood Kochai, an Afghan journalist who fled to Pakistan with his wife and six children after the Taliban seized power.
Image
Afghan children, sitting on a classroom floor before desks, studying the Quran before their teacher in Karachi.
Afghan children studying the Quran at an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi.Credit...Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Like many Afghan migrants in the capital, Islamabad, Mr. Kochai arrived in Pakistan on a temporary visa, anticipating an asylum decision from Western embassies in Islamabad. Soon after arriving, he applied for sanctuary in the United States under a refugee program for Afghans who worked with the U.S. government or U.S.-funded organizations.
But since he applied more than a year ago, he has not heard anything back, Mr. Kochai said. Now, he is concerned about the expiration of their Pakistani visas in two months.
In Karachi, home to a sizable population of Afghan migrants, news of migrants’ getting arrested at security checkpoints on roads and in markets during routine outings has stoked panic.
Ali, a former Afghan security official who would give only his first name because of his immigrant status in Pakistan, said he and his neighbors — also Afghan migrants — had barely gone outside for two weeks, fearing getting arrested and being sent back to Afghanistan. If he is deported, he worries he faces arrest — or worse — because of his affiliation with the U.S.-backed government.
The new policy has in fact drawn criticism from human rights groups, which say deporting Afghans could put them at risk in Afghanistan. Despite the Taliban’s policy of blanket amnesty for Afghans who worked with the U.S.-backed government, human rights monitors have documented hundreds of abuses against former government officials since the Taliban seized power.
Pakistani officials have defended the policy as necessary to protect Pakistan from extremist violence. In a news conference on Tuesday, the Pakistani caretaker government’s interior minister, Sarfraz Bugti, asserted that Afghans were involved in 14 of the 24 major terrorist attacks in Pakistan this year.
“There are attacks on us from Afghanistan, and Afghan nationals are involved in those attacks,” he said. Taliban officials denied those claims.
Image
A young Afghan girl is given a sip of water from a bottle offered by a man in Peshawar, Pakistan.
An Afghan family near Peshawar, Pakistan, on Friday.Credit...Abdul Majeed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The aggressive approach echoes similar crackdowns on Afghan migrants in years past, observers say. After a string of major terrorist attacks in 2016, the Pakistani authorities began a sweeping campaign to uproot Afghan migrants, forcing around 600,000 back to Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch characterized Pakistan’s actions as the world’s “largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees” in recent times.
“Afghans always get stuck when foreign relations break down between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Sanaa Alimia, researcher and author of “Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan.”
“That usually manifests itself as harassment of ordinary Afghans in the country and those getting harassed are usually in the lowest income groups, they are an easy target,” she added.
Pakistan has not signed the 1951 Geneva Convention and its 1967 protocol covering the status of refugees, which protects people seeking asylum. Instead, Pakistan’s Foreigners’ Act grants the authorities the right to apprehend, detain and expel foreigners — including refugees and asylum seekers — who lack valid documentation.
After previous crackdowns, many Afghans have either remained in Pakistan or returned after being deported — underlining the limit of the Pakistani government’s ability to repatriate Afghans, experts say.
Now, with the government facing dueling economic and political crises, it is unclear how the Pakistani authorities would repatriate such a large number of refugees, a deportation campaign requiring substantial personnel as well as military and intelligence resources.
Maulvi Abdul Jabbar Takhari, the Taliban’s consul general in Karachi, said that many Afghans who had been arrested possess legal documents allowing them to live in Pakistan and that Taliban officials had been trying to secure their release.
Mr. Takhari, who lived as a refugee in Karachi for several years, urged Pakistan’s government “to provide a specific time frame for undocumented refugees so that they can peacefully and respectfully wind up their businesses and return to their homeland.”
But for Afghan migrants, the wave of arrests has been a chilling reminder of their precarious status in Pakistan. Many arrived in the country decades ago, after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and after the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal.
Abdullah Bukhari, 51, came to Karachi in 1980 from Kunduz Province fleeing violence during the Soviet-Afghan war. The notion of uprooting his life in less than a month feels absurd and heartbreaking.
“How can they uproot everything in such a short period?” Mr. Bukhari asked. “We’ve spent our lives as refugees and amid conflict, but our biggest concern is for our children. They have never experienced Afghanistan even for a day.”
Image
Three children walk along a dirt road along with three women in a refugee camp in Karachi.
At an Afghan refugee camp in Karachi.Credit...Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/worl ... ugees.html
Afghan Refugees in Pakistan 2023-11-02
As Received, I do not know about the authenticity of the document.
2023, November 2: Exemption from arrest for some Afghan refugees in Pakistan
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/pa ... r-AA1jYoSN
.New Delhi: As the 1.4 million Afghan refugees got a temporary breather from Pakistani authorities from deportation, relief also came for the Afghan Ismailis with the government providing them immunity from arrest after it came to be known that the Canadian government was considering their relocation. This immunity, however, has started a debate among Pakistanis who seem divided on the fate of the Ismailis.
“It’s a very wise decision,” says one media figure from North-West Pakistan. For the most part, it seems that people support this move for its capacity to protect this religious minority from greater persecution in Afghanistan. Expectedly, there are those who question the decision. There are some who see in this decision the ‘faith-based selective victimisation’ of some Afghans instead of others. They seek to remind people that there are many religious minorities in danger, of which the ‘Ismaili communities are but one’.
In response to those impugning the government’s decision to forgo deportation for now, many have simply asked: “what’s wrong with that?”.
Ismaili Muslims
In Pakistan, Ismaili Muslims form a minority branch of the Shia Muslim community, which itself is a minority group within the predominantly Sunni country. In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime is Sunni and has minimised the spaces available for religious minorities. The fear is that, if deported, the Afghan Ismailis would face sustained and powerful persecution from the Taliban.
Seeing as the Pakistani government appears determined to continue with its controversial policy of ejecting undocumented Afghan migrants from the country, the Ismailis need somewhere else to go.
“Afghan Ismailis currently living in Pakistan are being considered by the Government of Canada for resettlement, for which the formalities shall be initiated shortly,” states the Ministry of Interior in Islamabad. This is why the government has ‘requested that members belonging to the Afghan Ismaili community shall not be arrested till further notice’.
2023, November 2: Exemption from arrest for some Afghan refugees in Pakistan
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/pa ... r-AA1jYoSN
.New Delhi: As the 1.4 million Afghan refugees got a temporary breather from Pakistani authorities from deportation, relief also came for the Afghan Ismailis with the government providing them immunity from arrest after it came to be known that the Canadian government was considering their relocation. This immunity, however, has started a debate among Pakistanis who seem divided on the fate of the Ismailis.
“It’s a very wise decision,” says one media figure from North-West Pakistan. For the most part, it seems that people support this move for its capacity to protect this religious minority from greater persecution in Afghanistan. Expectedly, there are those who question the decision. There are some who see in this decision the ‘faith-based selective victimisation’ of some Afghans instead of others. They seek to remind people that there are many religious minorities in danger, of which the ‘Ismaili communities are but one’.
In response to those impugning the government’s decision to forgo deportation for now, many have simply asked: “what’s wrong with that?”.
Ismaili Muslims
In Pakistan, Ismaili Muslims form a minority branch of the Shia Muslim community, which itself is a minority group within the predominantly Sunni country. In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime is Sunni and has minimised the spaces available for religious minorities. The fear is that, if deported, the Afghan Ismailis would face sustained and powerful persecution from the Taliban.
Seeing as the Pakistani government appears determined to continue with its controversial policy of ejecting undocumented Afghan migrants from the country, the Ismailis need somewhere else to go.
“Afghan Ismailis currently living in Pakistan are being considered by the Government of Canada for resettlement, for which the formalities shall be initiated shortly,” states the Ministry of Interior in Islamabad. This is why the government has ‘requested that members belonging to the Afghan Ismaili community shall not be arrested till further notice’.
Afghan refugees deportation from Pakistan - Ismailis protected?
https://theprint.in/go-to-pakistan/paki ... n/1846045/
Pakistan won’t arrest Afghan Ismaili refugees. Some call it selective victimisation
If deported, the Afghan Ismailis could face sustained and powerful persecution from the Taliban.
Rahul Weston
15 November, 2023 08:01 pm IST
New Delhi: As the 1.4 million Afghan refugees got a temporary breather from Pakistani authorities from deportation, relief also came for the Afghan Ismailis with the government providing them immunity from arrest after it came to be known that the Canadian government was considering their relocation. This immunity, however, has started a debate among Pakistanis who seem divided on the fate of the Ismailis.
“It’s a very wise decision,” says one media figure from North-West Pakistan. For the most part, it seems that people support this move for its capacity to protect this religious minority from greater persecution in Afghanistan. Expectedly, there are those who question the decision. There are some who see in this decision the ‘faith-based selective victimisation’ of some Afghans instead of others. They seek to remind people that there are many religious minorities in danger, of which the ‘Ismaili communities are but one’.
In response to those impugning the government’s decision to forgo deportation for now, many have simply asked: “what’s wrong with that?”.
Ismaili Muslims
In Pakistan, Ismaili Muslims form a minority branch of the Shia Muslim community, which itself is a minority group within the predominantly Sunni country. In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime is Sunni and has minimised the spaces available for religious minorities. The fear is that, if deported, the Afghan Ismailis would face sustained and powerful persecution from the Taliban.
Seeing as the Pakistani government appears determined to continue with its controversial policy of ejecting undocumented Afghan migrants from the country, the Ismailis need somewhere else to go.
“Afghan Ismailis currently living in Pakistan are being considered by the Government of Canada for resettlement, for which the formalities shall be initiated shortly,” states the Ministry of Interior in Islamabad. This is why the government has ‘requested that members belonging to the Afghan Ismaili community shall not be arrested till further notice’.
Aga Khan IV
Among supporters of the immunity order, there has been a frequent acknowledgement of the significant role played by Aga Khan IV, the 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailis, in facilitating the injunction. More than this, some suggest that “Agha Khan has paid for them to migrate to Canada”, though this is yet to be verified.
Khan has been described as the world’s most well-connected man, and his net worth is over £13 billion. In addition to deep pockets, he has the clout to influence government policy around the world.
Working toward sustainable economic growth and protection of cultural heritage in over 30 countries, the Aga Khan Development Network shares partnerships with organisations such as the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, and the European Commission. The Afghans Ismaili will be hoping that their Imam can indeed mobilise his considerable resources to save them from the potential horrors that Amnesty International predicts could await them in Afghanistan.
Violation of human rights
Since 31 October—the Pakistani government’s deadline for undocumented refugees to leave voluntarily—more than 2,00,000 Afghans have crossed into Afghanistan. They arrive in a country whose economy is crippled and people are starving. Across the board, humanitarian organisations fear the human rights abuses that incomers may face. The Office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights has expressed its worries that civil society activists, former government officials, and journalists could face detention and torture. In particular, women will be denied access to secondary and tertiary education, while being excluded from public life.
The Pakistani government has been warned by human rights organisations that it is reneging on its international legal commitments. One such responsibility is the principle of non-refoulement, the practice of not forcing refugees to go to a country in which they are liable to face persecution. In addition, Amnesty International’s investigations have found that in at least seven detention centres, no legal rights are delivered to detainees, and those centres are in violation of the right to liberty and a fair trial.
Pakistan won’t arrest Afghan Ismaili refugees. Some call it selective victimisation
If deported, the Afghan Ismailis could face sustained and powerful persecution from the Taliban.
Rahul Weston
15 November, 2023 08:01 pm IST
New Delhi: As the 1.4 million Afghan refugees got a temporary breather from Pakistani authorities from deportation, relief also came for the Afghan Ismailis with the government providing them immunity from arrest after it came to be known that the Canadian government was considering their relocation. This immunity, however, has started a debate among Pakistanis who seem divided on the fate of the Ismailis.
“It’s a very wise decision,” says one media figure from North-West Pakistan. For the most part, it seems that people support this move for its capacity to protect this religious minority from greater persecution in Afghanistan. Expectedly, there are those who question the decision. There are some who see in this decision the ‘faith-based selective victimisation’ of some Afghans instead of others. They seek to remind people that there are many religious minorities in danger, of which the ‘Ismaili communities are but one’.
In response to those impugning the government’s decision to forgo deportation for now, many have simply asked: “what’s wrong with that?”.
Ismaili Muslims
In Pakistan, Ismaili Muslims form a minority branch of the Shia Muslim community, which itself is a minority group within the predominantly Sunni country. In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime is Sunni and has minimised the spaces available for religious minorities. The fear is that, if deported, the Afghan Ismailis would face sustained and powerful persecution from the Taliban.
Seeing as the Pakistani government appears determined to continue with its controversial policy of ejecting undocumented Afghan migrants from the country, the Ismailis need somewhere else to go.
“Afghan Ismailis currently living in Pakistan are being considered by the Government of Canada for resettlement, for which the formalities shall be initiated shortly,” states the Ministry of Interior in Islamabad. This is why the government has ‘requested that members belonging to the Afghan Ismaili community shall not be arrested till further notice’.
Aga Khan IV
Among supporters of the immunity order, there has been a frequent acknowledgement of the significant role played by Aga Khan IV, the 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailis, in facilitating the injunction. More than this, some suggest that “Agha Khan has paid for them to migrate to Canada”, though this is yet to be verified.
Khan has been described as the world’s most well-connected man, and his net worth is over £13 billion. In addition to deep pockets, he has the clout to influence government policy around the world.
Working toward sustainable economic growth and protection of cultural heritage in over 30 countries, the Aga Khan Development Network shares partnerships with organisations such as the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, and the European Commission. The Afghans Ismaili will be hoping that their Imam can indeed mobilise his considerable resources to save them from the potential horrors that Amnesty International predicts could await them in Afghanistan.
Violation of human rights
Since 31 October—the Pakistani government’s deadline for undocumented refugees to leave voluntarily—more than 2,00,000 Afghans have crossed into Afghanistan. They arrive in a country whose economy is crippled and people are starving. Across the board, humanitarian organisations fear the human rights abuses that incomers may face. The Office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights has expressed its worries that civil society activists, former government officials, and journalists could face detention and torture. In particular, women will be denied access to secondary and tertiary education, while being excluded from public life.
The Pakistani government has been warned by human rights organisations that it is reneging on its international legal commitments. One such responsibility is the principle of non-refoulement, the practice of not forcing refugees to go to a country in which they are liable to face persecution. In addition, Amnesty International’s investigations have found that in at least seven detention centres, no legal rights are delivered to detainees, and those centres are in violation of the right to liberty and a fair trial.
Where Did All the Hong Kong Neon Go?
A government crackdown on neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, but the campaign evokes the fading of the city itself.
It was never just about the neon, that Cubist, consumerist razzle-dazzle cantilevered over Hong Kong’s streets announcing pawnbrokers and mooncake bakers, saunas and shark’s fin soup shops.
It was never just about the signs, shining on teahouses offering the finest Iron Goddess of Mercy brew and on hotels paid for by the hour, or on Chinese medicine emporiums bursting with wooden drawers of seahorses and on mahjong parlors clickety-clacking with manicured nails hitting hard tiles.
Because while the government’s crackdown on the neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, the campaign evokes the fading of Hong Kong itself: the mournful allegory for an electric city’s decline, the literal extinguishing of its brash flash.
Nights in Hong Kong these days feel as if still in the pall of a plague, or a deep political malaise.
Many of the tourists and resident foreigners are gone, the old party spots unsullied by their beer-guzzling excess.
Hong Kongers have left, too. More than 110,000 permanent residents departed last year, and the city’s population of those worth more than $30 million shrank by 23 percent, according to government and wealth survey data.
Their departure, a quarter-century after the territory reverted from British to Chinese rule, has been spurred by the territory’s economic decline and by an acute diminishment of political rights.
Those remaining in Hong Kong are polarized between those who fear that the Communist leadership in Beijing is destroying what made the place special — including a free press and an independent judiciary — and those who think that the people here have always withstood the whims of those in charge.
ImageA nighttime street scene showing neon signs in blue, red and green hanging on buildings and across the road.
Posing for a photograph under signs for karaoke nightclubs in October in Hong Kong.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
A busy nighttime street scene in the middle of a city aglow with neon signs.
Neon signage for the Tung Fung Pawn Shop in September.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Those whims lack any whimsy.
A national security law, imposed in 2020, criminalizes acts considered threatening to the state. Students, former legislators and a former media mogul sit in prison because of it. The chief executive, as the top leader is known in business-first Hong Kong, has been placed under sanction by the U.S. Treasury Department for undermining the territory’s autonomy. Expressing public support for such sanctions could itself be a crime.
Hong Kong today can feel like a city of shadows and metaphor, where a subject as innocuous as neon takes on shades of meaning.
The Hong Kong filmmaker Anastasia Tsang’s directorial debut, “A Light Never Goes Out,” is about a family coping with the death of a neon sign maker. The film, Hong Kong’s submission for next year’s Oscars, is an elegy for a disappearing craft that could also be a requiem for something larger.
“Hong Kong people have a very strong feeling of loss,” Ms. Tsang said. “Every day you’ve got a friend or relative who’s going to emigrate. Every day you feel like some part of your flesh is being taken from your skeleton.”
Since 2021, when she shot the film, many of the neon signs she used as a backdrop have disappeared.
“The change was so drastic and fast,” she said. “There was no way to save them.”
Image
People milling about outside a bar with a neon sign at night.
A bar in the Wan Chai neighborhood.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
People walking around outside at night under neon signs on a street in Hong Kong.
A sign outside the Mido cafe in October. It has been taken down since.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Cardin Chan runs Tetra Neon Exchange, a group dedicated to conserving condemned signs. She estimates that tens of thousands of signs, mostly neon, have been taken down in the past decade, ever since the Buildings Department started cracking down on unauthorized structures. Separately, some businesses voluntarily replaced neon with cheaper LED displays.
Ms. Chan talks to those served takedown notices, documenting the visual history of their trade. Pawnshops advertised with outlines of bats clutching coins because the word for the winged mammal sounds like “fortune.” Symbols — teeth, glasses, tea leaves — were once important for customers who could not read.
“Neon is a kind of city emblem, an embodiment of Hong Kong stories,” Ms. Chan said. “But it’s not only neon that’s undergoing a transformation. It’s the whole city, right?”
Some of Hong Kong’s defenders, who praise the city’s current incarnation, or at least its talent for reinvention, say that the neon cityscape never truly defined the territory. It was a kitschy tourist pitch, they say, from a movie set of kung fu kicks or cheongsam-clad women walking rainy streets with only the dirge of a cello to accompany them. Most Hong Kong residents lived far from the lurid glow reflected in puddles, crammed into Tetris blocks of tiled buildings that sprawled toward the border with China.
Image
Neon signs advertising night clubs, bars and a bank, in 1960s Hong Kong.
A nighttime street scene with colorful neon signs in English and Chinese, in Hong Kong, in the 1960s.Credit...Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Image
A daytime street scene showing multiple neon signs in Hong Kong.
Kowloon in 1995. Credit...Richard Baker/In Pictures, via Getty Images Images
The art of neon — bending glass tubes that are filled with neon and other inert gases — came to Hong Kong, in part, from Shanghai. When the Communists prevailed on the mainland in 1949, and over successive decades of turmoil, captains of industry and millions of other refugees fled to the British crown colony. By the 1970s, the streets of Wan Chai and Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Yau Ma Tei, thrummed with neon-tinged commerce, the electric signboards hung in profusion like L.S.D.-fueled Picassos.
It seemed fitting that in the 1980s the world’s biggest neon sign, for Marlboro cigarettes, was in Hong Kong. Some of the neon was in English, some in Arabic, some in Japanese. Most were in the traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong but not in mainland China. To fashion glass tubes into such complicated calligraphy — it takes 16 strokes to write the word “dragon” — took a painterly skill.
By the time Jive Lau was interested in the craft, only a few neon masters were still working, down from about 400 at the peak. He learned the art in Taiwan.
“I know neon is dying here,” he said, “but it’s the icon of Hong Kong, so I want to keep it alive somehow.”
Mr. Lau shapes glass tubes turned molten by flames in a government-funded arts center. Even as some of Hong Kong’s other virtues have eroded, its rulers, directed by Beijing, have seized on culture as worth keeping.
Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2023/12/05/113 ... g_720p.mp4
Jive Lau, one of only a few neon masters still working, says he knows neon is dying in Hong Kong, but he wants to keep it alive somehow.CreditCredit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
Removed neon signs piled up in a ramshackle yard.
Removed neon signs piled up in a storage site used by Tetra Neon Exchange, a group dedicated to conserving condemned signs. Tens of thousands of signs are thought to have been taken down in the past decade.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
A new cultural district has been built on land reclaimed from Victoria Harbor, and it includes a visual arts museum called M+. The museum has collected drawings of neon designs, as well as a few well-known signs, including a huge Angus cow for a steakhouse.
“We were really interested in signs that are landmarks,” said Tina Pang, the museum’s curator. “But it’s not ideal for a museum to collect them because they have become really disassociated from the whole context that makes them alive.”
Ms. Pang said that as much as safety edicts may have doomed Hong Kong’s neon, the global trend toward homogeneity, where cities all have the same stores, is also imperiling the territory’s unique streetscape.
In September, the government unveiled a campaign called Night Vibes Hong Kong “to attract citizens to go out and revitalize the city’s nightlife.” The logo for the campaign, naturally, featured neon.
For Peter Tse, a nearly 20-foot-tall neon sign symbolized the longevity of his Tai Tung bakery, which survived the Japanese occupation during World War II, when the hungry would snatch its pastries from customers.
Image
A large line of customers outside a bakery in Hong Kong.
Lining up at Tai Tung bakery to buy mooncakes. The bakery’s neon sign that lasted over 50 years was dismantled last year.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
Peter Tse inside a bakery. Workers are in the background.
Peter Tse, 90, the owner of Tai Tung bakery. Mr. Tse says he plans to install a smaller neon sign at his store because he wants Hong Kong to feel “vibrant.”Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
During Hong Kong’s boom years, Tai Tung stuffed mooncakes — made to mark the Mid-Autumn Festival — with honeyed oysters or 10 egg yolks, although, Mr. Tse admitted, 10 was nine too many.
Mr. Tse, now 90, has outlasted the bakery’s neon sign, dismantled last year. It was too big and too old, and not in compliance with regulations, Mr. Tse was told.
“It lasted over 50 years, through typhoons, no problem,” he said.
He still comes to the bakery every day. He misses his neon sign.
Mr. Tse plans to install a smaller one, even if it will cost up to $80,000 to fulfill the government’s requirements. His son has returned from Australia to guide the bakery into the fourth generation.
“I want Hong Kong to be vibrant,” Mr. Tse said. “I want it to feel like Hong Kong.”
Image
A large neon sign hangs off the side of a multistory building at night.
A restaurant sign in October.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/worl ... 778d3e6de3
It was never just about the neon, that Cubist, consumerist razzle-dazzle cantilevered over Hong Kong’s streets announcing pawnbrokers and mooncake bakers, saunas and shark’s fin soup shops.
It was never just about the signs, shining on teahouses offering the finest Iron Goddess of Mercy brew and on hotels paid for by the hour, or on Chinese medicine emporiums bursting with wooden drawers of seahorses and on mahjong parlors clickety-clacking with manicured nails hitting hard tiles.
Because while the government’s crackdown on the neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, the campaign evokes the fading of Hong Kong itself: the mournful allegory for an electric city’s decline, the literal extinguishing of its brash flash.
Nights in Hong Kong these days feel as if still in the pall of a plague, or a deep political malaise.
Many of the tourists and resident foreigners are gone, the old party spots unsullied by their beer-guzzling excess.
Hong Kongers have left, too. More than 110,000 permanent residents departed last year, and the city’s population of those worth more than $30 million shrank by 23 percent, according to government and wealth survey data.
Their departure, a quarter-century after the territory reverted from British to Chinese rule, has been spurred by the territory’s economic decline and by an acute diminishment of political rights.
Those remaining in Hong Kong are polarized between those who fear that the Communist leadership in Beijing is destroying what made the place special — including a free press and an independent judiciary — and those who think that the people here have always withstood the whims of those in charge.
ImageA nighttime street scene showing neon signs in blue, red and green hanging on buildings and across the road.
Posing for a photograph under signs for karaoke nightclubs in October in Hong Kong.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
A busy nighttime street scene in the middle of a city aglow with neon signs.
Neon signage for the Tung Fung Pawn Shop in September.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Those whims lack any whimsy.
A national security law, imposed in 2020, criminalizes acts considered threatening to the state. Students, former legislators and a former media mogul sit in prison because of it. The chief executive, as the top leader is known in business-first Hong Kong, has been placed under sanction by the U.S. Treasury Department for undermining the territory’s autonomy. Expressing public support for such sanctions could itself be a crime.
Hong Kong today can feel like a city of shadows and metaphor, where a subject as innocuous as neon takes on shades of meaning.
The Hong Kong filmmaker Anastasia Tsang’s directorial debut, “A Light Never Goes Out,” is about a family coping with the death of a neon sign maker. The film, Hong Kong’s submission for next year’s Oscars, is an elegy for a disappearing craft that could also be a requiem for something larger.
“Hong Kong people have a very strong feeling of loss,” Ms. Tsang said. “Every day you’ve got a friend or relative who’s going to emigrate. Every day you feel like some part of your flesh is being taken from your skeleton.”
Since 2021, when she shot the film, many of the neon signs she used as a backdrop have disappeared.
“The change was so drastic and fast,” she said. “There was no way to save them.”
Image
People milling about outside a bar with a neon sign at night.
A bar in the Wan Chai neighborhood.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
People walking around outside at night under neon signs on a street in Hong Kong.
A sign outside the Mido cafe in October. It has been taken down since.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Cardin Chan runs Tetra Neon Exchange, a group dedicated to conserving condemned signs. She estimates that tens of thousands of signs, mostly neon, have been taken down in the past decade, ever since the Buildings Department started cracking down on unauthorized structures. Separately, some businesses voluntarily replaced neon with cheaper LED displays.
Ms. Chan talks to those served takedown notices, documenting the visual history of their trade. Pawnshops advertised with outlines of bats clutching coins because the word for the winged mammal sounds like “fortune.” Symbols — teeth, glasses, tea leaves — were once important for customers who could not read.
“Neon is a kind of city emblem, an embodiment of Hong Kong stories,” Ms. Chan said. “But it’s not only neon that’s undergoing a transformation. It’s the whole city, right?”
Some of Hong Kong’s defenders, who praise the city’s current incarnation, or at least its talent for reinvention, say that the neon cityscape never truly defined the territory. It was a kitschy tourist pitch, they say, from a movie set of kung fu kicks or cheongsam-clad women walking rainy streets with only the dirge of a cello to accompany them. Most Hong Kong residents lived far from the lurid glow reflected in puddles, crammed into Tetris blocks of tiled buildings that sprawled toward the border with China.
Image
Neon signs advertising night clubs, bars and a bank, in 1960s Hong Kong.
A nighttime street scene with colorful neon signs in English and Chinese, in Hong Kong, in the 1960s.Credit...Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Image
A daytime street scene showing multiple neon signs in Hong Kong.
Kowloon in 1995. Credit...Richard Baker/In Pictures, via Getty Images Images
The art of neon — bending glass tubes that are filled with neon and other inert gases — came to Hong Kong, in part, from Shanghai. When the Communists prevailed on the mainland in 1949, and over successive decades of turmoil, captains of industry and millions of other refugees fled to the British crown colony. By the 1970s, the streets of Wan Chai and Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Yau Ma Tei, thrummed with neon-tinged commerce, the electric signboards hung in profusion like L.S.D.-fueled Picassos.
It seemed fitting that in the 1980s the world’s biggest neon sign, for Marlboro cigarettes, was in Hong Kong. Some of the neon was in English, some in Arabic, some in Japanese. Most were in the traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong but not in mainland China. To fashion glass tubes into such complicated calligraphy — it takes 16 strokes to write the word “dragon” — took a painterly skill.
By the time Jive Lau was interested in the craft, only a few neon masters were still working, down from about 400 at the peak. He learned the art in Taiwan.
“I know neon is dying here,” he said, “but it’s the icon of Hong Kong, so I want to keep it alive somehow.”
Mr. Lau shapes glass tubes turned molten by flames in a government-funded arts center. Even as some of Hong Kong’s other virtues have eroded, its rulers, directed by Beijing, have seized on culture as worth keeping.
Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2023/12/05/113 ... g_720p.mp4
Jive Lau, one of only a few neon masters still working, says he knows neon is dying in Hong Kong, but he wants to keep it alive somehow.CreditCredit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
Removed neon signs piled up in a ramshackle yard.
Removed neon signs piled up in a storage site used by Tetra Neon Exchange, a group dedicated to conserving condemned signs. Tens of thousands of signs are thought to have been taken down in the past decade.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
A new cultural district has been built on land reclaimed from Victoria Harbor, and it includes a visual arts museum called M+. The museum has collected drawings of neon designs, as well as a few well-known signs, including a huge Angus cow for a steakhouse.
“We were really interested in signs that are landmarks,” said Tina Pang, the museum’s curator. “But it’s not ideal for a museum to collect them because they have become really disassociated from the whole context that makes them alive.”
Ms. Pang said that as much as safety edicts may have doomed Hong Kong’s neon, the global trend toward homogeneity, where cities all have the same stores, is also imperiling the territory’s unique streetscape.
In September, the government unveiled a campaign called Night Vibes Hong Kong “to attract citizens to go out and revitalize the city’s nightlife.” The logo for the campaign, naturally, featured neon.
For Peter Tse, a nearly 20-foot-tall neon sign symbolized the longevity of his Tai Tung bakery, which survived the Japanese occupation during World War II, when the hungry would snatch its pastries from customers.
Image
A large line of customers outside a bakery in Hong Kong.
Lining up at Tai Tung bakery to buy mooncakes. The bakery’s neon sign that lasted over 50 years was dismantled last year.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Image
Peter Tse inside a bakery. Workers are in the background.
Peter Tse, 90, the owner of Tai Tung bakery. Mr. Tse says he plans to install a smaller neon sign at his store because he wants Hong Kong to feel “vibrant.”Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
During Hong Kong’s boom years, Tai Tung stuffed mooncakes — made to mark the Mid-Autumn Festival — with honeyed oysters or 10 egg yolks, although, Mr. Tse admitted, 10 was nine too many.
Mr. Tse, now 90, has outlasted the bakery’s neon sign, dismantled last year. It was too big and too old, and not in compliance with regulations, Mr. Tse was told.
“It lasted over 50 years, through typhoons, no problem,” he said.
He still comes to the bakery every day. He misses his neon sign.
Mr. Tse plans to install a smaller one, even if it will cost up to $80,000 to fulfill the government’s requirements. His son has returned from Australia to guide the bakery into the fourth generation.
“I want Hong Kong to be vibrant,” Mr. Tse said. “I want it to feel like Hong Kong.”
Image
A large neon sign hangs off the side of a multistory building at night.
A restaurant sign in October.Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/worl ... 778d3e6de3
How Taiwan’s Election Fits Into the Island’s Past, and Its Future
Tensions over the island’s status have flared repeatedly for decades, especially as Washington’s relationship with China has grown more strained.
Supporters of Lai Ching-te, who won his presidential race, at a campaign rally in Taipei on Saturday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Taiwan’s election on Saturday has big implications not only for the 23 million people who live on the island, but also for China’s superpower rivalry with the United States.
Voters chose as their next president Lai Ching-te, the current vice president, who has vowed to continue his party’s policy of protecting the island’s sovereignty. The vote is a rebuke to Beijing’s claim over Taiwan and the growing pressure it has been exerting on the island democracy.
As in all major Taiwanese elections, how to deal with China was a central focus of campaigning. The question has become only more urgent as Beijing has stepped up its military activity near Taiwan, raising the specter of a future conflict that could have implications for the United States.
What is the controversy over Taiwan’s status?
Since 1949, when the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek fled the Chinese mainland for Taiwan after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces, the island’s status and future have been disputed.
On Taiwan, Generalissimo Chiang and his Nationalist Party imposed martial law on the island for decades as they nursed dreams of reconquering the mainland. Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China, lost its membership in the United Nations in 1971, when the mainland People’s Republic of China took over the seat.
Image
A road beneath a highway overpass in a city, with buildings and a campaign poster in the distance.
A billboard in Taipei last week showing presidential candidates ahead of the election. Taiwan is functionally independent, with its own democratically elected representatives.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Democratization in the 1990s paved the way for the emergence of a Taiwanese identity separate from the Chinese one imposed by the Nationalists on the island.
Taiwan, about 80 miles off China’s coast, is functionally independent, with its own Constitution, military, democratically elected representatives, currency and customs regime. Its citizens carry green passports, which are accepted by immigration authorities in many countries. It is now seen as a leader on human rights in Asia — a sharp contrast with authoritarian China.
Only a handful of nations officially recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state, despite being treated almost as such by many countries.
What is China’s position?
China’s ruling Communist Party continues to claim sovereignty over Taiwan, even though it has never administered the island. Beijing refers to the island as “Taiwan region,” and says that any questions over its future are purely an internal Chinese affair. It demands that all countries accept its One China principle, which states that Taiwan is part of its territory.
Beijing presses its claim on Taiwan on the international stage by blocking the island’s attempts to join international bodies such as the World Health Organization. When Taiwan competes in the Olympics, it is referred to as “Chinese Taipei.”
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has said that China would continue to press for a “peaceful reunification” but reserved the right to use force if Beijing deemed it necessary.
Image
Large military ships are visible on an open ocean as helicopters fly in the air.
Chinese military helicopters flying past Pingtan Island, a part of Taiwan nearest the Chinese mainland, in 2022.Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Chinese jets and warships regularly run drills near Taiwan, eroding the informal boundary at the median of the Taiwan Strait, between the mainland and the island, which Chinese forces rarely crossed in the past.
Few analysts believe that an invasion by China is imminent, but Beijing has a variety of tools to exert leverage, in addition to military intimidation.
What is the U.S. position on Taiwan?
The United States is the most important backer of Taiwan’s security, and the island has been a flashpoint between the United States and China since the early years of the Cold War.
Two crises in the 1950s nearly led to military conflict between China and the United States, and Washington for decades backed the Chiang government in Taiwan.
When the United States recognized Communist-ruled China in 1979, Washington adopted a deliberately ambiguous “one China” policy: acknowledging, but not endorsing, Beijing’s position that its territory includes Taiwan.
In the decades since, the United States has maintained ties with Taiwan, including through weapons sales, and the periodic tensions over the island have not derailed the economic relationship between the United States and China.
Why is Taiwan a geopolitical flashpoint?
On Saturday, asked for a response to Taiwan’s election of Mr. Lai as president, President Biden reiterated the longstanding U.S. position that the country does not support the independence of Taiwan, remarks that appeared aimed at reassuring China.
But he has previously said he would defend the democratic island militarily if it were invaded by China, remarks that were a departure from the official U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” over how it would respond if China invaded.
The issue of Taiwan has flared again and again, especially as relations between Washington and Beijing have become strained in recent years.
In 2022, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi infuriated Beijing with a trip to Taipei, and a visit to the United States last year by Mr. Lai drew intense scrutiny. Chinese warplanes have tested Taiwan’s defenses, and American warships have defied Chinese pressure in the Taiwan Strait.
Who is Taiwan’s president-elect?
Mr. Lai is a member of the governing Democratic Progressive Party, or D.P.P., which has long rejected Beijing’s demands for unification. His main rival was a member of the opposition Nationalist Party, which has vowed to expand trade ties and restart talks with China.
Image
Mr. Lai stands at a lectern, one hand raised. He and a crowd of people behind him are all wearing matching green jackets.
President-elect Lai in Taipei on Saturday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Now president-elect, Mr. Lai has promised to continue the approach of President Tsai Ing-wen: keeping Beijing at arm’s length while seeking to avoid conflict, and strengthening ties with the United States and other democracies.
“We are telling the international community that between democracy and authoritarianism, we will stand on the side of democracy,” Mr. Lai said in his victory speech on Saturday, promising to defend Taiwan’s identity.
Yet when he takes office in May for a four-year term, Mr. Lai will face difficult questions about how to handle Taiwan’s dealings with Beijing. Mr. Lai has said that dialogue with Beijing is possible if Taiwan is treated with “equal respect.”
Polls show that most Taiwanese people support maintaining the island’s ambiguous status quo instead of pursing outright independence, risking possible retaliation by Beijing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Supporters of Lai Ching-te, who won his presidential race, at a campaign rally in Taipei on Saturday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Taiwan’s election on Saturday has big implications not only for the 23 million people who live on the island, but also for China’s superpower rivalry with the United States.
Voters chose as their next president Lai Ching-te, the current vice president, who has vowed to continue his party’s policy of protecting the island’s sovereignty. The vote is a rebuke to Beijing’s claim over Taiwan and the growing pressure it has been exerting on the island democracy.
As in all major Taiwanese elections, how to deal with China was a central focus of campaigning. The question has become only more urgent as Beijing has stepped up its military activity near Taiwan, raising the specter of a future conflict that could have implications for the United States.
What is the controversy over Taiwan’s status?
Since 1949, when the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek fled the Chinese mainland for Taiwan after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces, the island’s status and future have been disputed.
On Taiwan, Generalissimo Chiang and his Nationalist Party imposed martial law on the island for decades as they nursed dreams of reconquering the mainland. Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China, lost its membership in the United Nations in 1971, when the mainland People’s Republic of China took over the seat.
Image
A road beneath a highway overpass in a city, with buildings and a campaign poster in the distance.
A billboard in Taipei last week showing presidential candidates ahead of the election. Taiwan is functionally independent, with its own democratically elected representatives.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Democratization in the 1990s paved the way for the emergence of a Taiwanese identity separate from the Chinese one imposed by the Nationalists on the island.
Taiwan, about 80 miles off China’s coast, is functionally independent, with its own Constitution, military, democratically elected representatives, currency and customs regime. Its citizens carry green passports, which are accepted by immigration authorities in many countries. It is now seen as a leader on human rights in Asia — a sharp contrast with authoritarian China.
Only a handful of nations officially recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state, despite being treated almost as such by many countries.
What is China’s position?
China’s ruling Communist Party continues to claim sovereignty over Taiwan, even though it has never administered the island. Beijing refers to the island as “Taiwan region,” and says that any questions over its future are purely an internal Chinese affair. It demands that all countries accept its One China principle, which states that Taiwan is part of its territory.
Beijing presses its claim on Taiwan on the international stage by blocking the island’s attempts to join international bodies such as the World Health Organization. When Taiwan competes in the Olympics, it is referred to as “Chinese Taipei.”
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has said that China would continue to press for a “peaceful reunification” but reserved the right to use force if Beijing deemed it necessary.
Image
Large military ships are visible on an open ocean as helicopters fly in the air.
Chinese military helicopters flying past Pingtan Island, a part of Taiwan nearest the Chinese mainland, in 2022.Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Chinese jets and warships regularly run drills near Taiwan, eroding the informal boundary at the median of the Taiwan Strait, between the mainland and the island, which Chinese forces rarely crossed in the past.
Few analysts believe that an invasion by China is imminent, but Beijing has a variety of tools to exert leverage, in addition to military intimidation.
What is the U.S. position on Taiwan?
The United States is the most important backer of Taiwan’s security, and the island has been a flashpoint between the United States and China since the early years of the Cold War.
Two crises in the 1950s nearly led to military conflict between China and the United States, and Washington for decades backed the Chiang government in Taiwan.
When the United States recognized Communist-ruled China in 1979, Washington adopted a deliberately ambiguous “one China” policy: acknowledging, but not endorsing, Beijing’s position that its territory includes Taiwan.
In the decades since, the United States has maintained ties with Taiwan, including through weapons sales, and the periodic tensions over the island have not derailed the economic relationship between the United States and China.
Why is Taiwan a geopolitical flashpoint?
On Saturday, asked for a response to Taiwan’s election of Mr. Lai as president, President Biden reiterated the longstanding U.S. position that the country does not support the independence of Taiwan, remarks that appeared aimed at reassuring China.
But he has previously said he would defend the democratic island militarily if it were invaded by China, remarks that were a departure from the official U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” over how it would respond if China invaded.
The issue of Taiwan has flared again and again, especially as relations between Washington and Beijing have become strained in recent years.
In 2022, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi infuriated Beijing with a trip to Taipei, and a visit to the United States last year by Mr. Lai drew intense scrutiny. Chinese warplanes have tested Taiwan’s defenses, and American warships have defied Chinese pressure in the Taiwan Strait.
Who is Taiwan’s president-elect?
Mr. Lai is a member of the governing Democratic Progressive Party, or D.P.P., which has long rejected Beijing’s demands for unification. His main rival was a member of the opposition Nationalist Party, which has vowed to expand trade ties and restart talks with China.
Image
Mr. Lai stands at a lectern, one hand raised. He and a crowd of people behind him are all wearing matching green jackets.
President-elect Lai in Taipei on Saturday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Now president-elect, Mr. Lai has promised to continue the approach of President Tsai Ing-wen: keeping Beijing at arm’s length while seeking to avoid conflict, and strengthening ties with the United States and other democracies.
“We are telling the international community that between democracy and authoritarianism, we will stand on the side of democracy,” Mr. Lai said in his victory speech on Saturday, promising to defend Taiwan’s identity.
Yet when he takes office in May for a four-year term, Mr. Lai will face difficult questions about how to handle Taiwan’s dealings with Beijing. Mr. Lai has said that dialogue with Beijing is possible if Taiwan is treated with “equal respect.”
Polls show that most Taiwanese people support maintaining the island’s ambiguous status quo instead of pursing outright independence, risking possible retaliation by Beijing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: ASIA
A Peaceful Solution on Taiwan Is Slipping Away
Conflict between China and the United States just got a little more likely.
On Saturday, Taiwanese voters handed the Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which asserts that Taiwan is already independent from China and should stay that way, an unprecedented third consecutive presidential victory. In doing so, the island’s people shrugged off ominous warnings by China that a win by President-elect Lai Ching-te — considered by Beijing to be a dangerous Taiwan independence advocate — could trigger a war.
The result should lay to rest any doubt about the direction in which Taiwan is going. Determined to maintain their autonomy, the people of Taiwan are drifting further from China and won’t come back voluntarily, elevating military action as one of the only options left for China to effect the unification with Taiwan that it has long sought.
This hardening in Taiwanese attitudes has been a long time coming. In 1949, China’s former Kuomintang (K.M.T.) government lost a civil war against Communist Chinese forces and fled to Taiwan, dividing the two sides. For decades, the K.M.T. clung to an official policy of eventual unification with the mainland, and the question of whether Taiwan is part of China or its own distinct and self-ruled polity has dominated island politics ever since.
In 1994, more Taiwanese considered themselves exclusively Chinese than Taiwanese, and more favored moving toward unification with China than toward independence. Beijing courted such sentiments by forging close economic links with Taiwan. But attitudes have inexorably shifted as Taiwan blossomed into a democratic and economic success. Now, with China’s economy stagnating, it has fewer carrots to offer, and repressive Chinese actions like its crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms have further alienated Taiwan. As a result, President Xi Jinping of China has increasingly turned to wielding the stick — economic coercion, military threats and an online disinformation campaign in Taiwan — to pressure the island's people into unification.
It is now clear that this strategy has failed spectacularly. Today, nearly two-thirds of Taiwan’s people consider themselves exclusively Taiwanese, versus only 2.5 percent who identify as exclusively Chinese. Almost 50 percent of the island’s 24 million residents prefer future Taiwanese independence over maintaining the current ambiguous status quo (27 percent) or unification with China (12 percent).
There are reasons Mr. Xi might take modest comfort from the election result. The D.P.P.’s margin of victory in the presidential race was smaller than four years ago and it lost its legislative majority. But the weaker D.P.P. showing does not reflect a softening of independence sentiment in Taiwan. Rather, it is probably due more to bread-and-butter issues like stagnant wage growth and soaring housing prices, which loomed large in campaigning and public opinion surveys, as well as with public fatigue with the party after eight years in power.
Moving forward, Mr. Xi no longer has a reliable partner in Taiwan to negotiate unification with. Even the K.M.T., now in the opposition and more Beijing-friendly, knows that it must cater to an independence-leaning electorate. On the campaign trail, its presidential candidate, Hou Yu-ih, explicitly ruled out unification talks with China or a return to the engagement policies previously favored by the party, pledging instead to bolster Taiwan’s military in partnership with the United States, Japan and other democracies.
In this climate, the United States will need, more than ever, to strike a careful balance between deterring China from invading Taiwan and reassuring Beijing that Washington does not support the island’s independence. But that will be complicated by the divisive election campaign that America is now entering, in which candidates are likely to engage in tough talk on China that could provoke Beijing. Despite the posturing, election-year politicking may actually undermine U.S. readiness for a conflict: Partisanship last year held up military spending bills and hundreds of military leadership appointments, constraining the Pentagon’s ability to build bases, buy weapons or expand the U.S. industrial base at anything close to China’s clip.
President Biden has said the United States would help defend Taiwan in the event of an unprovoked attack, but with U.S. military supplies already constrained by the support provided to Ukraine, American forces could run out of missiles after a few weeks of high-intensity combat with China. Washington may also struggle to forge an effective coalition to deter or defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan if allies, put off by U.S. political dysfunction and a possible return to the “America First” foreign policy of Donald Trump, hesitate to join in U.S. military preparations or economic sanctions.
There is a belief that the United States can head off the possibility of Chinese aggression by voicing its opposition to Taiwan independence. The idea is that this will ease concerns in Beijing, which, beset by an ailing economy, will want to avoid the massive economic, social and diplomatic disruptions of starting a war. But Taiwan provokes China simply by being what it is: A prosperous and free society. Taiwan’s blooming national identity threatens China with the prospect of permanent territorial dismemberment; and Taiwan’s elections, rule of law and free press make a mockery of Beijing’s claim that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. America’s words can’t change any of that.
Chinese law explicitly states that Beijing may use force if possibilities for peaceful unification are “completely exhausted.” Because of politics in Taiwan and the United States, those possibilities are dwindling.
Taiwanese and American political leaders need to recognize this stark reality, do far more to improve military deterrence, start national conversations about the growing threat of war and work toward public unity about how to confront that threat, all while avoiding rhetoric or actions that needlessly throw fuel on the fire.
If they fail to seize this opportunity, they may not get another chance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Conflict between China and the United States just got a little more likely.
On Saturday, Taiwanese voters handed the Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which asserts that Taiwan is already independent from China and should stay that way, an unprecedented third consecutive presidential victory. In doing so, the island’s people shrugged off ominous warnings by China that a win by President-elect Lai Ching-te — considered by Beijing to be a dangerous Taiwan independence advocate — could trigger a war.
The result should lay to rest any doubt about the direction in which Taiwan is going. Determined to maintain their autonomy, the people of Taiwan are drifting further from China and won’t come back voluntarily, elevating military action as one of the only options left for China to effect the unification with Taiwan that it has long sought.
This hardening in Taiwanese attitudes has been a long time coming. In 1949, China’s former Kuomintang (K.M.T.) government lost a civil war against Communist Chinese forces and fled to Taiwan, dividing the two sides. For decades, the K.M.T. clung to an official policy of eventual unification with the mainland, and the question of whether Taiwan is part of China or its own distinct and self-ruled polity has dominated island politics ever since.
In 1994, more Taiwanese considered themselves exclusively Chinese than Taiwanese, and more favored moving toward unification with China than toward independence. Beijing courted such sentiments by forging close economic links with Taiwan. But attitudes have inexorably shifted as Taiwan blossomed into a democratic and economic success. Now, with China’s economy stagnating, it has fewer carrots to offer, and repressive Chinese actions like its crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms have further alienated Taiwan. As a result, President Xi Jinping of China has increasingly turned to wielding the stick — economic coercion, military threats and an online disinformation campaign in Taiwan — to pressure the island's people into unification.
It is now clear that this strategy has failed spectacularly. Today, nearly two-thirds of Taiwan’s people consider themselves exclusively Taiwanese, versus only 2.5 percent who identify as exclusively Chinese. Almost 50 percent of the island’s 24 million residents prefer future Taiwanese independence over maintaining the current ambiguous status quo (27 percent) or unification with China (12 percent).
There are reasons Mr. Xi might take modest comfort from the election result. The D.P.P.’s margin of victory in the presidential race was smaller than four years ago and it lost its legislative majority. But the weaker D.P.P. showing does not reflect a softening of independence sentiment in Taiwan. Rather, it is probably due more to bread-and-butter issues like stagnant wage growth and soaring housing prices, which loomed large in campaigning and public opinion surveys, as well as with public fatigue with the party after eight years in power.
Moving forward, Mr. Xi no longer has a reliable partner in Taiwan to negotiate unification with. Even the K.M.T., now in the opposition and more Beijing-friendly, knows that it must cater to an independence-leaning electorate. On the campaign trail, its presidential candidate, Hou Yu-ih, explicitly ruled out unification talks with China or a return to the engagement policies previously favored by the party, pledging instead to bolster Taiwan’s military in partnership with the United States, Japan and other democracies.
In this climate, the United States will need, more than ever, to strike a careful balance between deterring China from invading Taiwan and reassuring Beijing that Washington does not support the island’s independence. But that will be complicated by the divisive election campaign that America is now entering, in which candidates are likely to engage in tough talk on China that could provoke Beijing. Despite the posturing, election-year politicking may actually undermine U.S. readiness for a conflict: Partisanship last year held up military spending bills and hundreds of military leadership appointments, constraining the Pentagon’s ability to build bases, buy weapons or expand the U.S. industrial base at anything close to China’s clip.
President Biden has said the United States would help defend Taiwan in the event of an unprovoked attack, but with U.S. military supplies already constrained by the support provided to Ukraine, American forces could run out of missiles after a few weeks of high-intensity combat with China. Washington may also struggle to forge an effective coalition to deter or defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan if allies, put off by U.S. political dysfunction and a possible return to the “America First” foreign policy of Donald Trump, hesitate to join in U.S. military preparations or economic sanctions.
There is a belief that the United States can head off the possibility of Chinese aggression by voicing its opposition to Taiwan independence. The idea is that this will ease concerns in Beijing, which, beset by an ailing economy, will want to avoid the massive economic, social and diplomatic disruptions of starting a war. But Taiwan provokes China simply by being what it is: A prosperous and free society. Taiwan’s blooming national identity threatens China with the prospect of permanent territorial dismemberment; and Taiwan’s elections, rule of law and free press make a mockery of Beijing’s claim that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. America’s words can’t change any of that.
Chinese law explicitly states that Beijing may use force if possibilities for peaceful unification are “completely exhausted.” Because of politics in Taiwan and the United States, those possibilities are dwindling.
Taiwanese and American political leaders need to recognize this stark reality, do far more to improve military deterrence, start national conversations about the growing threat of war and work toward public unity about how to confront that threat, all while avoiding rhetoric or actions that needlessly throw fuel on the fire.
If they fail to seize this opportunity, they may not get another chance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
SLIM achieves a lunar soft landing, but its life on the moon may be short.
People at a public viewing event of the SLIM mission in Sagamihara, Japan, reacted as the spacecraft ended its descent. “We believe the soft landing was successful,” Hitoshi Kuninaka, a JAXA official, said.Credit...Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
A Japanese robotic spacecraft successfully set down on the moon on Friday — but its solar panels were not generating power, which will cut the length of time it will be able to operate to a few hours.
With this achievement, Japan is now the fifth country to send a spacecraft that made a soft landing on the moon.
For JAXA, Japan’s space agency which currently operates a variety of robotic science missions in space, this was the first time it had tried to set down on a planetary body elsewhere in the solar system. The spacecraft, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was intended to demonstrate precision landing, within a football field of a targeted destination rather than an uncertainty of miles that most landers are capable of.
The technology could also be useful for future missions like those in NASA’s Artemis program. Japan is a partner in that program, which will send astronauts back to the moon in the coming years.
At 10 a.m. Eastern time on Friday — midnight in Japan, the beginning of Saturday — SLIM fired its engines to begin its descent from lunar orbit. At 10:20, its main landing gear touched the surface near a small crater named Shioli in the equatorial region of the moon’s near side.
The surface there is angled about 15 degrees, which posed difficulties for landing without tipping over. The designers of SLIM thus decided to tilt the spacecraft to one side just before landing, and then after the initial contact with the ground, SLIM tipped forward onto its front legs.
Immediately after the landing, SLIM was able to send radio signals back to Earth. But the commentator on the webcast at that time said repeatedly, “We are still checking the status.” The webcast ended without disclosing SLIM’s fate.
Image
A computer-generated image shows a spacecraft hovering over the surface of the moon with its thrusters burning a bluish flame as a small robot launches from the spacecraft.
An artist’s concept of the Japanese space agency’s SLIM spacecraft landing on the moon and deploying one of its Lunar Excursion Vehicles.Credit...JAXA/EPA, via Shutterstock
At a news conference a couple of hours later, JAXA officials said the soft landing succeeded but revealed the solar panel problem.
They said it was possible that the panels were just pointing in the wrong direction, and they could generate energy later when the sun was shining at a different angle. The landing satisfied the minimal requirements for mission success, officials said. If the landing occurred within 100 meters of the target, that would constitute full success, although it will take a month of analysis to determine how close SLIM was.
Without working solar panels, the spacecraft is operating using its battery. To conserve energy, the spacecraft’s heaters have been shut off, JAXA officials said.
During the limited time, mission managers were prioritizing the retrieval of navigation data acquired during the landing.
Two small rovers were successfully deployed from the lander just before landing.
Deploying such pinpoint landing capabilities in the future would allow spacecraft to aim closer to intriguing places like craters, instead of large flat plains.
Because the moon has no global positioning satellites or radio beacons, spacecraft have to figure out by themselves exactly where they are. Radar pings informed SLIM how high it was and how fast it was moving. A camera taking pictures of the landscape below helped the spacecraft determine its location by matching the pattern of craters it saw with maps stored in its memory.
Vision-based systems on spacecraft have been limited because they use special computer chips that are hardened against the strong radiation of deep space. Such chips are generally one or two generations behind top-of-the-line chips, with only about one one-hundredth the processing power, JAXA said in a press kit for the SLIM mission.
JAXA developed image-processing algorithms that can run quickly on the slower space chips.
The images allowed SLIM to avoid hazardous rocks and other obstacles during its final approach.
Image
A computer-generated image of two small, almost toylike robots on the lunar surface.
Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon carried two rovers, Lunar Excursion Vehicle 1, left, and Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2.Credit...JAXA
The two rovers deployed by SLIM, called Lunar Excursion Vehicle 1 and Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2, were unconventional. One used a hopping mechanism and carried a thermometer, a radiation monitor and an instrument for measuring the slope and elevation.
The second rover was spherical, about the size of a baseball and weighing a half-pound. Its two halves were to pull apart, allowing the rover to crawl along the surface for a couple of hours until its battery was exhausted. JAXA developed this rover in cooperation with Doshisha University and Tomy, a toy company.
LEV-1 was able to communicate directly with Earth, and LEV-2 communicated via LEV-1. Data from the two rovers was being sent back to Earth, JAXA said.
Even with limited power, an instrument on the lander attempted to analyze the composition of rocks around the lander.
Over the past 11 years, a parade of spacecraft have headed toward the moon. Less than half of them made it to their destination intact.
China is the only country with a perfect record landing its robotic spacecraft on the moon — three successes in three attempts. India succeeded last year after an earlier attempt in 2019 crashed. Other attempts by Russia, a Japanese private company and an Israeli nonprofit all failed.
The latest failure, a spacecraft built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, never even made it to the moon because of a malfunction in its propulsion system shortly after reaching orbit.
Other spacecraft will try to reach the moon this year. A second American company, Intuitive Machines of Houston, has a contract to take NASA experiments to the moon. It is aiming to launch its lander as soon as the middle of next month. China may also attempt a robotic landing mission to the lunar far side this year.
Japan has future lunar plans of its own. It is working with India on launching a robotic rover, LUPEX, as soon as next year. Japanese astronauts may head to the moon in the future as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/12 ... 778d3e6de3
Re: ASIA
Fear and Ambition Propel Xi’s Nuclear Acceleration
China’s leader built up a nuclear arsenal, steeling for a growing rivalry with the United States. Now China is exploring how to wield its newfound strength.
A military parade in Beijing in 2019. As China’s nuclear options have grown, its military strategists are looking to nuclear weapons as not just a defensive shield, but as a potential sword.Credit...Kyodo News, via Getty Images
Nineteen days after taking power as China’s leader, Xi Jinping convened the generals overseeing the country’s nuclear missiles and issued a blunt demand. China had to be ready for possible confrontation with a formidable adversary, he said, signaling that he wanted a more potent nuclear capability to counter the threat.
Their force, he told the generals, was a “pillar of our status as a great power.” They must, Mr. Xi said, advance “strategic plans for responding under the most complicated and difficult conditions to military intervention by a powerful enemy,” according to an official internal summary of his speech in December 2012 to China’s nuclear and conventional missile arm, then called the Second Artillery Corps, which was verified by The New York Times.
Publicly, Mr. Xi’s remarks on nuclear matters have been sparse and formulaic. But his comments behind closed doors, revealed in the speech, show that anxiety and ambition have driven his transformative buildup of China’s nuclear weapons arsenal in the past decade.
From those early days, Mr. Xi signaled that a robust nuclear force was needed to mark China’s ascent as a great power. He also reflected fears that China’s relatively modest nuclear weaponry could be vulnerable against the United States — the “powerful enemy” — with its ring of Asian allies.
Now, as China’s nuclear options have grown, its military strategists are looking to nuclear weapons as not only a defensive shield, but as a potential sword — to intimidate and subjugate adversaries. Even without firing a nuclear weapon, China could mobilize or brandish its missiles, bombers and submarines to warn other countries against the risks of escalating into brinkmanship.
Image
Xi Jinping walks by a group of people, many of them wearing military uniforms.
Since his first days as China’s top leader, Xi Jinping has signaled that a robust nuclear force was needed to mark China’s ascent as a great power.Credit...Li Gang/Xinhua, via Getty Images
“A powerful strategic deterrent capability can force the enemy to pull back from rash action, subduing them without going to war,” Chen Jiaqi, a researcher at China’s National Defense University, wrote in a paper in 2021. “Whoever masters more advanced technologies, and develops strategic deterrent weapons that can leave others behind it in the dust, will have a powerful voice in times of peace and hold the initiative in times of war.”
This article draws on Mr. Xi’s internal speeches and dozens of People’s Liberation Army reports and studies, many in technical journals, to trace the motivations of China’s nuclear buildup. Some have been cited in recent studies of China’s nuclear posture; many others have not been brought up before.
Mr. Xi has expanded the country’s atomic arsenal faster than any other Chinese leader, bringing his country closer to the big league of the United States and Russia. He has doubled the size of China’s arsenal to roughly 500 warheads, and at this rate, by 2035, it could have around 1,500 warheads — roughly as many as Washington and Moscow each now deploy, U.S. officials have said. (The United States and Russia each have thousands more warheads mothballed.)
China is also developing an increasingly sophisticated array of missiles, submarines, bombers and hypersonic vehicles that can deliver nuclear strikes. It has upgraded its nuclear test site in its far western Xinjiang region, clearing the way for possible new underground tests, perhaps if a superpower arms race breaks out.
Image
A submarine rises from the water. It is flying Chinese flags.
China is developing an increasingly sophisticated array of missiles, submarines, bombers and hypersonic vehicles that can deliver nuclear strikes.Credit...Jason Lee/Reuters
A major shift in China’s nuclear power and doctrine could deeply complicate its competition with the United States. China’s expansion has already set off intense debate in Washington about how to respond, and it has cast greater doubt on the future of major arms control treaties. All while U.S.-Russian antagonism is also raising the prospect of a new era of nuclear rivalry.
Mr. Xi and President Biden have calmed rancor since last year, but finding nuclear stability may be elusive if Beijing stays outside of major arms control treaties while Washington squares off against both Beijing and Moscow.
Crucially, China’s growing nuclear options could shape the future of Taiwan — the island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory and that relies on the United States for security backing. In the coming years, Beijing may gain confidence that it can limit the intervention of Washington and its allies in any conflict.
In deciding Taiwan’s fate, China’s “trump card” could be a “powerful strategic deterrence force” to warn that “any external intervention will not succeed and cannot possibly succeed,” Ge Tengfei, a professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology, wrote in a Communist Party journal in 2022.
Xi’s Nuclear Revolution
Since China first tested an atomic bomb in 1964, its leaders have said that they would never be “the first to use nuclear weapons” in a war. China, they reasoned, needed only a relatively modest set of nuclear weapons to credibly threaten potential adversaries that if their country was ever attacked with nuclear arms, it could wipe out enemy cities.
“In the long run, China’s nuclear weapons are just symbolic,” said Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader, in 1983, explaining Beijing’s stance to the visiting Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. “If China spent too much energy on them, we’d weaken ourselves.”
Image
People walk past tanks on display in a museum. Behind them is a large photo of a mushroom cloud during a nuclear test.
A display of one of China’s nuclear tests, at a Beijing museum in 1992.Credit...Forrest Anderson/Getty Images
Even as China upgraded its conventional forces starting in the 1990s, its nuclear arsenal grew incrementally. When Mr. Xi took over as leader in 2012, China had about 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States.
China was already increasingly challenging its neighbors in territorial disputes and saw danger in the Obama administration’s efforts to shore up U.S. power across the Asia-Pacific. In a speech in late 2012, Mr. Xi warned his commanders that the United States was “stepping up strategic containment and encirclement around us.”
Beijing worried, too, that its nuclear deterrent was weakening. Chinese military analysts warned that the People’s Liberation Army’s missiles were growing vulnerable to detection and destruction as the United States made advances in military technology and built alliances in Asia.
Official Chinese accounts of history reinforced that fear. People’s Liberation Army studies often dwell on the Korean War and crises over Taiwan in the 1950s, when American leaders hinted that they could drop atomic bombs on China. Such memories have entrenched views in Beijing that the United States is inclined to use “nuclear blackmail.”
Image
In a black and white picture taken during the Korean War, U.S. soldiers riding on a vehicle look at smoke rising in the distance in snowy hills.
People’s Liberation Army studies often dwell on the Korean War, above, and crises over Taiwan in the 1950s, when American leaders hinted that they could drop atomic bombs on China.Credit...Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
“We must have sharp weapons to protect ourselves and killer maces that others will fear,” Mr. Xi told People’s Liberation Army armaments officers in late 2014.
Late in 2015, he took a big step in upgrading China’s nuclear force. In his green suit as chairman of China’s military, he presided over a ceremony in which the Second Artillery Corps, the custodian of China’s nuclear missiles, was reborn as the Rocket Force, elevated to a service alongside the army, navy and air force.
The Rocket Force’s mission, Mr. Xi told its commanders, included “enhancing a credible and reliable nuclear deterrent and nuclear counterstrike capability” — that is, an ability to survive an initial attack and hit back with devastating force.
From Tunnels to Silo Fields
China is not only on a quest for more warheads. It is also focused on concealing and shielding the warheads, and on being able to launch them more quickly and from land, sea or air. The newly elevated Rocket Force has added a powerful voice to that effort.
Researchers from the Rocket Force wrote in a study in 2017 that China should emulate the United States and seek “nuclear forces sufficient to balance the new global situation, and ensure that our country can win the initiative in future wars.”
China’s nuclear deterrent long relied heavily on units dug into tunnels deep in remote mountains. Soldiers are trained to go into hiding in tunnels for weeks or months, deprived of sunlight, regular sleep and fresh air while they try to stay undetected by enemies, according to medical studies of their grueling routine.
“If war comes,” said a Chinese state television report in 2018, “this nuclear arsenal that shuttles underground will break cover where the enemy least expects and fire off its missiles.”
The Rocket Force expanded quickly, adding at least 10 new brigades, an increase of about one-third, within a few years, according to a study published by the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. China has also added more road- and rail-mobile missile launchers to try to outfox American satellites and other detection technology.
Chinese fears of American abilities have nonetheless remained. Even as China was rolling out road-mobile missiles, some experts from the People’s Liberation Army argued that they could be tracked by ever more sophisticated satellites.
A solution, some analysts from the Rocket Force argued in 2021, was to also build clusters of launch silos for missiles, forcing U.S. forces to try to detect which ones housed real missiles and which ones had dummies, making it “even harder to wipe them out in one blow.”
Image
A photo from a satellite shows straight lines in an area resembling a desert.
A satellite image provided by Planet Labs Inc. shows what analysts believed was a field of intercontinental ballistic missile silos near Hami, in western China, in 2021.Credit...Planet Labs Inc., via Associated Press
Other Chinese studies made similar arguments for silos, and Mr. Xi and his commanders seemed to heed them. The boldest move so far in his nuclear expansion has been three vast fields of 320 or so missile silos built in northern China. The silos, safely distant from U.S. conventional missiles, can hold missiles capable of hitting the United States.
The expansion, though, has hit turbulence. Last year, Mr. Xi abruptly replaced the Rocket Force’s two top commanders, an unexplained shake-up that suggests its growth has been troubled by corruption. This year, nine senior Chinese military officers were expelled from the legislature, indicating a widening investigation.
The upheaval could slow China’s nuclear weapons plans in the short term, but Mr. Xi’s long-term ambitions appear set. At a Communist Party congress in 2022, he declared that China must keep building its “strategic deterrence forces.”
And even with hundreds of new silos, Chinese military analysts find new sources of worry. Last year, Chinese rocket engineers proposed reinforcing silos to better shield missiles from precision attacks. “Only that can make sure that the our side is able to deliver a lethal counterstrike in the event of a nuclear attack,” they wrote.
Tough Decisions
Chinese leaders have said that they want peaceful unification with Taiwan, but may use force if they deem that other options are spent. If Beijing moved to seize Taiwan, the United States could intervene to defend the island, and China may calculate that its expanded nuclear arsenal could present a potent warning.
Chinese military officers have issued blustery warnings of nuclear retaliation over Taiwan before. Now, China’s threats could carry more weight.
Image
Soldiers stand near what appears to be a rocket in a wooded area.
A photograph released by Chinese state media in 2023 said to show a rocket test. The country’s Rocket Force has been elevated to a service alongside the army, navy and air force.Credit...Liu Mingsong/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Its expanding array of missiles, submarines and bombers could convey credible threats to not just cities in the continental United States, but to American military bases on, say, Japan or Guam. The risk of a conventional clash spiraling into nuclear confrontation could hang over decisions. Chinese military analysts have argued that Russian nuclear warnings constrained NATO countries in their response to the invasion of Ukraine.
“The ladder of escalation that they can apply now is much more nuanced,” said Bates Gill, the executive director of Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “The implicit message is not just: ‘We could nuke Los Angeles.’ Now it’s also: ‘We could wipe out Guam, and you don’t want to risk escalation if we do.’”
Beijing’s options include 200 or so DF-26 missile launchers, which can swap between conventional and nuclear warheads and hit targets across Asia. Chinese official media have described Rocket Force units practicing such swaps, and boasted during a military parade about the missile’s dual convention-nuclear role — the kind of disclosure meant to spook rivals.
In a real confrontation, Washington could face difficult decisions over whether potential targets for strikes in China may include nuclear-armed missile units, and in an extreme whether an incoming DF-26 missile may be nuclear.
“That’s going to be a really tough decision for any U.S. president — to trust that whatever advice he’s getting is not risking nuclear escalation for the sake of Taiwan,” said John K. Culver, a former C.I.A. senior analyst who studies the Chinese military. “As soon as the U.S. starts bombing mainland China, no one is going to be able to tell the U.S. president with conviction exactly where China’s line is.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
China’s leader built up a nuclear arsenal, steeling for a growing rivalry with the United States. Now China is exploring how to wield its newfound strength.
A military parade in Beijing in 2019. As China’s nuclear options have grown, its military strategists are looking to nuclear weapons as not just a defensive shield, but as a potential sword.Credit...Kyodo News, via Getty Images
Nineteen days after taking power as China’s leader, Xi Jinping convened the generals overseeing the country’s nuclear missiles and issued a blunt demand. China had to be ready for possible confrontation with a formidable adversary, he said, signaling that he wanted a more potent nuclear capability to counter the threat.
Their force, he told the generals, was a “pillar of our status as a great power.” They must, Mr. Xi said, advance “strategic plans for responding under the most complicated and difficult conditions to military intervention by a powerful enemy,” according to an official internal summary of his speech in December 2012 to China’s nuclear and conventional missile arm, then called the Second Artillery Corps, which was verified by The New York Times.
Publicly, Mr. Xi’s remarks on nuclear matters have been sparse and formulaic. But his comments behind closed doors, revealed in the speech, show that anxiety and ambition have driven his transformative buildup of China’s nuclear weapons arsenal in the past decade.
From those early days, Mr. Xi signaled that a robust nuclear force was needed to mark China’s ascent as a great power. He also reflected fears that China’s relatively modest nuclear weaponry could be vulnerable against the United States — the “powerful enemy” — with its ring of Asian allies.
Now, as China’s nuclear options have grown, its military strategists are looking to nuclear weapons as not only a defensive shield, but as a potential sword — to intimidate and subjugate adversaries. Even without firing a nuclear weapon, China could mobilize or brandish its missiles, bombers and submarines to warn other countries against the risks of escalating into brinkmanship.
Image
Xi Jinping walks by a group of people, many of them wearing military uniforms.
Since his first days as China’s top leader, Xi Jinping has signaled that a robust nuclear force was needed to mark China’s ascent as a great power.Credit...Li Gang/Xinhua, via Getty Images
“A powerful strategic deterrent capability can force the enemy to pull back from rash action, subduing them without going to war,” Chen Jiaqi, a researcher at China’s National Defense University, wrote in a paper in 2021. “Whoever masters more advanced technologies, and develops strategic deterrent weapons that can leave others behind it in the dust, will have a powerful voice in times of peace and hold the initiative in times of war.”
This article draws on Mr. Xi’s internal speeches and dozens of People’s Liberation Army reports and studies, many in technical journals, to trace the motivations of China’s nuclear buildup. Some have been cited in recent studies of China’s nuclear posture; many others have not been brought up before.
Mr. Xi has expanded the country’s atomic arsenal faster than any other Chinese leader, bringing his country closer to the big league of the United States and Russia. He has doubled the size of China’s arsenal to roughly 500 warheads, and at this rate, by 2035, it could have around 1,500 warheads — roughly as many as Washington and Moscow each now deploy, U.S. officials have said. (The United States and Russia each have thousands more warheads mothballed.)
China is also developing an increasingly sophisticated array of missiles, submarines, bombers and hypersonic vehicles that can deliver nuclear strikes. It has upgraded its nuclear test site in its far western Xinjiang region, clearing the way for possible new underground tests, perhaps if a superpower arms race breaks out.
Image
A submarine rises from the water. It is flying Chinese flags.
China is developing an increasingly sophisticated array of missiles, submarines, bombers and hypersonic vehicles that can deliver nuclear strikes.Credit...Jason Lee/Reuters
A major shift in China’s nuclear power and doctrine could deeply complicate its competition with the United States. China’s expansion has already set off intense debate in Washington about how to respond, and it has cast greater doubt on the future of major arms control treaties. All while U.S.-Russian antagonism is also raising the prospect of a new era of nuclear rivalry.
Mr. Xi and President Biden have calmed rancor since last year, but finding nuclear stability may be elusive if Beijing stays outside of major arms control treaties while Washington squares off against both Beijing and Moscow.
Crucially, China’s growing nuclear options could shape the future of Taiwan — the island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory and that relies on the United States for security backing. In the coming years, Beijing may gain confidence that it can limit the intervention of Washington and its allies in any conflict.
In deciding Taiwan’s fate, China’s “trump card” could be a “powerful strategic deterrence force” to warn that “any external intervention will not succeed and cannot possibly succeed,” Ge Tengfei, a professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology, wrote in a Communist Party journal in 2022.
Xi’s Nuclear Revolution
Since China first tested an atomic bomb in 1964, its leaders have said that they would never be “the first to use nuclear weapons” in a war. China, they reasoned, needed only a relatively modest set of nuclear weapons to credibly threaten potential adversaries that if their country was ever attacked with nuclear arms, it could wipe out enemy cities.
“In the long run, China’s nuclear weapons are just symbolic,” said Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader, in 1983, explaining Beijing’s stance to the visiting Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. “If China spent too much energy on them, we’d weaken ourselves.”
Image
People walk past tanks on display in a museum. Behind them is a large photo of a mushroom cloud during a nuclear test.
A display of one of China’s nuclear tests, at a Beijing museum in 1992.Credit...Forrest Anderson/Getty Images
Even as China upgraded its conventional forces starting in the 1990s, its nuclear arsenal grew incrementally. When Mr. Xi took over as leader in 2012, China had about 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States.
China was already increasingly challenging its neighbors in territorial disputes and saw danger in the Obama administration’s efforts to shore up U.S. power across the Asia-Pacific. In a speech in late 2012, Mr. Xi warned his commanders that the United States was “stepping up strategic containment and encirclement around us.”
Beijing worried, too, that its nuclear deterrent was weakening. Chinese military analysts warned that the People’s Liberation Army’s missiles were growing vulnerable to detection and destruction as the United States made advances in military technology and built alliances in Asia.
Official Chinese accounts of history reinforced that fear. People’s Liberation Army studies often dwell on the Korean War and crises over Taiwan in the 1950s, when American leaders hinted that they could drop atomic bombs on China. Such memories have entrenched views in Beijing that the United States is inclined to use “nuclear blackmail.”
Image
In a black and white picture taken during the Korean War, U.S. soldiers riding on a vehicle look at smoke rising in the distance in snowy hills.
People’s Liberation Army studies often dwell on the Korean War, above, and crises over Taiwan in the 1950s, when American leaders hinted that they could drop atomic bombs on China.Credit...Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
“We must have sharp weapons to protect ourselves and killer maces that others will fear,” Mr. Xi told People’s Liberation Army armaments officers in late 2014.
Late in 2015, he took a big step in upgrading China’s nuclear force. In his green suit as chairman of China’s military, he presided over a ceremony in which the Second Artillery Corps, the custodian of China’s nuclear missiles, was reborn as the Rocket Force, elevated to a service alongside the army, navy and air force.
The Rocket Force’s mission, Mr. Xi told its commanders, included “enhancing a credible and reliable nuclear deterrent and nuclear counterstrike capability” — that is, an ability to survive an initial attack and hit back with devastating force.
From Tunnels to Silo Fields
China is not only on a quest for more warheads. It is also focused on concealing and shielding the warheads, and on being able to launch them more quickly and from land, sea or air. The newly elevated Rocket Force has added a powerful voice to that effort.
Researchers from the Rocket Force wrote in a study in 2017 that China should emulate the United States and seek “nuclear forces sufficient to balance the new global situation, and ensure that our country can win the initiative in future wars.”
China’s nuclear deterrent long relied heavily on units dug into tunnels deep in remote mountains. Soldiers are trained to go into hiding in tunnels for weeks or months, deprived of sunlight, regular sleep and fresh air while they try to stay undetected by enemies, according to medical studies of their grueling routine.
“If war comes,” said a Chinese state television report in 2018, “this nuclear arsenal that shuttles underground will break cover where the enemy least expects and fire off its missiles.”
The Rocket Force expanded quickly, adding at least 10 new brigades, an increase of about one-third, within a few years, according to a study published by the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. China has also added more road- and rail-mobile missile launchers to try to outfox American satellites and other detection technology.
Chinese fears of American abilities have nonetheless remained. Even as China was rolling out road-mobile missiles, some experts from the People’s Liberation Army argued that they could be tracked by ever more sophisticated satellites.
A solution, some analysts from the Rocket Force argued in 2021, was to also build clusters of launch silos for missiles, forcing U.S. forces to try to detect which ones housed real missiles and which ones had dummies, making it “even harder to wipe them out in one blow.”
Image
A photo from a satellite shows straight lines in an area resembling a desert.
A satellite image provided by Planet Labs Inc. shows what analysts believed was a field of intercontinental ballistic missile silos near Hami, in western China, in 2021.Credit...Planet Labs Inc., via Associated Press
Other Chinese studies made similar arguments for silos, and Mr. Xi and his commanders seemed to heed them. The boldest move so far in his nuclear expansion has been three vast fields of 320 or so missile silos built in northern China. The silos, safely distant from U.S. conventional missiles, can hold missiles capable of hitting the United States.
The expansion, though, has hit turbulence. Last year, Mr. Xi abruptly replaced the Rocket Force’s two top commanders, an unexplained shake-up that suggests its growth has been troubled by corruption. This year, nine senior Chinese military officers were expelled from the legislature, indicating a widening investigation.
The upheaval could slow China’s nuclear weapons plans in the short term, but Mr. Xi’s long-term ambitions appear set. At a Communist Party congress in 2022, he declared that China must keep building its “strategic deterrence forces.”
And even with hundreds of new silos, Chinese military analysts find new sources of worry. Last year, Chinese rocket engineers proposed reinforcing silos to better shield missiles from precision attacks. “Only that can make sure that the our side is able to deliver a lethal counterstrike in the event of a nuclear attack,” they wrote.
Tough Decisions
Chinese leaders have said that they want peaceful unification with Taiwan, but may use force if they deem that other options are spent. If Beijing moved to seize Taiwan, the United States could intervene to defend the island, and China may calculate that its expanded nuclear arsenal could present a potent warning.
Chinese military officers have issued blustery warnings of nuclear retaliation over Taiwan before. Now, China’s threats could carry more weight.
Image
Soldiers stand near what appears to be a rocket in a wooded area.
A photograph released by Chinese state media in 2023 said to show a rocket test. The country’s Rocket Force has been elevated to a service alongside the army, navy and air force.Credit...Liu Mingsong/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Its expanding array of missiles, submarines and bombers could convey credible threats to not just cities in the continental United States, but to American military bases on, say, Japan or Guam. The risk of a conventional clash spiraling into nuclear confrontation could hang over decisions. Chinese military analysts have argued that Russian nuclear warnings constrained NATO countries in their response to the invasion of Ukraine.
“The ladder of escalation that they can apply now is much more nuanced,” said Bates Gill, the executive director of Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “The implicit message is not just: ‘We could nuke Los Angeles.’ Now it’s also: ‘We could wipe out Guam, and you don’t want to risk escalation if we do.’”
Beijing’s options include 200 or so DF-26 missile launchers, which can swap between conventional and nuclear warheads and hit targets across Asia. Chinese official media have described Rocket Force units practicing such swaps, and boasted during a military parade about the missile’s dual convention-nuclear role — the kind of disclosure meant to spook rivals.
In a real confrontation, Washington could face difficult decisions over whether potential targets for strikes in China may include nuclear-armed missile units, and in an extreme whether an incoming DF-26 missile may be nuclear.
“That’s going to be a really tough decision for any U.S. president — to trust that whatever advice he’s getting is not risking nuclear escalation for the sake of Taiwan,” said John K. Culver, a former C.I.A. senior analyst who studies the Chinese military. “As soon as the U.S. starts bombing mainland China, no one is going to be able to tell the U.S. president with conviction exactly where China’s line is.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
A Polarized Pakistan Goes to the Polls With the Result All but Certain
A crackdown on a major political party is the latest dizzying swerve in the country’s roller-coaster politics.
Supporters of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party at a rally in Kasur District, Pakistan, on Tuesday. It is the party expected to win the most votes in an election Thursday that has been criticized as unfree.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times
Pakistanis have labeled it a “selection” — not an election. Human rights monitors have condemned it as neither free nor fair.
As voters headed to the polls on Thursday, the influence of Pakistan’s powerful military and the turbulent state of its politics were on full display. Few doubted which party would come out on top, a reflection of the generals’ ultimate hold on Pakistan’s troubled democracy.
But the military is facing new challenges to its authority from a discontented public, making this an especially fraught moment in the nation’s history.
The tension was underlined on Thursday as Pakistan’s Interior Ministry announced that it was suspending mobile phone service across the country because of the security situation. Some analysts in Pakistan cast it as an effort to keep opposition voters from getting information or coordinating activities.
The election was taking place in the shadow of a monthslong military campaign to gut the party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, a former international cricket star and populist leader who was ousted by Parliament in 2022 after falling out with the generals.
The crackdown is the latest dizzying swerve in the country’s roller-coaster politics.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, or P.M.L.N., the party of the three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, is expected to claim victory in Thursday’s vote. Mr. Sharif himself was ousted when he fell out of favor with the military in 2017, and Mr. Khan, with the military’s support, became prime minister a year later.
Image
A group of men stand in front of a large screen and next to a man standing at a lectern draped in green with the image of a tiger.
Nawaz Sharif speaks at a political rally a few days before the election. Mr. Sharif has already been prime minister three times before and now, again favored by the military, is widely expected to get a fourth term.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times
Now it is Mr. Khan who is sitting in jail after a bitter split with the military over its political control, while Mr. Sharif is apparently seen by the generals as the lone figure in Pakistan having the stature to compete with the widely popular Mr. Khan.
Voters will choose members of provincial legislatures and the country’s Parliament, which will appoint the next prime minister. It is seen as unlikely that any party will win an outright majority, meaning that the party with the largest share of seats would form a coalition government. Officially, this will be only the third democratic transition between civilian governments in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 240 million people.
The military has ruled Pakistan directly through various coups or indirectly under civilian governments ever since the country gained independence in 1947. It has often meddled in election cycles to pave the way for its preferred candidates and to winnow the field of their competitors. But the military has used an especially heavy hand ahead of this vote, analysts say, a reflection of the growing anti-military fervor in the country stoked by Mr. Khan.
The crackdown has drawn widespread condemnation from local and international human rights groups. On Tuesday, the United Nations’ top human rights body expressed concern over “the pattern of harassment, arrests and prolonged detentions of leaders.”
“We deplore all acts of violence against political parties and candidates, and urge the authorities to uphold the fundamental freedoms necessary for an inclusive and meaningful democratic process,” Liz Throssell, spokeswoman for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said at a news conference.
The intimidation campaign has come at a particularly turbulent moment in Pakistan. For months after Mr. Khan was removed from office, he railed against the country’s generals and accused them of orchestrating his ouster — a claim they reject. His direct criticism of the military was unheard-of in Pakistan. It inspired his supporters to come out in droves to vent their anger at the military for its role in his removal.
Image
A man hangs up a large banner featuring a picture of Imran Khan.
Pakistan People’s Party workers outside their regional office in Lahore on Monday.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times
Mr. Sharif built his reputation on reviving the country’s economy — which is currently suffering double-digit inflation — and building megaprojects like superhighways. He has also pushed for more civilian control of the government and had each of his terms cut short after falling out with the military — a history that raises doubts about how long this latest rapprochement with the generals will last.
The turmoil has laid out the dismal state of Pakistani politics, a winner-take-all game dominated by a handful of political dynasties and ultimately controlled by the military. In the country’s 76-year history, no prime minister has ever completed a term in office. This election is also the first in decades in which no party has campaigned on a platform of reforming that entrenched system.
“All mainstream political parties have accepted the military’s role in politics; there is no challenge,” said Mustafa Nawaz Kokhar, a former senator with the Pakistan People’s Party and a vocal critic of the military, who is running in the election as an independent candidate in Islamabad.
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Zia ur-Rehman from Lahore.
Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The Times. More about Christina Goldbaum
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Supporters of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party at a rally in Kasur District, Pakistan, on Tuesday. It is the party expected to win the most votes in an election Thursday that has been criticized as unfree.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times
Pakistanis have labeled it a “selection” — not an election. Human rights monitors have condemned it as neither free nor fair.
As voters headed to the polls on Thursday, the influence of Pakistan’s powerful military and the turbulent state of its politics were on full display. Few doubted which party would come out on top, a reflection of the generals’ ultimate hold on Pakistan’s troubled democracy.
But the military is facing new challenges to its authority from a discontented public, making this an especially fraught moment in the nation’s history.
The tension was underlined on Thursday as Pakistan’s Interior Ministry announced that it was suspending mobile phone service across the country because of the security situation. Some analysts in Pakistan cast it as an effort to keep opposition voters from getting information or coordinating activities.
The election was taking place in the shadow of a monthslong military campaign to gut the party of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, a former international cricket star and populist leader who was ousted by Parliament in 2022 after falling out with the generals.
The crackdown is the latest dizzying swerve in the country’s roller-coaster politics.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, or P.M.L.N., the party of the three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, is expected to claim victory in Thursday’s vote. Mr. Sharif himself was ousted when he fell out of favor with the military in 2017, and Mr. Khan, with the military’s support, became prime minister a year later.
Image
A group of men stand in front of a large screen and next to a man standing at a lectern draped in green with the image of a tiger.
Nawaz Sharif speaks at a political rally a few days before the election. Mr. Sharif has already been prime minister three times before and now, again favored by the military, is widely expected to get a fourth term.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times
Now it is Mr. Khan who is sitting in jail after a bitter split with the military over its political control, while Mr. Sharif is apparently seen by the generals as the lone figure in Pakistan having the stature to compete with the widely popular Mr. Khan.
Voters will choose members of provincial legislatures and the country’s Parliament, which will appoint the next prime minister. It is seen as unlikely that any party will win an outright majority, meaning that the party with the largest share of seats would form a coalition government. Officially, this will be only the third democratic transition between civilian governments in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 240 million people.
The military has ruled Pakistan directly through various coups or indirectly under civilian governments ever since the country gained independence in 1947. It has often meddled in election cycles to pave the way for its preferred candidates and to winnow the field of their competitors. But the military has used an especially heavy hand ahead of this vote, analysts say, a reflection of the growing anti-military fervor in the country stoked by Mr. Khan.
The crackdown has drawn widespread condemnation from local and international human rights groups. On Tuesday, the United Nations’ top human rights body expressed concern over “the pattern of harassment, arrests and prolonged detentions of leaders.”
“We deplore all acts of violence against political parties and candidates, and urge the authorities to uphold the fundamental freedoms necessary for an inclusive and meaningful democratic process,” Liz Throssell, spokeswoman for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said at a news conference.
The intimidation campaign has come at a particularly turbulent moment in Pakistan. For months after Mr. Khan was removed from office, he railed against the country’s generals and accused them of orchestrating his ouster — a claim they reject. His direct criticism of the military was unheard-of in Pakistan. It inspired his supporters to come out in droves to vent their anger at the military for its role in his removal.
Image
A man hangs up a large banner featuring a picture of Imran Khan.
Pakistan People’s Party workers outside their regional office in Lahore on Monday.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times
Mr. Sharif built his reputation on reviving the country’s economy — which is currently suffering double-digit inflation — and building megaprojects like superhighways. He has also pushed for more civilian control of the government and had each of his terms cut short after falling out with the military — a history that raises doubts about how long this latest rapprochement with the generals will last.
The turmoil has laid out the dismal state of Pakistani politics, a winner-take-all game dominated by a handful of political dynasties and ultimately controlled by the military. In the country’s 76-year history, no prime minister has ever completed a term in office. This election is also the first in decades in which no party has campaigned on a platform of reforming that entrenched system.
“All mainstream political parties have accepted the military’s role in politics; there is no challenge,” said Mustafa Nawaz Kokhar, a former senator with the Pakistan People’s Party and a vocal critic of the military, who is running in the election as an independent candidate in Islamabad.
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Zia ur-Rehman from Lahore.
Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The Times. More about Christina Goldbaum
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: ASIA
China’s Rush to Dominate A.I. Comes With a Twist: It Depends on U.S. Technology
China’s tech firms were caught off guard by breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence. Beijing’s regulations and a sagging economy aren’t helping.
In November, a year after ChatGPT’s release, a relatively unknown Chinese start-up leaped to the top of a leaderboard that judged the abilities of open-source artificial intelligence systems.
The Chinese firm, 01.AI, was only eight months old but had deep-pocketed backers and a $1 billion valuation and was founded by a well-known investor and technologist, Kai-Fu Lee. In interviews, Mr. Lee presented his A.I. system as an alternative to options like Meta’s generative A.I. model, called LLaMA.
There was just one twist: Some of the technology in 01.AI’s system came from LLaMA. Mr. Lee’s start-up then built on Meta’s technology, training its system with new data to make it more powerful.
The situation is emblematic of a reality that many in China openly admit. Even as the country races to build generative A.I., Chinese companies are relying almost entirely on underlying systems from the United States. China now lags the United States in generative A.I. by at least a year and may be falling further behind, according to more than a dozen tech industry insiders and leading engineers, setting the stage for a new phase in the cutthroat technological competition between the two nations that some have likened to a cold war.
“Chinese companies are under tremendous pressure to keep abreast of U.S. innovations,” said Chris Nicholson, an investor with the venture capital firm Page One Ventures who focuses on A.I. technologies. The release of ChatGPT was “yet another Sputnik moment that China felt it had to respond to.”
Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital, an investment firm that focuses on A.I.-powered companies, said the A.I. models that Chinese companies build from scratch “aren’t very good,” leading to many Chinese firms often using “fine-tuned versions of Western models.” She estimated China was two to three years behind the United States in generative A.I. developments.
The jockeying for A.I. primacy has huge implications. Breakthroughs in generative A.I. could tip the global technological balance of power, increasing people’s productivity, aiding industries and leading to future innovations, even as nations struggle with the technology’s risks.
As Chinese firms aim to catch up by turning to open-source A.I. models from the United States, Washington is in a difficult spot. Even as the United States has tried to slow China’s advancements by limiting the sale of microchips and curbing investments, it has not held back the practice of openly releasing software to encourage its adoption.
For China, the newfound reliance on A.I. systems from the United States — primarily Meta’s LLaMA — has fueled deeper questions about the country’s innovation model, which in recent decades surprised many by turning out world-beating firms like Alibaba and ByteDance despite Beijing’s authoritarian controls.
“When Chinese companies are leveraging American open-source technologies to play catch-up, the questions become very complicated — wrapped up in issues of national security and geopolitics,” said Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington professor who specializes in A.I. and the founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit working to identify disinformation online in political campaigns.
Image
The Chinese firm 01.AI was founded by investor and technologist Kai-Fu Lee, at left.Credit...Yan Cong for The New York Times
In an emailed statement, Mr. Lee, 01.AI’s founder, said his startup’s A.I. model was built on LLaMA just “like most other A.I. companies,” adding that using open-source technologies is a standard practice. He said his company had trained its A.I. model from scratch, using its own data and algorithms. Those were “the main determinants” of the “excellent performance” of 01.AI’s model, Mr. Lee said.
Meta pointed to comments by Nick Clegg, who leads global affairs, in which he said openly sharing the company’s A.I. models helped spread its values and standards, and in turn helped secure American leadership.
(The New York Times has sued the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
A.I. has long been a priority in China. After the A.I. tool AlphaGo defeated two top players of the board game Go in 2016 and 2017, Chinese policymakers set out an ambitious plan to lead the world in technology by 2030. The government pledged billions to researchers and companies focused on A.I.
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, many Chinese firms were being hamstrung by a regulatory crackdown from Beijing that discouraged experimentation without government approval. Chinese tech companies were also burdened by censorship rules designed to manage public opinion and mute major opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.
Chinese companies with the resources to build a generative A.I. model faced a dilemma. If they created a chatbot that said the wrong thing, its makers would pay the price. And no one could be sure what might tumble out of a chatbot’s digital mouth.
“It’s just not possible to get rid of all the problematic ways these systems can express themselves,” said Andrew Ng, who teaches computer science at Stanford and was a former executive at Baidu, the Chinese search giant.
Chinese tech giants were also grappling with new regulations that dictate how A.I. models could be trained. The rules limit the data sets that could be used to train A.I. models and the applications that were acceptable, and also set requirements for registering A.I. models with the government.
“It is both more difficult and more risky to innovate in generative A.I. in the current regulatory regime, which is still a moving target,” said Kevin Xu, the U.S.-based founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in A.I. ventures.
Tech investors in China have also pushed for quick turnarounds from A.I., which has meant money has flowed to easy-to-execute applications instead of more ambitious goals focused on fundamental research, said Yiran Chen, a John Cocke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. As much as 50 percent of China’s A.I. investment has gone into computer vision technology, which is required for surveillance, instead of building foundation models for generative A.I., he said.
Now Baidu, Alibaba, the dairy company Mengniu and the tutoring firm TAL Education have all jumped into the generative A.I. race in China, leading Chinese media to coin the phrase “the battle of 100 models” to describe the frenzy.
Some have criticized the free-for-all as publicity stunts that add unnecessary competition. In a panel discussion last year, Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, described having hundreds of basic A.I. models as a waste.
Image
Robin Li, the chief executive of Baidu, which is one of the few in China building a foundational A.I. model from scratch.Credit...Mark R Cristino/EPA, via Shutterstock
“More resources should be allocated to applications in various industries, especially considering the limitations on our computing power,” he said.
Success has been elusive. When Baidu introduced its chatbot, Ernie, in March, the “live” demonstration was revealed to be prerecorded. Baidu’s stock plummeted 10 percent that day.
Despite the setback, Baidu remains one of China’s few major efforts at building a foundation A.I. model from scratch. Others are being led by Alibaba and Tencent, China’s tech giants, as well as a start-up linked to Tsinghua University.
A Baidu spokesman declined to comment.
U.S. restrictions on A.I. chip sales to China pose further challenges, since many such chips are needed when training generative A.I. models. Baidu and 01.AI, among others, have said they’ve stockpiled enough chips to sustain their operations in the near future.
There are some bright spots for China with A.I., including in fields like computer vision and autonomous vehicles. Some Chinese entrepreneurs are also looking to leapfrog the United States with breakthroughs in other parts of generative A.I.
Wang Changhu, the former head of ByteDance’s A.I. lab, founded a company called AIsphere in Beijing last year to spearhead what he saw as the next major frontier in the technology: video generation. In November, the start-up released PixVerse, an A.I.-powered generator that can create video from a text description.
“We forged ahead, building our models from the ground up,” Mr. Wang said. “This gives us a significant edge as true pioneers in the realm of video generation.”
That edge may have lasted just a few months. Last week, OpenAI unveiled Sora, an A.I. tool that turns a simple text prompt into videos that look as if they were lifted from a Hollywood movie. Sora instantly went viral.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/tech ... 778d3e6de3
China’s tech firms were caught off guard by breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence. Beijing’s regulations and a sagging economy aren’t helping.
In November, a year after ChatGPT’s release, a relatively unknown Chinese start-up leaped to the top of a leaderboard that judged the abilities of open-source artificial intelligence systems.
The Chinese firm, 01.AI, was only eight months old but had deep-pocketed backers and a $1 billion valuation and was founded by a well-known investor and technologist, Kai-Fu Lee. In interviews, Mr. Lee presented his A.I. system as an alternative to options like Meta’s generative A.I. model, called LLaMA.
There was just one twist: Some of the technology in 01.AI’s system came from LLaMA. Mr. Lee’s start-up then built on Meta’s technology, training its system with new data to make it more powerful.
The situation is emblematic of a reality that many in China openly admit. Even as the country races to build generative A.I., Chinese companies are relying almost entirely on underlying systems from the United States. China now lags the United States in generative A.I. by at least a year and may be falling further behind, according to more than a dozen tech industry insiders and leading engineers, setting the stage for a new phase in the cutthroat technological competition between the two nations that some have likened to a cold war.
“Chinese companies are under tremendous pressure to keep abreast of U.S. innovations,” said Chris Nicholson, an investor with the venture capital firm Page One Ventures who focuses on A.I. technologies. The release of ChatGPT was “yet another Sputnik moment that China felt it had to respond to.”
Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital, an investment firm that focuses on A.I.-powered companies, said the A.I. models that Chinese companies build from scratch “aren’t very good,” leading to many Chinese firms often using “fine-tuned versions of Western models.” She estimated China was two to three years behind the United States in generative A.I. developments.
The jockeying for A.I. primacy has huge implications. Breakthroughs in generative A.I. could tip the global technological balance of power, increasing people’s productivity, aiding industries and leading to future innovations, even as nations struggle with the technology’s risks.
As Chinese firms aim to catch up by turning to open-source A.I. models from the United States, Washington is in a difficult spot. Even as the United States has tried to slow China’s advancements by limiting the sale of microchips and curbing investments, it has not held back the practice of openly releasing software to encourage its adoption.
For China, the newfound reliance on A.I. systems from the United States — primarily Meta’s LLaMA — has fueled deeper questions about the country’s innovation model, which in recent decades surprised many by turning out world-beating firms like Alibaba and ByteDance despite Beijing’s authoritarian controls.
“When Chinese companies are leveraging American open-source technologies to play catch-up, the questions become very complicated — wrapped up in issues of national security and geopolitics,” said Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington professor who specializes in A.I. and the founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit working to identify disinformation online in political campaigns.
Image
The Chinese firm 01.AI was founded by investor and technologist Kai-Fu Lee, at left.Credit...Yan Cong for The New York Times
In an emailed statement, Mr. Lee, 01.AI’s founder, said his startup’s A.I. model was built on LLaMA just “like most other A.I. companies,” adding that using open-source technologies is a standard practice. He said his company had trained its A.I. model from scratch, using its own data and algorithms. Those were “the main determinants” of the “excellent performance” of 01.AI’s model, Mr. Lee said.
Meta pointed to comments by Nick Clegg, who leads global affairs, in which he said openly sharing the company’s A.I. models helped spread its values and standards, and in turn helped secure American leadership.
(The New York Times has sued the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
A.I. has long been a priority in China. After the A.I. tool AlphaGo defeated two top players of the board game Go in 2016 and 2017, Chinese policymakers set out an ambitious plan to lead the world in technology by 2030. The government pledged billions to researchers and companies focused on A.I.
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, many Chinese firms were being hamstrung by a regulatory crackdown from Beijing that discouraged experimentation without government approval. Chinese tech companies were also burdened by censorship rules designed to manage public opinion and mute major opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.
Chinese companies with the resources to build a generative A.I. model faced a dilemma. If they created a chatbot that said the wrong thing, its makers would pay the price. And no one could be sure what might tumble out of a chatbot’s digital mouth.
“It’s just not possible to get rid of all the problematic ways these systems can express themselves,” said Andrew Ng, who teaches computer science at Stanford and was a former executive at Baidu, the Chinese search giant.
Chinese tech giants were also grappling with new regulations that dictate how A.I. models could be trained. The rules limit the data sets that could be used to train A.I. models and the applications that were acceptable, and also set requirements for registering A.I. models with the government.
“It is both more difficult and more risky to innovate in generative A.I. in the current regulatory regime, which is still a moving target,” said Kevin Xu, the U.S.-based founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in A.I. ventures.
Tech investors in China have also pushed for quick turnarounds from A.I., which has meant money has flowed to easy-to-execute applications instead of more ambitious goals focused on fundamental research, said Yiran Chen, a John Cocke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. As much as 50 percent of China’s A.I. investment has gone into computer vision technology, which is required for surveillance, instead of building foundation models for generative A.I., he said.
Now Baidu, Alibaba, the dairy company Mengniu and the tutoring firm TAL Education have all jumped into the generative A.I. race in China, leading Chinese media to coin the phrase “the battle of 100 models” to describe the frenzy.
Some have criticized the free-for-all as publicity stunts that add unnecessary competition. In a panel discussion last year, Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, described having hundreds of basic A.I. models as a waste.
Image
Robin Li, the chief executive of Baidu, which is one of the few in China building a foundational A.I. model from scratch.Credit...Mark R Cristino/EPA, via Shutterstock
“More resources should be allocated to applications in various industries, especially considering the limitations on our computing power,” he said.
Success has been elusive. When Baidu introduced its chatbot, Ernie, in March, the “live” demonstration was revealed to be prerecorded. Baidu’s stock plummeted 10 percent that day.
Despite the setback, Baidu remains one of China’s few major efforts at building a foundation A.I. model from scratch. Others are being led by Alibaba and Tencent, China’s tech giants, as well as a start-up linked to Tsinghua University.
A Baidu spokesman declined to comment.
U.S. restrictions on A.I. chip sales to China pose further challenges, since many such chips are needed when training generative A.I. models. Baidu and 01.AI, among others, have said they’ve stockpiled enough chips to sustain their operations in the near future.
There are some bright spots for China with A.I., including in fields like computer vision and autonomous vehicles. Some Chinese entrepreneurs are also looking to leapfrog the United States with breakthroughs in other parts of generative A.I.
Wang Changhu, the former head of ByteDance’s A.I. lab, founded a company called AIsphere in Beijing last year to spearhead what he saw as the next major frontier in the technology: video generation. In November, the start-up released PixVerse, an A.I.-powered generator that can create video from a text description.
“We forged ahead, building our models from the ground up,” Mr. Wang said. “This gives us a significant edge as true pioneers in the realm of video generation.”
That edge may have lasted just a few months. Last week, OpenAI unveiled Sora, an A.I. tool that turns a simple text prompt into videos that look as if they were lifted from a Hollywood movie. Sora instantly went viral.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/tech ... 778d3e6de3
Re: ASIA
Noisy, Gaudy and Spiritual: Young Pilgrims Embrace an Ancient Goddess
On an island whose religious diversity is part of its democratic identity, many of the faithful participating in a pilgrimage for Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, were in their 20s and teens.
A statue, being carried on a litter, arrived at night to a temple jam-packed with people, beneath bright lights and colorful lanterns.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
In a din of firecrackers, cymbals and horns, a team of devotees carried the shrouded wooden statue of a serene-faced woman, holding her aloft on a brightly decorated litter as they navigated through tens of thousands of onlookers.
As the carriers nudged forward, hundreds of people were lined up ahead of them, kneeling on the road and waiting for the moment when the statue would pass over their heads.
Some wept after it did; many smiled and snapped selfies. “I love Mazu, and Mazu loves me,” the crowd shouted.
Mazu, sometimes known as the Goddess of the Sea, is the most widely venerated of dozens of folk deities that many people in Taiwan turn to for solace, guidance and good fortune. The huge annual processions to honor her are noisy and gaudy. And yet for many, they are also deeply spiritual events, acts of faith showing that Mazu and other spirits remain vibrant presences here, alongside Buddhism and Christianity.
ImageWorshipers praying and offering lighted incense sticks.
Followers of Mazu bowed and lit incense before a statue of Mazu at a temple.
Image
Mazu being carried through a crowded street.
Carrying Mazu through a crowd of people. In recent years, many young Taiwanese have been participating in pilgrimages.
Taiwan’s two biggest pilgrimages for Mazu — named Baishatun and Dajia after the temples that pilgrims set out from every year — recently have been drawing record numbers of participants. And a striking number of them are younger Taiwanese, in their teens or 20s, drawn to experiencing the traditions of Mazu, like throwing crescent-shaped pieces of wood in a ritual to divine their futures.
“I didn’t expect there’d be so many younger people taking the pilgrimage like this,” said Chou Chia-liang, 28, a fashion designer who had traveled from Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, for the Dajia pilgrimage, which starts in Taichung on the west-central coast. “People used to think the Mazu faith was for old people from the countryside. Look around here — it doesn’t seem like that.”
Image
A young man standing next to a cart draped with yellow fabric. behind which is a small statue of Mazu.
“I didn’t expect there’d be so many younger people taking the pilgrimage like this,” said Chou Chia-liang, 28, a fashion designer from Taipei.
Like quite a few other pilgrims, Mr. Chou, in a show of reverence, was pushing along a cart carrying his own small statue of Mazu, usually kept at the temple in Taipei where he typically prays.
“This is a bit different from my family’s religion,” he said. “Most Taiwanese people are very tolerant. They don’t have the idea that ‘this is my faith and that is your faith, and they can’t go together’.”
Image
Four young pilgrims, seen from behind, with the sun low in the sky ahead of them.
The Mazu pilgrimage once followed dirt paths past rice paddy fields. Now, it takes place in a much more urbanized Taiwan.
Image
A densely packed train platform, with almost everyone wearing a mask.
Media attention has helped spur interest in the pilgrimages, and Taiwan’s efficient transportation system makes it easy for people from around the island to participate.
Many Taiwanese people say they are proud of their right to choose from an abundance of faiths, especially in contrast to the tight controls on religion in neighboring China. Taiwan’s religious diversity and vitality forms a kind of subsoil of the self-governed island’s identity and values.
About one-fifth of Taiwan’s 23 million people count themselves as Buddhist, another 5 percent are Christian, and over half take part in Taoism and a range of related folk religions, including worshiping Mazu, also spelt Matsu. In practice, many people mix Buddhist and folk traditions as they pray for a healthy birth or a high score on an exam.
“Local religions have re-emerged strongly since the ’80s and ’90s,” said Ting Jen-chieh, who studies religions at Academia Sinica, a top research institute in Taiwan. “Before, they were found more in the villages, but now it’s across middle-class society too.”
Image
People kneeling in prayer.
A scene along the route of the pilgrimage. Many Taiwanese people say they are proud of their right to choose from an abundance of faiths, especially in contrast to the tight controls on religion in neighboring China.
Image
What appears to be a firecracker going off in a small burst of flame on a street, with people keeping a safe distance.
The Dajia pilgrimage processions starts in the city of Taichung, on the west-central coast of Taiwan.
The largest temples for Mazu and other deities are powerful, wealthy institutions that make money from donations and services, including memorials for the dead. At election times, candidates pay their respects here, as well as at Buddhist temples and Christian churches, mindful of the sway that religious organizations can have with voters.
Beijing also tries to exert influence.
For decades, the Chinese government, which claims Taiwan as its lost territory, has invoked shared religious traditions, including Mazu, to try appeal to Taiwanese people. Mazu also has followers in coastal eastern China where, the story goes, she was born around 960 A.D. in Fujian Province, and used her special powers to save seafarers from drowning.
Whatever Beijing’s efforts, many pilgrims spoke of Mazu as a distinctly Taiwanese goddess, who happened to have been born on the other side of the strait. Some brushed away the politics, and said they were worried that the pilgrimages were being sullied by too much glitz, including the troupes of dancers and pop songs blaring over loudspeakers.
Image
Plumes of fire shooting out from two flame throwers attached to the front of a litter upon which sits a sedan chair carrying a Mazu statue.
Mazu’s litter outfitted with flame throwers. Some said they were worried the pilgrimages were being sullied by too much glitz.
Image
Looking out from inside a brightly lid arcade with claw machine games toward the street, where a troupe of dancers on a blue-lit float can be seen passing by.
Dance troupes are among the features of the pilgrimage.
“Many people like the noise and sound and light effects,” said Lin Ting-yi, 20, a professional spiritual medium who participated in Mazu’s pilgrimage in March. But, he added, “Whenever I want to talk to deities, I like to feel and pray quietly, alone.”
For generations, the pilgrimages involved mostly farmers and fishermen who carried Mazu statues through nearby rice paddies and along dirt paths.
Now, the pilgrimages reflect a much wealthier, more urbanized Taiwan. The Mazu processions pass by factories and expressways, where the chanting and fireworks compete with the roar of passing trucks.
During the processions, the Mazu statues have been known to stop at schools, military barracks, and, one year, a car dealership display room, whose employees hurriedly moved a vehicle from the spot where, the carriers told them, the goddess wished to rest.
Along the annual routes, local temples, residents, shops and companies set up stalls to offer pilgrims (mostly) free food and drinks — watermelon, stewed tofu, cookies, sweet drinks and water.
Image
People sitting on stools outside.
Along the annual routes, local temples, residents, shops and companies set up stalls to offer pilgrims (mostly) free food and drinks.
Image
A line of people kneeling on a street, hands together in prayer.
Pilgrims paying their respects. When Mazu passes by, chants of “I love Mazu, and Mazu loves me,” are often heard.
Despite the hubbub, some pilgrims described how, as they fell into a meditative walking rhythm, the noise of the firecrackers and loudspeakers fell away, and they sometimes struck up deep conversations, and friendships, with strangers walking beside them.
“While you’re walking, you can give yourself more time and space to think deeply about things you haven’t thought of before,” said Hung Yu-fang, a 40-year old insurance company employee who was doing the Dajia pilgrimage for a fourth year.
While the nine-day Dajia pilgrimage follows a preset route, the Baishatun pilgrimage is more fluid. It doesn’t set a precise path in advance, leaving followers to intuit which turns in the roads the Mazu statue will take and where she may stop.
When her carriers reached an intersection this year, a tense air settled over the pilgrims, waiting while the statue bearers shuffled and turned this way and that — by their account, waiting for Mazu to decide which direction she wanted to take. They cheered when Mazu headed off again.
At night, the carriers rested the Mazu statue in a temple, and hardier pilgrims slept in the temple or on the nearby streets. unrolling thin rubber mattresses.
Image
Firecrackers exploding in the middle of the street, with a Mazu procession behind them.
Despite the hubbub, some pilgrims described how, as they fell into a meditative walking rhythm, the noise of the firecrackers and loudspeakers would fall away.
Image
Parts of a half dozen or so people can be seen resting on mat placed on the floor of a temple, with religious statues and red columns visible.
At night, hardier pilgrims sleep on the floor of temples on thin rubber mattresses.
As Taiwan industrialized, it seemed possible that such rituals might survive only as symbols of the island’s fading rustic roots.
“For some time, it was for the lower rungs of society. Just a few hundred people would take part in the pilgrimages,” said Professor Ting, the religion researcher. “Now it’s popular, but a lot of the new, younger participants only walk for a few days — not the whole journey — to experience it as Taiwanese culture.”
In recent years, the surge of participants has been spurred by media attention (Taiwanese TV covers the pilgrimages like they were major sporting events), online enthusiasts (Mazu’s progress can be followed on the temples’ phone apps), and ease of travel (trains are fast and efficient).
In 2010, the Baishatun pilgrimage drew around 5,000 registered participants; this year, nearly 180,000 pilgrims signed up, a figure that doesn’t include the tens of thousands who joined informally along the way.
When the pilgrimage reached the Beigang Chaotian temple in southern Taiwan — its main destination before turning home — Mazu was greeted by an eruption of fireworks and gongs, and overwhelming crowds. Nearly 500,000 people turned up that day, a record, said organizers.
Despite the heat and crowds, people lined up for hours to squeeze inside the temple and catch a glimpse of Mazu, wearing an embroidered headdress draped with pearls.
“I couldn’t squeeze inside the temple,” said Mr. Chou, the clothes designer, who this year managed to walk part of both major pilgrimages. “But that didn’t matter. This time I also invited friends along so they could also get a taste of more traditional culture.”
Image
A large crowd at an ornate temple, with dozens of colorful lanterns floating above them.
The crowds can be so large that some pilgrims find it impossible to squeeze onto temple grounds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
On an island whose religious diversity is part of its democratic identity, many of the faithful participating in a pilgrimage for Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, were in their 20s and teens.
A statue, being carried on a litter, arrived at night to a temple jam-packed with people, beneath bright lights and colorful lanterns.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
In a din of firecrackers, cymbals and horns, a team of devotees carried the shrouded wooden statue of a serene-faced woman, holding her aloft on a brightly decorated litter as they navigated through tens of thousands of onlookers.
As the carriers nudged forward, hundreds of people were lined up ahead of them, kneeling on the road and waiting for the moment when the statue would pass over their heads.
Some wept after it did; many smiled and snapped selfies. “I love Mazu, and Mazu loves me,” the crowd shouted.
Mazu, sometimes known as the Goddess of the Sea, is the most widely venerated of dozens of folk deities that many people in Taiwan turn to for solace, guidance and good fortune. The huge annual processions to honor her are noisy and gaudy. And yet for many, they are also deeply spiritual events, acts of faith showing that Mazu and other spirits remain vibrant presences here, alongside Buddhism and Christianity.
ImageWorshipers praying and offering lighted incense sticks.
Followers of Mazu bowed and lit incense before a statue of Mazu at a temple.
Image
Mazu being carried through a crowded street.
Carrying Mazu through a crowd of people. In recent years, many young Taiwanese have been participating in pilgrimages.
Taiwan’s two biggest pilgrimages for Mazu — named Baishatun and Dajia after the temples that pilgrims set out from every year — recently have been drawing record numbers of participants. And a striking number of them are younger Taiwanese, in their teens or 20s, drawn to experiencing the traditions of Mazu, like throwing crescent-shaped pieces of wood in a ritual to divine their futures.
“I didn’t expect there’d be so many younger people taking the pilgrimage like this,” said Chou Chia-liang, 28, a fashion designer who had traveled from Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, for the Dajia pilgrimage, which starts in Taichung on the west-central coast. “People used to think the Mazu faith was for old people from the countryside. Look around here — it doesn’t seem like that.”
Image
A young man standing next to a cart draped with yellow fabric. behind which is a small statue of Mazu.
“I didn’t expect there’d be so many younger people taking the pilgrimage like this,” said Chou Chia-liang, 28, a fashion designer from Taipei.
Like quite a few other pilgrims, Mr. Chou, in a show of reverence, was pushing along a cart carrying his own small statue of Mazu, usually kept at the temple in Taipei where he typically prays.
“This is a bit different from my family’s religion,” he said. “Most Taiwanese people are very tolerant. They don’t have the idea that ‘this is my faith and that is your faith, and they can’t go together’.”
Image
Four young pilgrims, seen from behind, with the sun low in the sky ahead of them.
The Mazu pilgrimage once followed dirt paths past rice paddy fields. Now, it takes place in a much more urbanized Taiwan.
Image
A densely packed train platform, with almost everyone wearing a mask.
Media attention has helped spur interest in the pilgrimages, and Taiwan’s efficient transportation system makes it easy for people from around the island to participate.
Many Taiwanese people say they are proud of their right to choose from an abundance of faiths, especially in contrast to the tight controls on religion in neighboring China. Taiwan’s religious diversity and vitality forms a kind of subsoil of the self-governed island’s identity and values.
About one-fifth of Taiwan’s 23 million people count themselves as Buddhist, another 5 percent are Christian, and over half take part in Taoism and a range of related folk religions, including worshiping Mazu, also spelt Matsu. In practice, many people mix Buddhist and folk traditions as they pray for a healthy birth or a high score on an exam.
“Local religions have re-emerged strongly since the ’80s and ’90s,” said Ting Jen-chieh, who studies religions at Academia Sinica, a top research institute in Taiwan. “Before, they were found more in the villages, but now it’s across middle-class society too.”
Image
People kneeling in prayer.
A scene along the route of the pilgrimage. Many Taiwanese people say they are proud of their right to choose from an abundance of faiths, especially in contrast to the tight controls on religion in neighboring China.
Image
What appears to be a firecracker going off in a small burst of flame on a street, with people keeping a safe distance.
The Dajia pilgrimage processions starts in the city of Taichung, on the west-central coast of Taiwan.
The largest temples for Mazu and other deities are powerful, wealthy institutions that make money from donations and services, including memorials for the dead. At election times, candidates pay their respects here, as well as at Buddhist temples and Christian churches, mindful of the sway that religious organizations can have with voters.
Beijing also tries to exert influence.
For decades, the Chinese government, which claims Taiwan as its lost territory, has invoked shared religious traditions, including Mazu, to try appeal to Taiwanese people. Mazu also has followers in coastal eastern China where, the story goes, she was born around 960 A.D. in Fujian Province, and used her special powers to save seafarers from drowning.
Whatever Beijing’s efforts, many pilgrims spoke of Mazu as a distinctly Taiwanese goddess, who happened to have been born on the other side of the strait. Some brushed away the politics, and said they were worried that the pilgrimages were being sullied by too much glitz, including the troupes of dancers and pop songs blaring over loudspeakers.
Image
Plumes of fire shooting out from two flame throwers attached to the front of a litter upon which sits a sedan chair carrying a Mazu statue.
Mazu’s litter outfitted with flame throwers. Some said they were worried the pilgrimages were being sullied by too much glitz.
Image
Looking out from inside a brightly lid arcade with claw machine games toward the street, where a troupe of dancers on a blue-lit float can be seen passing by.
Dance troupes are among the features of the pilgrimage.
“Many people like the noise and sound and light effects,” said Lin Ting-yi, 20, a professional spiritual medium who participated in Mazu’s pilgrimage in March. But, he added, “Whenever I want to talk to deities, I like to feel and pray quietly, alone.”
For generations, the pilgrimages involved mostly farmers and fishermen who carried Mazu statues through nearby rice paddies and along dirt paths.
Now, the pilgrimages reflect a much wealthier, more urbanized Taiwan. The Mazu processions pass by factories and expressways, where the chanting and fireworks compete with the roar of passing trucks.
During the processions, the Mazu statues have been known to stop at schools, military barracks, and, one year, a car dealership display room, whose employees hurriedly moved a vehicle from the spot where, the carriers told them, the goddess wished to rest.
Along the annual routes, local temples, residents, shops and companies set up stalls to offer pilgrims (mostly) free food and drinks — watermelon, stewed tofu, cookies, sweet drinks and water.
Image
People sitting on stools outside.
Along the annual routes, local temples, residents, shops and companies set up stalls to offer pilgrims (mostly) free food and drinks.
Image
A line of people kneeling on a street, hands together in prayer.
Pilgrims paying their respects. When Mazu passes by, chants of “I love Mazu, and Mazu loves me,” are often heard.
Despite the hubbub, some pilgrims described how, as they fell into a meditative walking rhythm, the noise of the firecrackers and loudspeakers fell away, and they sometimes struck up deep conversations, and friendships, with strangers walking beside them.
“While you’re walking, you can give yourself more time and space to think deeply about things you haven’t thought of before,” said Hung Yu-fang, a 40-year old insurance company employee who was doing the Dajia pilgrimage for a fourth year.
While the nine-day Dajia pilgrimage follows a preset route, the Baishatun pilgrimage is more fluid. It doesn’t set a precise path in advance, leaving followers to intuit which turns in the roads the Mazu statue will take and where she may stop.
When her carriers reached an intersection this year, a tense air settled over the pilgrims, waiting while the statue bearers shuffled and turned this way and that — by their account, waiting for Mazu to decide which direction she wanted to take. They cheered when Mazu headed off again.
At night, the carriers rested the Mazu statue in a temple, and hardier pilgrims slept in the temple or on the nearby streets. unrolling thin rubber mattresses.
Image
Firecrackers exploding in the middle of the street, with a Mazu procession behind them.
Despite the hubbub, some pilgrims described how, as they fell into a meditative walking rhythm, the noise of the firecrackers and loudspeakers would fall away.
Image
Parts of a half dozen or so people can be seen resting on mat placed on the floor of a temple, with religious statues and red columns visible.
At night, hardier pilgrims sleep on the floor of temples on thin rubber mattresses.
As Taiwan industrialized, it seemed possible that such rituals might survive only as symbols of the island’s fading rustic roots.
“For some time, it was for the lower rungs of society. Just a few hundred people would take part in the pilgrimages,” said Professor Ting, the religion researcher. “Now it’s popular, but a lot of the new, younger participants only walk for a few days — not the whole journey — to experience it as Taiwanese culture.”
In recent years, the surge of participants has been spurred by media attention (Taiwanese TV covers the pilgrimages like they were major sporting events), online enthusiasts (Mazu’s progress can be followed on the temples’ phone apps), and ease of travel (trains are fast and efficient).
In 2010, the Baishatun pilgrimage drew around 5,000 registered participants; this year, nearly 180,000 pilgrims signed up, a figure that doesn’t include the tens of thousands who joined informally along the way.
When the pilgrimage reached the Beigang Chaotian temple in southern Taiwan — its main destination before turning home — Mazu was greeted by an eruption of fireworks and gongs, and overwhelming crowds. Nearly 500,000 people turned up that day, a record, said organizers.
Despite the heat and crowds, people lined up for hours to squeeze inside the temple and catch a glimpse of Mazu, wearing an embroidered headdress draped with pearls.
“I couldn’t squeeze inside the temple,” said Mr. Chou, the clothes designer, who this year managed to walk part of both major pilgrimages. “But that didn’t matter. This time I also invited friends along so they could also get a taste of more traditional culture.”
Image
A large crowd at an ornate temple, with dozens of colorful lanterns floating above them.
The crowds can be so large that some pilgrims find it impossible to squeeze onto temple grounds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3