Will Taiwan Be the First Domino to Fall to China?
Democratic countries that worry about the Chinese government’s attempts to influence their politics should study its success in this weekend’s elections in Taiwan.
The many races — for some 11,000 positions in villages, towns and counties across the island — were something like midterms and widely seen as a prelude to the next presidential election, scheduled for early 2020. By my count, candidates friendly to Beijing will now occupy 16 of the 24 top posts that were contested, up from the current six.
China has denied any meddling. But in the last several years, it has intensified its efforts to destabilize the Taiwanese government led by the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.). It has curbed tourism from the mainland, conducted military maneuvers around Taiwan and even threatened to invade.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/opin ... dline&te=1
ASIA
The Real China Challenge: Managing Its Decline
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first tout as countries of the future.
In 2009, The Economist wrote about an up-and-coming global power: Brazil. Its economy, the magazine suggested, would soon overtake that of France or the U.K. as the world’s fifth largest. São Paulo would be the world’s fifth-richest city. Vast new reserves of offshore oil would provide an added boost, complemented by the country’s robust and sophisticated manufacturing sector.
To illustrate the point, the magazine’s cover featured a picture of Rio de Janeiro’s “Christ the Redeemer” statue taking off from its mountaintop as if it were a rocket.
The rocket never reached orbit. Brazil’s economy is now limping its way out of the worst recession in its history. The murder rate — 175 people per day in 2017 — is at a record high. One former president is in jail, another was impeached. The incoming president is an admirer of the country’s old military dictatorship, only he thinks it should have killed the people it tortured.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first tout as countries of the future.
I thought about The Economist story while reading a deeply reported and thought-provoking series in The Times about another country of the future: China. The phrase “rise of China” has now become so commonplace that we treat it more as a fact of nature than as a prediction of a very familiar sort — one made erroneously about the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s; about Japan in the ’70s and ’80s; and about the European Union in the ’90s and ’00s.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/opin ... dline&te=1
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first tout as countries of the future.
In 2009, The Economist wrote about an up-and-coming global power: Brazil. Its economy, the magazine suggested, would soon overtake that of France or the U.K. as the world’s fifth largest. São Paulo would be the world’s fifth-richest city. Vast new reserves of offshore oil would provide an added boost, complemented by the country’s robust and sophisticated manufacturing sector.
To illustrate the point, the magazine’s cover featured a picture of Rio de Janeiro’s “Christ the Redeemer” statue taking off from its mountaintop as if it were a rocket.
The rocket never reached orbit. Brazil’s economy is now limping its way out of the worst recession in its history. The murder rate — 175 people per day in 2017 — is at a record high. One former president is in jail, another was impeached. The incoming president is an admirer of the country’s old military dictatorship, only he thinks it should have killed the people it tortured.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first tout as countries of the future.
I thought about The Economist story while reading a deeply reported and thought-provoking series in The Times about another country of the future: China. The phrase “rise of China” has now become so commonplace that we treat it more as a fact of nature than as a prediction of a very familiar sort — one made erroneously about the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s; about Japan in the ’70s and ’80s; and about the European Union in the ’90s and ’00s.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/opin ... dline&te=1
As China Seeks Scientific Greatness, Some Say Ethics Are an Afterthought
BEIJING — First it was a proposal to transplant a head to a new body. Then it was the world’s first cloned primates. Now it is genetically edited babies.
Those recent scientific announcements, generating reactions that went from unease to shock, had one thing in common: All involved scientists from China.
China has set its sights on becoming a leader in science, pouring millions of dollars into research projects and luring back top Western-educated Chinese talent. The country’s scientists are accustomed to attention-grabbing headlines by their colleagues as they race to dominate their fields.
But when He Jiankui announced on Monday that he had created the world’s first genetically edited babies, Chinese scientists — like those elsewhere — denounced it as a step too far. Now many are asking whether their country’s intense focus on scientific achievement has come at the expense of ethical standards.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/worl ... 3053091201
BEIJING — First it was a proposal to transplant a head to a new body. Then it was the world’s first cloned primates. Now it is genetically edited babies.
Those recent scientific announcements, generating reactions that went from unease to shock, had one thing in common: All involved scientists from China.
China has set its sights on becoming a leader in science, pouring millions of dollars into research projects and luring back top Western-educated Chinese talent. The country’s scientists are accustomed to attention-grabbing headlines by their colleagues as they race to dominate their fields.
But when He Jiankui announced on Monday that he had created the world’s first genetically edited babies, Chinese scientists — like those elsewhere — denounced it as a step too far. Now many are asking whether their country’s intense focus on scientific achievement has come at the expense of ethical standards.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/worl ... 3053091201
The Race to Dam the Himalayas
Hundreds of big projects are planned for the rivers that plunge from the roof of the world.
Excerpt:
India is not alone in its ambitions. Hungry for energy and threatened by an acute shortage of fresh water, other Asian nations are competing to harness the power of the Himalayan rivers, on which more than half a billion people depend directly for sustenance.
More than 400 dams are under construction, or planned for the coming decades, in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan; at least 100 more have been proposed across the Chinese border in Tibet. If the plans come to fruition, this will be one of the world’s most heavily dammed regions. But these projects will aggravate international tensions. They carry grave ecological risks. To understand why their backers cast caution aside, it helps to look to history.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/opin ... dline&te=1
Hundreds of big projects are planned for the rivers that plunge from the roof of the world.
Excerpt:
India is not alone in its ambitions. Hungry for energy and threatened by an acute shortage of fresh water, other Asian nations are competing to harness the power of the Himalayan rivers, on which more than half a billion people depend directly for sustenance.
More than 400 dams are under construction, or planned for the coming decades, in Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan; at least 100 more have been proposed across the Chinese border in Tibet. If the plans come to fruition, this will be one of the world’s most heavily dammed regions. But these projects will aggravate international tensions. They carry grave ecological risks. To understand why their backers cast caution aside, it helps to look to history.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/opin ... dline&te=1
Even by the standards of poor countries, India is alarmingly filthy
For its own sake, and the world’s, it needs to clean up
India stinks. If at this misty time of year its capital, Delhi, smells as if something is burning, that is because many things are: the carcinogenic diesel that supplies three-quarters of the city’s motor fuel, the dirty coal that supplies most of its power, the rice stalks that nearby farmers want to clear after the harvest, the rubbish dumps that perpetually smoulder, the 400,000 trees that feed the city’s crematoria each year and so on. All this combustion makes Delhi’s air the most noxious of any big city (see article). It chokes on roughly twice as much pm 2.5, fine dust that penetrates deep into lungs, as Beijing.
Delhi’s deadly air is part of a wider crisis. Seventy percent of surface water is tainted. In the World Health Organisation’s rankings of air pollution, Indian cities claim 14 of the top 15 spots. In an index of countries’ environmental health from Yale and Columbia universities, India ranks a dismal 177th out of 180.
This does not just make life unpleasant for a lot of Indians. It kills them. Recent estimates put the annual death toll from breathing pm 2.5 alone at 1.2m-2.2m a year. The lifespan of Delhi-dwellers is shortened by more than ten years, says the University of Chicago. Consumption of dirty water directly causes 200,000 deaths a year, a government think-tank reckons, without measuring its contribution to slower killers such as kidney disease. Some 600m Indians, nearly half the country, live in areas where water is in short supply. As pollutants taint groundwater, and global warming makes the vital monsoon rains more erratic, the country is poisoning its own future.
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https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/ ... a/173397/n
For its own sake, and the world’s, it needs to clean up
India stinks. If at this misty time of year its capital, Delhi, smells as if something is burning, that is because many things are: the carcinogenic diesel that supplies three-quarters of the city’s motor fuel, the dirty coal that supplies most of its power, the rice stalks that nearby farmers want to clear after the harvest, the rubbish dumps that perpetually smoulder, the 400,000 trees that feed the city’s crematoria each year and so on. All this combustion makes Delhi’s air the most noxious of any big city (see article). It chokes on roughly twice as much pm 2.5, fine dust that penetrates deep into lungs, as Beijing.
Delhi’s deadly air is part of a wider crisis. Seventy percent of surface water is tainted. In the World Health Organisation’s rankings of air pollution, Indian cities claim 14 of the top 15 spots. In an index of countries’ environmental health from Yale and Columbia universities, India ranks a dismal 177th out of 180.
This does not just make life unpleasant for a lot of Indians. It kills them. Recent estimates put the annual death toll from breathing pm 2.5 alone at 1.2m-2.2m a year. The lifespan of Delhi-dwellers is shortened by more than ten years, says the University of Chicago. Consumption of dirty water directly causes 200,000 deaths a year, a government think-tank reckons, without measuring its contribution to slower killers such as kidney disease. Some 600m Indians, nearly half the country, live in areas where water is in short supply. As pollutants taint groundwater, and global warming makes the vital monsoon rains more erratic, the country is poisoning its own future.
More...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/ ... a/173397/n
China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor
KASHGAR, China — Muslim inmates from internment camps in far western China hunched over sewing machines, in row after row. They were among hundreds of thousands who had been detained and spent month after month renouncing their religious convictions. Now the government was showing them on television as models of repentance, earning good pay — and political salvation — as factory workers.
China’s ruling Communist Party has said in a surge of upbeat propaganda that a sprawling network of camps in the Xinjiang region is providing job training and putting detainees on production lines for their own good, offering an escape from poverty, backwardness and the temptations of radical Islam.
But mounting evidence suggests a system of forced labor is emerging from the camps, a development likely to intensify international condemnation of China’s drastic efforts to control and indoctrinate a Muslim ethnic minority population of more than 12 million in Xinjiang.
Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/worl ... 3053091217
KASHGAR, China — Muslim inmates from internment camps in far western China hunched over sewing machines, in row after row. They were among hundreds of thousands who had been detained and spent month after month renouncing their religious convictions. Now the government was showing them on television as models of repentance, earning good pay — and political salvation — as factory workers.
China’s ruling Communist Party has said in a surge of upbeat propaganda that a sprawling network of camps in the Xinjiang region is providing job training and putting detainees on production lines for their own good, offering an escape from poverty, backwardness and the temptations of radical Islam.
But mounting evidence suggests a system of forced labor is emerging from the camps, a development likely to intensify international condemnation of China’s drastic efforts to control and indoctrinate a Muslim ethnic minority population of more than 12 million in Xinjiang.
Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/worl ... 3053091217
China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Plan in Pakistan Takes a Military Turn
Under a program China insisted was peaceful, Pakistan is cooperating on distinctly defense-related projects, including a secret plan to build new fighter jets.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — When President Trump started the new year by suspending billions of dollars of security aid to Pakistan, one theory was that it would scare the Pakistani military into cooperating better with its American allies.
The reality was that Pakistan already had a replacement sponsor lined up.
Just two weeks later, the Pakistani Air Force and Chinese officials were putting the final touches on a secret proposal to expand Pakistan’s building of Chinese military jets, weaponry and other hardware. The confidential plan, reviewed by The New York Times, would also deepen the cooperation between China and Pakistan in space, a frontier the Pentagon recently said Beijing was trying to militarize after decades of playing catch-up.
All those military projects were designated as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion chain of infrastructure development programs stretching across some 70 countries, built and financed by Beijing.
Chinese officials have repeatedly said the Belt and Road is purely an economic project with peaceful intent. But with its plan for Pakistan, China is for the first time explicitly tying a Belt and Road proposal to its military ambitions — and confirming the concerns of a host of nations who suspect the infrastructure initiative is really about helping China project armed might.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/worl ... 3053091220
Under a program China insisted was peaceful, Pakistan is cooperating on distinctly defense-related projects, including a secret plan to build new fighter jets.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — When President Trump started the new year by suspending billions of dollars of security aid to Pakistan, one theory was that it would scare the Pakistani military into cooperating better with its American allies.
The reality was that Pakistan already had a replacement sponsor lined up.
Just two weeks later, the Pakistani Air Force and Chinese officials were putting the final touches on a secret proposal to expand Pakistan’s building of Chinese military jets, weaponry and other hardware. The confidential plan, reviewed by The New York Times, would also deepen the cooperation between China and Pakistan in space, a frontier the Pentagon recently said Beijing was trying to militarize after decades of playing catch-up.
All those military projects were designated as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion chain of infrastructure development programs stretching across some 70 countries, built and financed by Beijing.
Chinese officials have repeatedly said the Belt and Road is purely an economic project with peaceful intent. But with its plan for Pakistan, China is for the first time explicitly tying a Belt and Road proposal to its military ambitions — and confirming the concerns of a host of nations who suspect the infrastructure initiative is really about helping China project armed might.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/worl ... 3053091220
“Period. End of Sentence.”
Menstruation and liberation
“Period. End of Sentence.”, a new documentary about women in rural India fighting the stigma of menstruation, is a timely exploration of a national taboo. Around 70% of Indian women cannot afford sanitary products; 300m use unhygienic alternatives like newspapers. The documentary looks at women who make cheap sanitary products and deliver them door-to-door. It deserves a wide audience—and it may now get one, following its nomination for an Oscar
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https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019 ... m=20190122
Menstruation and liberation
“Period. End of Sentence.”, a new documentary about women in rural India fighting the stigma of menstruation, is a timely exploration of a national taboo. Around 70% of Indian women cannot afford sanitary products; 300m use unhygienic alternatives like newspapers. The documentary looks at women who make cheap sanitary products and deliver them door-to-door. It deserves a wide audience—and it may now get one, following its nomination for an Oscar
More...
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019 ... m=20190122
How China Brings Us Together
An existential threat for the 21st century.
I’ve always thought Americans would come together when we realized that we faced a dangerous foreign foe. And lo and behold, now we have one: China. It’s become increasingly clear that China is a grave economic, technological and intellectual threat to the United States and the world order.
And sure enough, beneath the TV bluster of daily politics, Americans are beginning to join together. Mike Pence and Elizabeth Warren can sound shockingly similar when talking about China’s economic policy. Nancy Pelosi and Republicans sound shockingly similar when they talk about Chinese human rights abuses. Conservative and liberal policy thinkers can sound shockingly similar when they start talking about how to respond to the challenge from China.
For the past few decades, China has appeared to be a net positive force in world affairs. Sure, Beijing violated trade agreements and escalated regional tensions. But the Chinese economic explosion lowered our cost of living and expanded prosperity worldwide.
But a few things have now changed. First, instead of liberalizing, the Chinese regime has become more aggressive and repressive.
Second, the Chinese have changed their economic focus so that their economy can directly replace ours. The regime’s “Made in China 2025” policy is an attempt to go up the value chain and dominate high-tech industries like aerospace, robotics and biotech.
According to a report just released by Marco Rubio, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, China’s artificial intelligence industry has grown by 67 percent over the past year and has produced more patents than its U.S. counterparts. One estimate suggests China is investing as much as 30 times more capital in quantum computing than the U.S. My colleague Thomas L. Friedman notes that China already has the No. 1 and No. 3 drone manufacturers in the world, and it is way ahead of us on technologies like facial and speech recognition.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/opin ... dline&te=1
An existential threat for the 21st century.
I’ve always thought Americans would come together when we realized that we faced a dangerous foreign foe. And lo and behold, now we have one: China. It’s become increasingly clear that China is a grave economic, technological and intellectual threat to the United States and the world order.
And sure enough, beneath the TV bluster of daily politics, Americans are beginning to join together. Mike Pence and Elizabeth Warren can sound shockingly similar when talking about China’s economic policy. Nancy Pelosi and Republicans sound shockingly similar when they talk about Chinese human rights abuses. Conservative and liberal policy thinkers can sound shockingly similar when they start talking about how to respond to the challenge from China.
For the past few decades, China has appeared to be a net positive force in world affairs. Sure, Beijing violated trade agreements and escalated regional tensions. But the Chinese economic explosion lowered our cost of living and expanded prosperity worldwide.
But a few things have now changed. First, instead of liberalizing, the Chinese regime has become more aggressive and repressive.
Second, the Chinese have changed their economic focus so that their economy can directly replace ours. The regime’s “Made in China 2025” policy is an attempt to go up the value chain and dominate high-tech industries like aerospace, robotics and biotech.
According to a report just released by Marco Rubio, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, China’s artificial intelligence industry has grown by 67 percent over the past year and has produced more patents than its U.S. counterparts. One estimate suggests China is investing as much as 30 times more capital in quantum computing than the U.S. My colleague Thomas L. Friedman notes that China already has the No. 1 and No. 3 drone manufacturers in the world, and it is way ahead of us on technologies like facial and speech recognition.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/opin ... dline&te=1
Italy Gives Xi, and China’s Vast Infrastructure Project, a Royal Welcome
ROME — President Xi Jinping of China arrived on Friday at Rome’s presidential palace with a cavalry escort usually reserved for royals. For a three-day visit, Italy pulled out all the stops for an economic superpower promising billions in investment and trade deals in exchange for officially signing on to China’s vast new Silk Road.
But even as Mr. Xi and his wife were serenaded at a state dinner by Andrea Bocelli, the leaders of France, Germany and the European Union huddled in Brussels hoping to strengthen the Continent’s defenses against what they considered to be China’s economic incursion.
The disconnect between the two scenes laid bare the divisions and tensions in Europe, caught in the middle of a trade war between the United States and China, while trying to find its bearings and assert its power in a volatile era of shifting geopolitical alliances and American retrenchment.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/worl ... 3053090323
ROME — President Xi Jinping of China arrived on Friday at Rome’s presidential palace with a cavalry escort usually reserved for royals. For a three-day visit, Italy pulled out all the stops for an economic superpower promising billions in investment and trade deals in exchange for officially signing on to China’s vast new Silk Road.
But even as Mr. Xi and his wife were serenaded at a state dinner by Andrea Bocelli, the leaders of France, Germany and the European Union huddled in Brussels hoping to strengthen the Continent’s defenses against what they considered to be China’s economic incursion.
The disconnect between the two scenes laid bare the divisions and tensions in Europe, caught in the middle of a trade war between the United States and China, while trying to find its bearings and assert its power in a volatile era of shifting geopolitical alliances and American retrenchment.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/worl ... 3053090323
Religious Minorities Across Asia Suffer Amid Surge in Sectarian Politics
The bombings of three churches in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday highlighted the vulnerability of Christians in Asia.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The deadly attacks in Sri Lanka on Sunday highlighted how easily religious coexistence can be ripped apart in a region where secularism is weakening amid the growing appeal of a politics based on ethnic and sectarian identity.
In India, the country’s governing right-wing Hindu party is exploiting faith for votes, pushing an us-versus-them philosophy that has left Muslims fearing they will be lynched if they walk alone.
In Myanmar, the country’s Buddhist generals have orchestrated a terrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Rohingya Muslims.
And in Indonesia and Bangladesh, traditionally moderate Muslim politicians are adopting harder-line stances to appeal to more conservative electorates.
Sri Lanka Bombing Maps: What We Know About the Attack Sites
The attacks struck churches, five-star hotels and other sites in multiple cities.
The bombings of three churches in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday highlighted the vulnerability of Christians in Asia, where religious minorities of many faiths have been battered by this surge of nationalism and sectarian politics.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/worl ... 3053090422
The bombings of three churches in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday highlighted the vulnerability of Christians in Asia.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The deadly attacks in Sri Lanka on Sunday highlighted how easily religious coexistence can be ripped apart in a region where secularism is weakening amid the growing appeal of a politics based on ethnic and sectarian identity.
In India, the country’s governing right-wing Hindu party is exploiting faith for votes, pushing an us-versus-them philosophy that has left Muslims fearing they will be lynched if they walk alone.
In Myanmar, the country’s Buddhist generals have orchestrated a terrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Rohingya Muslims.
And in Indonesia and Bangladesh, traditionally moderate Muslim politicians are adopting harder-line stances to appeal to more conservative electorates.
Sri Lanka Bombing Maps: What We Know About the Attack Sites
The attacks struck churches, five-star hotels and other sites in multiple cities.
The bombings of three churches in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday highlighted the vulnerability of Christians in Asia, where religious minorities of many faiths have been battered by this surge of nationalism and sectarian politics.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/worl ... 3053090422
Is China the World’s Loan Shark?
Some say Beijing lends money for infrastructure and development to pressure poor countries with debt. Not so.
WASHINGTON — Representatives from more than 150 countries began to gather in Beijing on Friday for a grand forum to celebrate China’s grand Belt and Road Initiative. Since its formal unveiling in 2013, B.R.I. — a vast, worldwide web of infrastructure-development projects mostly funded or sponsored by the Chinese government — has generated both tremendous enthusiasm and tremendous anxiety.
Some call the colossal program a new Marshall Plan, arguing that it could radically reduce the costs of international trade as well as underpin the economic transformation of poor countries.
Others accuse China of using B.R.I. as a way to flex its economic muscle for political gain on the sly. The whole effort is a cover for “debt-trap diplomacy,” goes one common criticism — or, to borrow from John R. Bolton, the United States national security adviser, China is making “strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands.” (Some American Democrats seem to agree with him, at least about this.)
Yes, debt is on the rise in the developing world, and Chinese overseas lending is, for the first time, a part of the story. But a number of us academics who have studied China’s practices in detail have found scant evidence of a pattern indicating that Chinese banks, acting at the government’s behest, are deliberately over-lending or funding loss-making projects to secure strategic advantages for China.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opin ... dline&te=1
Some say Beijing lends money for infrastructure and development to pressure poor countries with debt. Not so.
WASHINGTON — Representatives from more than 150 countries began to gather in Beijing on Friday for a grand forum to celebrate China’s grand Belt and Road Initiative. Since its formal unveiling in 2013, B.R.I. — a vast, worldwide web of infrastructure-development projects mostly funded or sponsored by the Chinese government — has generated both tremendous enthusiasm and tremendous anxiety.
Some call the colossal program a new Marshall Plan, arguing that it could radically reduce the costs of international trade as well as underpin the economic transformation of poor countries.
Others accuse China of using B.R.I. as a way to flex its economic muscle for political gain on the sly. The whole effort is a cover for “debt-trap diplomacy,” goes one common criticism — or, to borrow from John R. Bolton, the United States national security adviser, China is making “strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands.” (Some American Democrats seem to agree with him, at least about this.)
Yes, debt is on the rise in the developing world, and Chinese overseas lending is, for the first time, a part of the story. But a number of us academics who have studied China’s practices in detail have found scant evidence of a pattern indicating that Chinese banks, acting at the government’s behest, are deliberately over-lending or funding loss-making projects to secure strategic advantages for China.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opin ... dline&te=1
Latest Arena for China’s Growing Global Ambitions: The Arctic
ROVANIEMI, Finland — The Arctic is thawing, and China is seizing the chance to expand its influence in the north.
For China, the retreating ice potentially offers two big prizes: new sources of energy and a faster shipping route across the top of the world. To that end, the country is cultivating deeper ties with Russia.
More than 3,000 miles from home, Chinese crews have been drilling for gas beneath the frigid waters of the Kara Sea off Russia’s northern coast. Every summer for the last five years, Chinese cargo ships have maneuvered through the ice packs off Russia’s shores — a new passage that officials in Beijing like to call the Polar Silk Road. And in Shanghai, Chinese shipbuilders recently launched the country’s second icebreaker, the Snow Dragon 2.
China’s ambitions in the Far North, said Aleksi Harkonen, Finland’s ambassador for Arctic affairs, mirror its ambitions everywhere else. “It’s after global influence,” he said, “including in the Arctic.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/clim ... _th_190525
ROVANIEMI, Finland — The Arctic is thawing, and China is seizing the chance to expand its influence in the north.
For China, the retreating ice potentially offers two big prizes: new sources of energy and a faster shipping route across the top of the world. To that end, the country is cultivating deeper ties with Russia.
More than 3,000 miles from home, Chinese crews have been drilling for gas beneath the frigid waters of the Kara Sea off Russia’s northern coast. Every summer for the last five years, Chinese cargo ships have maneuvered through the ice packs off Russia’s shores — a new passage that officials in Beijing like to call the Polar Silk Road. And in Shanghai, Chinese shipbuilders recently launched the country’s second icebreaker, the Snow Dragon 2.
China’s ambitions in the Far North, said Aleksi Harkonen, Finland’s ambassador for Arctic affairs, mirror its ambitions everywhere else. “It’s after global influence,” he said, “including in the Arctic.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/clim ... _th_190525
Recyclers Cringe as Southeast Asia Says It’s Sick of the West’s Trash
TELOK GONG, Malaysia — Black sedans with government plates raced through a town near Malaysia’s main seaport, flashing blue sirens as they approached rogue trash dumps.
The raid, in the town of Telok Gong this week, was among the latest efforts by officials to shut down unlicensed dumps holding plastic scrap imported from the United States and other rich countries.
“Everybody knows those dumps are illegal,” said Modh Faiz Tamsir, a butcher hawking fly-covered beef in a parking lot on Telok Gong’s main drag. “We don’t like them.”
After China, once the world’s primary dumping ground, abruptly imposed restrictions on “foreign garbage” in late 2017, countries across Southeast Asia began taking in the West’s plastic waste.
Within months, Malaysia, which has a sizable ethnic Chinese population, had replaced China as the world’s largest importer of plastic scrap. But this country, and others across the region, soon saw the waste as an environmental nightmare, and a heavy backlash has begun. With public support, some advocacy groups have urged officials to permanently ban the import of plastic waste.
But at a time when the world is awash in such plastic, some experts worry that this backlash could block the flow of raw material to Southeast Asia’s aboveboard recyclers and manufacturers — and raise the chances that plastic scrap will end up in rivers, oceans, dumps and illegal burn sites.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/worl ... 3053090617
TELOK GONG, Malaysia — Black sedans with government plates raced through a town near Malaysia’s main seaport, flashing blue sirens as they approached rogue trash dumps.
The raid, in the town of Telok Gong this week, was among the latest efforts by officials to shut down unlicensed dumps holding plastic scrap imported from the United States and other rich countries.
“Everybody knows those dumps are illegal,” said Modh Faiz Tamsir, a butcher hawking fly-covered beef in a parking lot on Telok Gong’s main drag. “We don’t like them.”
After China, once the world’s primary dumping ground, abruptly imposed restrictions on “foreign garbage” in late 2017, countries across Southeast Asia began taking in the West’s plastic waste.
Within months, Malaysia, which has a sizable ethnic Chinese population, had replaced China as the world’s largest importer of plastic scrap. But this country, and others across the region, soon saw the waste as an environmental nightmare, and a heavy backlash has begun. With public support, some advocacy groups have urged officials to permanently ban the import of plastic waste.
But at a time when the world is awash in such plastic, some experts worry that this backlash could block the flow of raw material to Southeast Asia’s aboveboard recyclers and manufacturers — and raise the chances that plastic scrap will end up in rivers, oceans, dumps and illegal burn sites.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/worl ... 3053090617
India Launches Chandrayaan-2 Moon Mission on Second Try
SATISH DHAWAN SPACE CENTER, India — India is on its way to the moon.
One week after a first attempt was canceled at the last minute, the Chandrayaan-2 mission blasted off at 2:43 p.m. Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s southeast coast, carrying an uncrewed lunar lander and the dreams of a nation.
The 142-foot, 700-ton rocket rose on a funnel of fire, ripping through the air perfectly straight and surprisingly fast before vanishing into a thick bank of clouds.
A roaring thunder echoed across the sky.
“The mission has been successfully accomplished!” blared a message from loudspeakers at mission control.
If the rest of the mission goes as well, India will become the fourth nation — after the United States, Russia and China — to land on the moon, more than 200,000 miles away. Its target is a region near the mysterious south pole, where no other missions have explored.
Video and more....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/worl ... 3053090723
SATISH DHAWAN SPACE CENTER, India — India is on its way to the moon.
One week after a first attempt was canceled at the last minute, the Chandrayaan-2 mission blasted off at 2:43 p.m. Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s southeast coast, carrying an uncrewed lunar lander and the dreams of a nation.
The 142-foot, 700-ton rocket rose on a funnel of fire, ripping through the air perfectly straight and surprisingly fast before vanishing into a thick bank of clouds.
A roaring thunder echoed across the sky.
“The mission has been successfully accomplished!” blared a message from loudspeakers at mission control.
If the rest of the mission goes as well, India will become the fourth nation — after the United States, Russia and China — to land on the moon, more than 200,000 miles away. Its target is a region near the mysterious south pole, where no other missions have explored.
Video and more....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/worl ... 3053090723
The heart of the world
The Silk Road – from the Eastern Mediterranean to China’s Pacific shore – is once again the centre of the world
Successful empires and kingdoms are good at building infrastructure and sharpening the best ideas. The inscription along the magnificent colonnade above the James A Farley building in central Manhattan, the largest post office in the United States, reads: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’ Herodotus wrote the words 2,500 years ago, to describe the ancient Persians – who were always on the lookout for innovative technologies and ideas that made it easier to administer their great empire. Getting messages quickly and reliably from A to B in the ancient world was no less important than it is today.
The instant communications made possible by recent technological changes should not make us susceptible to the breathless commentary about globalisation as something new. For more than two millennia, news and information, goods and products, ideas and beliefs have flowed through networks linking the Pacific coast of China with the Atlantic coasts of North Africa and Europe, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf with the Mediterranean and Scandinavia. Since the late 19th century, these networks have been known as the Silk Roads.
For most, the name conjures an exotic air of a distant past, but not a history. The history of ideas has not admitted the Silk Roads as it links past to present in a chain from polytheism and democracy in Ancient Greece to the arrival of Christianity in Europe, which led to the Renaissance, paving the way for the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment gave birth to political democracy and the industrial revolution, the logical culmination of which is the US and its creed of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Historians challenge and reshape individual sections of this story; but its essential components and trajectory remain secure.
If history, as the saying goes, is written by the winners, it might be why the world, especially the world from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean seems so unsettlingly difficult to understand.
It is no coincidence that the lion’s share of challenges and opportunities around us narrow down to the old Silk Road. We are witnessing the world’s centre of gravity return to the axis on which it spun for millennia. When viewed from the vantage point of the Silk Roads, the familiar narrative begins to quiver, history itself begins to shift. In fact, to understand the world, the best place to look is not in the centre of the West nor in the heart of the East, but on the old Silk Road where the two come together.
More....
https://aeon.co/essays/the-silk-road-is ... rce=Direct
The Silk Road – from the Eastern Mediterranean to China’s Pacific shore – is once again the centre of the world
Successful empires and kingdoms are good at building infrastructure and sharpening the best ideas. The inscription along the magnificent colonnade above the James A Farley building in central Manhattan, the largest post office in the United States, reads: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’ Herodotus wrote the words 2,500 years ago, to describe the ancient Persians – who were always on the lookout for innovative technologies and ideas that made it easier to administer their great empire. Getting messages quickly and reliably from A to B in the ancient world was no less important than it is today.
The instant communications made possible by recent technological changes should not make us susceptible to the breathless commentary about globalisation as something new. For more than two millennia, news and information, goods and products, ideas and beliefs have flowed through networks linking the Pacific coast of China with the Atlantic coasts of North Africa and Europe, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf with the Mediterranean and Scandinavia. Since the late 19th century, these networks have been known as the Silk Roads.
For most, the name conjures an exotic air of a distant past, but not a history. The history of ideas has not admitted the Silk Roads as it links past to present in a chain from polytheism and democracy in Ancient Greece to the arrival of Christianity in Europe, which led to the Renaissance, paving the way for the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment gave birth to political democracy and the industrial revolution, the logical culmination of which is the US and its creed of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Historians challenge and reshape individual sections of this story; but its essential components and trajectory remain secure.
If history, as the saying goes, is written by the winners, it might be why the world, especially the world from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean seems so unsettlingly difficult to understand.
It is no coincidence that the lion’s share of challenges and opportunities around us narrow down to the old Silk Road. We are witnessing the world’s centre of gravity return to the axis on which it spun for millennia. When viewed from the vantage point of the Silk Roads, the familiar narrative begins to quiver, history itself begins to shift. In fact, to understand the world, the best place to look is not in the centre of the West nor in the heart of the East, but on the old Silk Road where the two come together.
More....
https://aeon.co/essays/the-silk-road-is ... rce=Direct
Asia digs up and burns three-quarters of the world’s coal
That must change if the climate is not to
Alarge sign in the city hall of San Carlos, on the island of Negros in the Philippines, lays out the local government’s ambitions. It wants San Carlos to be “a model green city”, “a renewable energy hub for Asia” and “a sustainable tourism destination”. But the local officials sitting directly beneath the sign are keen to talk about something else: why a plan to build a coal-fired power plant nearby is an excellent idea.
Coal drives Asia. Between 2006 and 2016 the continent’s consumption of it grew by 3.1% a year. Asia now accounts for fully 75% of global demand for the stuff (see chart 1). China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal. Largely as a result, it also emits more carbon dioxide than any other country. India is the second-biggest consumer. Japan and South Korea are also big consumers, while Australia and Indonesia are big producers. South-East Asia was the only region in the world in which coal’s share of power generation grew last year, according to the International Energy Agency (iea), a research body. And four of the five countries that shell out the most in subsidies for the fuel are Asian.
Asia’s passion for coal, in turn, threatens the health of the planet. The Paris agreement on climate change (which every country in Asia, from Afghanistan to New Zealand, has signed) aims to limit the increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial averages to “well below” 2°C. To avoid 1.5°C of global warming, virtually all of the planet’s coal-fired plants need to close by 2050, climatologists say, given the vast quantity of greenhouse gases produced by mining, transporting and burning coal. No new coal-fired plants should be built from next year on, the secretary-general of the un says. But ubs, a Swiss bank, reckons that Indonesia and Vietnam may still be building coal-fired power stations in 2035. Asia’s last coal plant, it projects, will close only in 2079. Curbing global warming depends on convincing Asian governments to take a different path.
More....
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/08/ ... a/296844/n
That must change if the climate is not to
Alarge sign in the city hall of San Carlos, on the island of Negros in the Philippines, lays out the local government’s ambitions. It wants San Carlos to be “a model green city”, “a renewable energy hub for Asia” and “a sustainable tourism destination”. But the local officials sitting directly beneath the sign are keen to talk about something else: why a plan to build a coal-fired power plant nearby is an excellent idea.
Coal drives Asia. Between 2006 and 2016 the continent’s consumption of it grew by 3.1% a year. Asia now accounts for fully 75% of global demand for the stuff (see chart 1). China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal. Largely as a result, it also emits more carbon dioxide than any other country. India is the second-biggest consumer. Japan and South Korea are also big consumers, while Australia and Indonesia are big producers. South-East Asia was the only region in the world in which coal’s share of power generation grew last year, according to the International Energy Agency (iea), a research body. And four of the five countries that shell out the most in subsidies for the fuel are Asian.
Asia’s passion for coal, in turn, threatens the health of the planet. The Paris agreement on climate change (which every country in Asia, from Afghanistan to New Zealand, has signed) aims to limit the increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial averages to “well below” 2°C. To avoid 1.5°C of global warming, virtually all of the planet’s coal-fired plants need to close by 2050, climatologists say, given the vast quantity of greenhouse gases produced by mining, transporting and burning coal. No new coal-fired plants should be built from next year on, the secretary-general of the un says. But ubs, a Swiss bank, reckons that Indonesia and Vietnam may still be building coal-fired power stations in 2035. Asia’s last coal plant, it projects, will close only in 2079. Curbing global warming depends on convincing Asian governments to take a different path.
More....
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/08/ ... a/296844/n
As Amazon Smolders, Indonesia Fires Choke the Other Side of the World
Thousands of fires, most of them set to clear land for plantations that make palm oil, created thick clouds of smoke that disrupted air travel and sickened people.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Brazil has captured global attention over deliberately set fires that are burning the Amazon rainforest, often called the earth’s lungs. Now Indonesia is compounding the concern with blazes to clear forest on the other side of the world.
Hundreds of wildfires burned across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra on Tuesday, producing thick clouds of smoke that disrupted air travel, forced schools to close and sickened many thousands of people. Poorly equipped firefighters were unable to bring them under control.
Officials said that about 80 percent of the fires were set intentionally to make room for palm plantations, a lucrative cash crop that has led to deforestation on much of Sumatra.
The slash-and-burn conflagrations, which tore through sensitive rainforests where dozens of endangered species live, immediately drew comparisons to the wildfires in the Amazon basin that have destroyed more than 2 million acres.
Photos and more....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/worl ... ogin-email
Thousands of fires, most of them set to clear land for plantations that make palm oil, created thick clouds of smoke that disrupted air travel and sickened people.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Brazil has captured global attention over deliberately set fires that are burning the Amazon rainforest, often called the earth’s lungs. Now Indonesia is compounding the concern with blazes to clear forest on the other side of the world.
Hundreds of wildfires burned across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra on Tuesday, producing thick clouds of smoke that disrupted air travel, forced schools to close and sickened many thousands of people. Poorly equipped firefighters were unable to bring them under control.
Officials said that about 80 percent of the fires were set intentionally to make room for palm plantations, a lucrative cash crop that has led to deforestation on much of Sumatra.
The slash-and-burn conflagrations, which tore through sensitive rainforests where dozens of endangered species live, immediately drew comparisons to the wildfires in the Amazon basin that have destroyed more than 2 million acres.
Photos and more....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/worl ... ogin-email
India’s government is pouring money into dung
When it comes to government funding, cows have jumped over the moon
On september 7th mission control in Bengaluru lost contact with an Indian-designed and -built lunar probe mere seconds before it was supposed to land. Some Indians were consoled by the fact that their country had nearly pulled off an extraordinarily complex mission on a shoestring budget. But others asked why the budget was quite so pinched.
As a proportion of gdp—0.6%—public spending on research and development has not budged in 20 years. That is one of the lowest figures among big economies. Since 2015 the largest state funding agency, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, has seen its budget decline in real terms. The government wants it to attract private money. Yet firms are even stingier: India’s top companies spend barely half a percent of their income on r&d.
Scientists complain, too, that state funding bodies seem increasingly driven by ideology. A particular focus, since the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) took power in 2014, has been on promoting ancient Indian science and medicine. One recent three-year, government-funded hospital study explored the effects of Vedic chants on brain-trauma victims. This included consultation with an authority on “medical astrology” who incorporated horoscope data in the chants, undertook purification rituals with holy Ganges water and performed special prayers. The results of the study have yet to be published.
Scientists also describe mounting pressure to propose work on gomutra (cows’ urine) or panchagavya (a mixture of milk, yogurt, clarified butter, urine and dung), so as to win funding from a recently created government board tasked with “validating” the beneficial qualities of all things bovine. “These ideas are based on absolutely unscientific mythology and scripture,” complains a researcher who declined to be named, fearing funding cuts. “But my department needs equipment and lab facilities for our real research, and we can’t get funds without doing this stuff.” A newly created National Cow Commission has pledged to fund up to 60% of startup capital for businesses that commercialise panchagavya.
A recently elected bjp mp insists that it was drinking cow urine that cured her breast cancer, not the three operations she had. The Cow Urine Therapy and Research Institute of Indore claims to have cured dozens of patients, while Junagadh Agricultural University says its researchers have not only destroyed cancer cells in vitro with gomutra, but discovered gold in the miraculous liquid. Online retailers happily flog dung-based soaps and urine-based medicines promising to cure cancer. The benefits of the lunar mission are less clear.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/09/ ... -into-dung
When it comes to government funding, cows have jumped over the moon
On september 7th mission control in Bengaluru lost contact with an Indian-designed and -built lunar probe mere seconds before it was supposed to land. Some Indians were consoled by the fact that their country had nearly pulled off an extraordinarily complex mission on a shoestring budget. But others asked why the budget was quite so pinched.
As a proportion of gdp—0.6%—public spending on research and development has not budged in 20 years. That is one of the lowest figures among big economies. Since 2015 the largest state funding agency, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, has seen its budget decline in real terms. The government wants it to attract private money. Yet firms are even stingier: India’s top companies spend barely half a percent of their income on r&d.
Scientists complain, too, that state funding bodies seem increasingly driven by ideology. A particular focus, since the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) took power in 2014, has been on promoting ancient Indian science and medicine. One recent three-year, government-funded hospital study explored the effects of Vedic chants on brain-trauma victims. This included consultation with an authority on “medical astrology” who incorporated horoscope data in the chants, undertook purification rituals with holy Ganges water and performed special prayers. The results of the study have yet to be published.
Scientists also describe mounting pressure to propose work on gomutra (cows’ urine) or panchagavya (a mixture of milk, yogurt, clarified butter, urine and dung), so as to win funding from a recently created government board tasked with “validating” the beneficial qualities of all things bovine. “These ideas are based on absolutely unscientific mythology and scripture,” complains a researcher who declined to be named, fearing funding cuts. “But my department needs equipment and lab facilities for our real research, and we can’t get funds without doing this stuff.” A newly created National Cow Commission has pledged to fund up to 60% of startup capital for businesses that commercialise panchagavya.
A recently elected bjp mp insists that it was drinking cow urine that cured her breast cancer, not the three operations she had. The Cow Urine Therapy and Research Institute of Indore claims to have cured dozens of patients, while Junagadh Agricultural University says its researchers have not only destroyed cancer cells in vitro with gomutra, but discovered gold in the miraculous liquid. Online retailers happily flog dung-based soaps and urine-based medicines promising to cure cancer. The benefits of the lunar mission are less clear.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/09/ ... -into-dung
China Wants the World to Stay Silent on Muslim Camps. It’s Succeeding.
BEIJING — When Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Beijing this summer, he hailed a new Silk Road bridging Asia and Europe. He welcomed big Chinese investments for his beleaguered economy. He gushed about China’s sovereignty.
But Mr. Erdogan, who has stridently promoted Islamic values in his overwhelmingly Muslim country, was largely silent on the incarceration of more than one million Turkic Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang, and the forced assimilation of millions more. It was an about-face from a decade ago, when he said the Uighurs there suffered from, “simply put, genocide” at the hands of the Chinese government.
Like Mr. Erdogan, the world has been noticeably quiet about Xinjiang, where China has built a vast network of detention camps and systematic surveillance over the past two years in a state-led operation to convert Uighurs into loyal, secular supporters of the Communist Party. Even when diplomats have witnessed the problems firsthand and privately condemned them, they have been reluctant to go public, unable to garner broad support or unwilling to risk financial ties with China.
Backed by its diplomatic and economic might, China has largely succeeded in quashing criticism. Chinese officials have convinced countries to support Beijing publicly on the issue, most notably Muslim ones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. They have played to the discord within the West over China. And they have waged an aggressive campaign to prevent discussion of Xinjiang at the United Nations.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/worl ... ogin-email
BEIJING — When Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Beijing this summer, he hailed a new Silk Road bridging Asia and Europe. He welcomed big Chinese investments for his beleaguered economy. He gushed about China’s sovereignty.
But Mr. Erdogan, who has stridently promoted Islamic values in his overwhelmingly Muslim country, was largely silent on the incarceration of more than one million Turkic Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang, and the forced assimilation of millions more. It was an about-face from a decade ago, when he said the Uighurs there suffered from, “simply put, genocide” at the hands of the Chinese government.
Like Mr. Erdogan, the world has been noticeably quiet about Xinjiang, where China has built a vast network of detention camps and systematic surveillance over the past two years in a state-led operation to convert Uighurs into loyal, secular supporters of the Communist Party. Even when diplomats have witnessed the problems firsthand and privately condemned them, they have been reluctant to go public, unable to garner broad support or unwilling to risk financial ties with China.
Backed by its diplomatic and economic might, China has largely succeeded in quashing criticism. Chinese officials have convinced countries to support Beijing publicly on the issue, most notably Muslim ones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. They have played to the discord within the West over China. And they have waged an aggressive campaign to prevent discussion of Xinjiang at the United Nations.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/worl ... ogin-email
The struggle of Asian women not to be abused
The speaker of Nepal’s parliament has been arrested. Few other powerful Asian men are held to account
In September a woman called police to tell them that the Speaker of Nepal’s parliament, Krishna Bahadur Mahara, had just drunkenly assaulted her in her flat. When, according to local media reports, she later withdrew her allegation in the face of threats and pressure, everything seemed to be following the usual South Asian script. Men, especially powerful ones, rarely have to answer for their actions. Then the un and foreign embassies put out a statement urging the government to take a stand on violence against women. Within days, Mr Mahara had stepped down. This week the police arrested him.
Whether this case will count as progress in the abysmal treatment of women in his part of the world will not be clear for some time. Violence against women need not hold back a man going places. A tally in India last year found 48 members of parliament or state assemblies accused or convicted of violent crimes against females. They included members of parties run by women.
In South Asia the mistreatment starts in the womb, with the selective abortion of girls. It continues after birth. Girls are likelier to die before the age of five or drop out of school. Many marry before they are adults or are beaten by their partners. In the five years to 2015 over 40,000 Indian women died in rows over dowries. That is more than the combined deaths over the same period from conflict in Kashmir, insurrection in the north-east and the Naxalite rebellion.
Laws and social attitudes have evolved, but not enough. The brutal gang-rape and murder in 2012 of a student in Delhi galvanised India’s middle classes, but the rape of women and girls in villages attracts little attention.
Most sex crimes everywhere go unreported, so all statistics about them should be treated with caution. But for what it is worth, the un says Asia and the Pacific have the worst rates of violence against women, with two in three women experiencing it in their lifetime.
Discrimination is rampant. This year Indonesia’s Supreme Court found a former teacher guilty of “violating decency” by making a lewd recording. She had taped her boss making sexually explicit comments to her, hoping to prove that he was harassing her. Her ordeal ended only with a presidential pardon. Female police officers and army recruits are sometimes required to submit to outrageous physical inspections to “prove” their virginity.
In China abusive marriages are common, and hard to escape (see article). Activists against harassment are themselves harassed by the state. In Cambodia women’s safety is not helped by the media. A third of television dramas depict physical, sexual or emotional abuse of women. Such problems are not confined to poor countries. South Korea’s k-pop industry has been roiled by a series of cases in which women were drugged and raped. Then there are the thousands of spycams detected each year in women’s lavatories and changing rooms, for which hardly anyone is prosecuted. Recently, a hospital worker killed herself after discovering that a video of her changing into her scrubs had been widely distributed. Reported sex crimes, including child rape, are up sharply in Bangladesh, though this might simply reflect a greater willingness to report such things.
Across Asia women are finding a voice. In Bangladesh a #MeToo-style movement is growing in the country’s garment factories (though the movement’s leaders still struggle to convince victims to file complaints with the police). In January lawyers in Pakistan launched an online portal called Ab Aur Nahin (“Time’s up”) offering pro bono help for victims of harassment.
In the Philippines women have taken to social media and the streets to complain about President Rodrigo Duterte’s frequent jokes about rape and groping—a rare case of people standing up to the strongman. And in South Korea more women are speaking up against powerful, violent men in government, business and entertainment.
They are also, in a “corset-free” movement, challenging the country’s rigid beauty standards, exemplified by employers’ expectation that women should be heavily made-up at work and, at some firms, not even wear glasses. The emergence in South Korea of an aggressive, mainly online force of young men who believe that such movements are proof of the oppression of men is an indication of how long and how hard the battle for security, let alone equality, will be for Asian women.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/10/ ... -be-abused
The speaker of Nepal’s parliament has been arrested. Few other powerful Asian men are held to account
In September a woman called police to tell them that the Speaker of Nepal’s parliament, Krishna Bahadur Mahara, had just drunkenly assaulted her in her flat. When, according to local media reports, she later withdrew her allegation in the face of threats and pressure, everything seemed to be following the usual South Asian script. Men, especially powerful ones, rarely have to answer for their actions. Then the un and foreign embassies put out a statement urging the government to take a stand on violence against women. Within days, Mr Mahara had stepped down. This week the police arrested him.
Whether this case will count as progress in the abysmal treatment of women in his part of the world will not be clear for some time. Violence against women need not hold back a man going places. A tally in India last year found 48 members of parliament or state assemblies accused or convicted of violent crimes against females. They included members of parties run by women.
In South Asia the mistreatment starts in the womb, with the selective abortion of girls. It continues after birth. Girls are likelier to die before the age of five or drop out of school. Many marry before they are adults or are beaten by their partners. In the five years to 2015 over 40,000 Indian women died in rows over dowries. That is more than the combined deaths over the same period from conflict in Kashmir, insurrection in the north-east and the Naxalite rebellion.
Laws and social attitudes have evolved, but not enough. The brutal gang-rape and murder in 2012 of a student in Delhi galvanised India’s middle classes, but the rape of women and girls in villages attracts little attention.
Most sex crimes everywhere go unreported, so all statistics about them should be treated with caution. But for what it is worth, the un says Asia and the Pacific have the worst rates of violence against women, with two in three women experiencing it in their lifetime.
Discrimination is rampant. This year Indonesia’s Supreme Court found a former teacher guilty of “violating decency” by making a lewd recording. She had taped her boss making sexually explicit comments to her, hoping to prove that he was harassing her. Her ordeal ended only with a presidential pardon. Female police officers and army recruits are sometimes required to submit to outrageous physical inspections to “prove” their virginity.
In China abusive marriages are common, and hard to escape (see article). Activists against harassment are themselves harassed by the state. In Cambodia women’s safety is not helped by the media. A third of television dramas depict physical, sexual or emotional abuse of women. Such problems are not confined to poor countries. South Korea’s k-pop industry has been roiled by a series of cases in which women were drugged and raped. Then there are the thousands of spycams detected each year in women’s lavatories and changing rooms, for which hardly anyone is prosecuted. Recently, a hospital worker killed herself after discovering that a video of her changing into her scrubs had been widely distributed. Reported sex crimes, including child rape, are up sharply in Bangladesh, though this might simply reflect a greater willingness to report such things.
Across Asia women are finding a voice. In Bangladesh a #MeToo-style movement is growing in the country’s garment factories (though the movement’s leaders still struggle to convince victims to file complaints with the police). In January lawyers in Pakistan launched an online portal called Ab Aur Nahin (“Time’s up”) offering pro bono help for victims of harassment.
In the Philippines women have taken to social media and the streets to complain about President Rodrigo Duterte’s frequent jokes about rape and groping—a rare case of people standing up to the strongman. And in South Korea more women are speaking up against powerful, violent men in government, business and entertainment.
They are also, in a “corset-free” movement, challenging the country’s rigid beauty standards, exemplified by employers’ expectation that women should be heavily made-up at work and, at some firms, not even wear glasses. The emergence in South Korea of an aggressive, mainly online force of young men who believe that such movements are proof of the oppression of men is an indication of how long and how hard the battle for security, let alone equality, will be for Asian women.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/10/ ... -be-abused
In China, courts deny women divorces in the name of “social harmony”
Even if their husbands beat them
The beatings were so brutal that Dong Fang (not her real name) was left partially deaf, and her daughter needed three stitches in her hand. Not long ago, China’s courts would probably have ignored such an assault, because the attacker was both Ms Dong’s husband and the girl’s father. Luckily for the victims, however, the country had recently enacted a domestic-violence bill. This enabled Ms Dong to obtain a restraining order from a court in Chengdu, the south-western city where she lives. Local media praised this as an example of the new law in action. Later came the shock. The same court rejected Ms Dong’s petition for divorce. It reasoned that the marriage was still on a “very firm” foundation and the husband should be given “a chance”, the judge told a newspaper in Beijing.
Ms Dong’s plight is common. The law on domestic violence, which took effect in March 2016, aims to protect women. But it is also intended to “promote family harmony and social stability”. Judges often consider this more important than women’s well-being. A study of 150,000 divorce cases filed between 2009 and September 2016, more than two-thirds of them by women, found the new law had done little to help female victims. When people file their first petition for divorce (many have several tries), judges are more likely to agree if the plaintiff is a man. They are usually unswayed by claims of violence. “For abused women, courts are the problem, not the solution,” says the study’s author, Ethan Michelson of Indiana University.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is a champion of tradition. He describes families as the “cells” of society (mention of Mr Xi’s divorce from his first wife in 1982, after only three years of marriage, is taboo). Officials fear those cells are decaying as marriage rates fall and divorce rates soar. Last year more than 10m couples tied the knot and nearly 4.5m undid it. This is partly because, for many people, divorce has become much easier. Before 2003 it needed approval from an employer or community leader. Now, if both partners agree, they can quickly unmarry at a local civil-affairs bureau.
But the one-in-six cases that end up in court are complicated. Last year two-thirds of them were rejected at the first hearing. Domestic violence has been a legal ground for divorce and damages since 2001. But abused spouses often remain trapped. Sometimes judges refuse to approve divorces for the sake of their own jobs. Performance targets often involve finishing a certain number of cases. As citizens become more litigious, caseloads are growing fast. For judges, saying no to a divorce is usually quicker than arranging one.
More...
https://www.economist.com/china/2019/10 ... al-harmony
Even if their husbands beat them
The beatings were so brutal that Dong Fang (not her real name) was left partially deaf, and her daughter needed three stitches in her hand. Not long ago, China’s courts would probably have ignored such an assault, because the attacker was both Ms Dong’s husband and the girl’s father. Luckily for the victims, however, the country had recently enacted a domestic-violence bill. This enabled Ms Dong to obtain a restraining order from a court in Chengdu, the south-western city where she lives. Local media praised this as an example of the new law in action. Later came the shock. The same court rejected Ms Dong’s petition for divorce. It reasoned that the marriage was still on a “very firm” foundation and the husband should be given “a chance”, the judge told a newspaper in Beijing.
Ms Dong’s plight is common. The law on domestic violence, which took effect in March 2016, aims to protect women. But it is also intended to “promote family harmony and social stability”. Judges often consider this more important than women’s well-being. A study of 150,000 divorce cases filed between 2009 and September 2016, more than two-thirds of them by women, found the new law had done little to help female victims. When people file their first petition for divorce (many have several tries), judges are more likely to agree if the plaintiff is a man. They are usually unswayed by claims of violence. “For abused women, courts are the problem, not the solution,” says the study’s author, Ethan Michelson of Indiana University.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is a champion of tradition. He describes families as the “cells” of society (mention of Mr Xi’s divorce from his first wife in 1982, after only three years of marriage, is taboo). Officials fear those cells are decaying as marriage rates fall and divorce rates soar. Last year more than 10m couples tied the knot and nearly 4.5m undid it. This is partly because, for many people, divorce has become much easier. Before 2003 it needed approval from an employer or community leader. Now, if both partners agree, they can quickly unmarry at a local civil-affairs bureau.
But the one-in-six cases that end up in court are complicated. Last year two-thirds of them were rejected at the first hearing. Domestic violence has been a legal ground for divorce and damages since 2001. But abused spouses often remain trapped. Sometimes judges refuse to approve divorces for the sake of their own jobs. Performance targets often involve finishing a certain number of cases. As citizens become more litigious, caseloads are growing fast. For judges, saying no to a divorce is usually quicker than arranging one.
More...
https://www.economist.com/china/2019/10 ... al-harmony
The Man Who Feeds Ants
And other tales of pollution in Karachi.
KARACHI, Pakistan — Walking along the beach recently, I met a man who was feeding ants. When I spotted him bending over a bush throwing some powdery stuff, I assumed he was spreading poison to kill rats. Then I thought: I have seen people do odd things on Karachi’s beaches, but nobody bothers killing anything. There is enough poison in the sea.
“What do ants eat?” I asked him when he told me what he was doing. “Semolina,” he said, waving his plastic bag in my face. How did he know? I had always believed in the Islamic dictum that God promises sustenance to all, even insects. I thought the man was crazy for wasting his compassion on the wrong species.
“I have been doing it for three years,” he said. “They seem to like it.”
He was oblivious to the filth around him. He wasn’t concerned about the plastic bags fluttering about or the seawater’s gray, oily texture or the smell of sewage carried by the breeze. He didn’t care about Playa’s Bar and Bruno’s, posh eateries that were built and abandoned before even opening. He didn’t have anything to say about the McDonald’s, which seemed to be throwing its refuse directly into the Arabian Sea. Seeing this man and his display of needless kindness amid this squalor should have made me happy: He summed up the generosity of my adopted hometown. But the man’s extreme charity also represented what is wrong with one of the world’s most populous cities.
Last month, Karachi received another top ranking, from the Economist Intelligence Unit — as the fifth-least livable city on the planet. Karachi’s poor might disagree; they have probably never had the chance to see another city. But Karachi’s well-heeled moan about the rot a lot. Then again, anybody who has observed their lifestyle, our lifestyle, will tell you that they are the rot.
According to screaming headlines and politicians of all varieties, Karachi has turned into a heap of trash. Two inches of rain and the city is flooded, and when people step outside, they are electrocuted. Drains are blocked with garbage. Open sewers brim with plastic waste. The natural drains that were supposed to take the rainwater to the sea have been filled in as people built houses on them. Right next to the fancy malls and upscale housing blocks, there are piles and piles of rubbish. There is much indignation, much rage, about this rubbish, but nobody seems very interested in talking about who produces it.
I see it on my street every day. People who complain the most about garbage are the ones who produce most of it, and then they ask their servants to take it out and throw it at the street corner. These are the same people who lecture us about civic sense, about taking ownership of the city. But they — we — are the privileged ones because our trash does get removed. There are neighborhoods in Karachi that have never been visited by the municipal authorities, ever. Neighborhoods that the municipal authorities pretend don’t even exist.
Inequality in megacities is quite common and stark, but Karachi’s elites have taken it to a new level. All they seem to care about is signal-free roads for their cars, parking for their cars and gated communities for their cars and their families. And keeping the riffraff away.
Yet despite the city’s abysmal global rankings, working people from all over Pakistan still flock to the city — only to end up on the doorsteps of the rich, sometimes as modern slaves, sometimes as freelance trash pickers.
In Karachi, you see kids around traffic lights and shopping centers that display vintage Rolls-Royces — kids who are so young they forget they were put there to beg and start to play with one another instead. Yet what repulses us isn’t the fact that in this city children as young as three are forced to live in such squalor; it’s the sight of a child defecating by the roadside.
In this city, two and a half people live in a mansion and are tended to by a half-dozen servants, who live cramped in a tent outside. High unemployment means that labor is cheap: The price of dinner for two at a local French cafe is the monthly wage of a nanny or an round-the-clock security guard.
Those who preach resilience and civic responsibility are often the people who have built themselves little fortresses that are city-proof. The lack of civic amenities affects them very little; in fact, they are the ones responsible for the lack of civic amenities.
My street is full of politicians and bureaucrats who spend their lives going through the revolving door of power. As soon as there is an electrical outage in the neighborhood, a thousand generators fire up — the rumble reminds me of that sequence in “Apocalypse Now” when formations of helicopters suddenly appear on the screen ready to bomb a serene village. In my neighborhood, it could be raining fire outside, but the air-conditioners will keep our living rooms at a steady 18 degrees Celsius (about 64 degrees Fahrenheit).
Despite our love for air-conditioners and our two-maids-per-child compulsions, we know about climate change: We are trying to ban plastic bags. We just haven’t bothered to think of an alternative for the millions of working people who get their tea or their lunch delivered in one.
It’s increasingly clear that the people who produce the most garbage do little to solve the problem — other than to poorly pay their servants to throw the trash far enough away that they can’t smell it. For them, the shopping mall built on reclaimed stretches of the Arabian Sea is not the problem; the 3-year-old defecating in public across the road is. These are people who can’t tell the difference between garbage and hard-working people. Some people have to pick trash to make a living, and they are then treated like trash.
Through Karachi’s affluent neighborhoods, young boys walk with a bag as large as themselves slung over their shoulders. The more enterprising ones have two bags slung over a bicycle. They go through the garbage we’ve dumped, picking out plastic, empty glass bottles of smuggled Scotch whisky, squashed tins of Heineken, cardboard boxes of pizza, discarded household implements — anything that can be recycled, anything that can be sold. By evening, with their bags full, they make about 200 rupees (less than $1.30), just enough for two meals or, for some of them, a daily fix. I haven’t seen more hardworking drug addicts in my life.
“What do you do for a living?” I asked the man who feeds ants. He told me that he owns a few dozen liter bottles of Sprite, Fanta and Coke, fills them up with the polluted seawater and waits. People who barge into the sea then want to wash off the stench or the sand, and for a rinse they’ll pay 20 rupees (about 13 cents) for a bottle filled with that same seawater.
It’s a very sustainable business model. The man feeding the ants knows that God has promised sustenance for all, but he isn’t taking any chances.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/opin ... d=45305309
And other tales of pollution in Karachi.
KARACHI, Pakistan — Walking along the beach recently, I met a man who was feeding ants. When I spotted him bending over a bush throwing some powdery stuff, I assumed he was spreading poison to kill rats. Then I thought: I have seen people do odd things on Karachi’s beaches, but nobody bothers killing anything. There is enough poison in the sea.
“What do ants eat?” I asked him when he told me what he was doing. “Semolina,” he said, waving his plastic bag in my face. How did he know? I had always believed in the Islamic dictum that God promises sustenance to all, even insects. I thought the man was crazy for wasting his compassion on the wrong species.
“I have been doing it for three years,” he said. “They seem to like it.”
He was oblivious to the filth around him. He wasn’t concerned about the plastic bags fluttering about or the seawater’s gray, oily texture or the smell of sewage carried by the breeze. He didn’t care about Playa’s Bar and Bruno’s, posh eateries that were built and abandoned before even opening. He didn’t have anything to say about the McDonald’s, which seemed to be throwing its refuse directly into the Arabian Sea. Seeing this man and his display of needless kindness amid this squalor should have made me happy: He summed up the generosity of my adopted hometown. But the man’s extreme charity also represented what is wrong with one of the world’s most populous cities.
Last month, Karachi received another top ranking, from the Economist Intelligence Unit — as the fifth-least livable city on the planet. Karachi’s poor might disagree; they have probably never had the chance to see another city. But Karachi’s well-heeled moan about the rot a lot. Then again, anybody who has observed their lifestyle, our lifestyle, will tell you that they are the rot.
According to screaming headlines and politicians of all varieties, Karachi has turned into a heap of trash. Two inches of rain and the city is flooded, and when people step outside, they are electrocuted. Drains are blocked with garbage. Open sewers brim with plastic waste. The natural drains that were supposed to take the rainwater to the sea have been filled in as people built houses on them. Right next to the fancy malls and upscale housing blocks, there are piles and piles of rubbish. There is much indignation, much rage, about this rubbish, but nobody seems very interested in talking about who produces it.
I see it on my street every day. People who complain the most about garbage are the ones who produce most of it, and then they ask their servants to take it out and throw it at the street corner. These are the same people who lecture us about civic sense, about taking ownership of the city. But they — we — are the privileged ones because our trash does get removed. There are neighborhoods in Karachi that have never been visited by the municipal authorities, ever. Neighborhoods that the municipal authorities pretend don’t even exist.
Inequality in megacities is quite common and stark, but Karachi’s elites have taken it to a new level. All they seem to care about is signal-free roads for their cars, parking for their cars and gated communities for their cars and their families. And keeping the riffraff away.
Yet despite the city’s abysmal global rankings, working people from all over Pakistan still flock to the city — only to end up on the doorsteps of the rich, sometimes as modern slaves, sometimes as freelance trash pickers.
In Karachi, you see kids around traffic lights and shopping centers that display vintage Rolls-Royces — kids who are so young they forget they were put there to beg and start to play with one another instead. Yet what repulses us isn’t the fact that in this city children as young as three are forced to live in such squalor; it’s the sight of a child defecating by the roadside.
In this city, two and a half people live in a mansion and are tended to by a half-dozen servants, who live cramped in a tent outside. High unemployment means that labor is cheap: The price of dinner for two at a local French cafe is the monthly wage of a nanny or an round-the-clock security guard.
Those who preach resilience and civic responsibility are often the people who have built themselves little fortresses that are city-proof. The lack of civic amenities affects them very little; in fact, they are the ones responsible for the lack of civic amenities.
My street is full of politicians and bureaucrats who spend their lives going through the revolving door of power. As soon as there is an electrical outage in the neighborhood, a thousand generators fire up — the rumble reminds me of that sequence in “Apocalypse Now” when formations of helicopters suddenly appear on the screen ready to bomb a serene village. In my neighborhood, it could be raining fire outside, but the air-conditioners will keep our living rooms at a steady 18 degrees Celsius (about 64 degrees Fahrenheit).
Despite our love for air-conditioners and our two-maids-per-child compulsions, we know about climate change: We are trying to ban plastic bags. We just haven’t bothered to think of an alternative for the millions of working people who get their tea or their lunch delivered in one.
It’s increasingly clear that the people who produce the most garbage do little to solve the problem — other than to poorly pay their servants to throw the trash far enough away that they can’t smell it. For them, the shopping mall built on reclaimed stretches of the Arabian Sea is not the problem; the 3-year-old defecating in public across the road is. These are people who can’t tell the difference between garbage and hard-working people. Some people have to pick trash to make a living, and they are then treated like trash.
Through Karachi’s affluent neighborhoods, young boys walk with a bag as large as themselves slung over their shoulders. The more enterprising ones have two bags slung over a bicycle. They go through the garbage we’ve dumped, picking out plastic, empty glass bottles of smuggled Scotch whisky, squashed tins of Heineken, cardboard boxes of pizza, discarded household implements — anything that can be recycled, anything that can be sold. By evening, with their bags full, they make about 200 rupees (less than $1.30), just enough for two meals or, for some of them, a daily fix. I haven’t seen more hardworking drug addicts in my life.
“What do you do for a living?” I asked the man who feeds ants. He told me that he owns a few dozen liter bottles of Sprite, Fanta and Coke, fills them up with the polluted seawater and waits. People who barge into the sea then want to wash off the stench or the sand, and for a rinse they’ll pay 20 rupees (about 13 cents) for a bottle filled with that same seawater.
It’s a very sustainable business model. The man feeding the ants knows that God has promised sustenance for all, but he isn’t taking any chances.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/opin ... d=45305309
Bangladesh’s biggest city plans to ban cycle rickshaws
Millions of people could lose their livelihoods
For many Westerners, the cycle rickshaw (also known as the cyclo or pedicab) is an iconically Asian form of transport. In fact, most Asian cities have long since abandoned them (and a few European and North American cities have taken them up). But in Bangladesh the cycle rickshaw is as popular as ever. In the capital, Dhaka, rickshaws can be seen creaking down almost every street. Dhaka’s administrators, however, would like to consign its rickshaws to the past, too.
In July the city banned rickshaws on three main roads. All of Dhaka will be “rickshaw-free” within two years, says Mohammed Atiqul Islam, the mayor of the northern half of the city. “Dhaka has a traffic problem,” explains Dhrubo Alam of Dhaka Transport Co-ordination Authority. “It is one of the world’s most densely populated cities, and most congested.” According to a recent World Bank report, the average traffic speed fell from 21km per hour in 2008 to 7km per hour last year. On current trends, it will be faster to walk by 2035.
Sitting in traffic is not just annoying; it is also wasteful. The World Bank estimates that 3.2m working hours are lost each day, at a cost of billions of dollars each year.
According to Mr Alam, slow-moving but highly manoeuvrable vehicles like rickshaws are a big part of the problem. There are between 600,000 and 1m of them in Dhaka. They can change lanes or make u-turns very abruptly. “That creates chaos,” he says. Another reason to get rid of them, he adds, is that most are illegal. Only around 80,000 of Dhaka’s are licensed. No new licences have been granted since 1986.
For the city’s rickshaw-drivers such concerns seem beside the point. “What am I supposed to do?” asks Abdul Mubin, a 32-year-old. “I have mouths to feed.” He and thousands of other rickshaw-drivers went on strike in protest against the proposed ban in July. By blocking several big roads, they exacerbated the jams across the city.
The drivers are not the only ones with reason to worry. There are also hundreds of thousands of rickshaw-owners (who rent out the vehicles to drivers), makers, mechanics and spare-parts traders who rely on the business for their livelihood.
Then there are Dhaka’s commuters, who rely on rickshaws more than any other form of transport. At least 40% of the 3.5m trips that take place each day on Dhaka’s streets are made by rickshaw. There is little public transport. The city has only 8,000 public buses to cater to its 18m people. Worse, they do not follow any timetable and the drivers are often unlicensed. Last year students took to the streets when racing buses, competing for passengers, hit and killed two schoolchildren.
Buses will soon come under one regulatory authority, Mr Alam promises. The routes will be “rationalised” to provide “smooth service”. A metro system is also under construction, though it will not initially be big or cheap enough to make much of a dent in traffic. Meanwhile, the number of private cars is rising fast. They will soon undo all the benefits of banning rickshaws and then some, Mr Alam says, if public transport is not improved.
Mr Mubin says rickshaw-drivers are too poor to strike again. He sees no redress. But he finds the double standard galling: “Rich people are buying cars and motorbikes. A lot of them have more than one. How is banning rickshaws going to help traffic?”
Photo at:
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/ ... a/341817/n
Millions of people could lose their livelihoods
For many Westerners, the cycle rickshaw (also known as the cyclo or pedicab) is an iconically Asian form of transport. In fact, most Asian cities have long since abandoned them (and a few European and North American cities have taken them up). But in Bangladesh the cycle rickshaw is as popular as ever. In the capital, Dhaka, rickshaws can be seen creaking down almost every street. Dhaka’s administrators, however, would like to consign its rickshaws to the past, too.
In July the city banned rickshaws on three main roads. All of Dhaka will be “rickshaw-free” within two years, says Mohammed Atiqul Islam, the mayor of the northern half of the city. “Dhaka has a traffic problem,” explains Dhrubo Alam of Dhaka Transport Co-ordination Authority. “It is one of the world’s most densely populated cities, and most congested.” According to a recent World Bank report, the average traffic speed fell from 21km per hour in 2008 to 7km per hour last year. On current trends, it will be faster to walk by 2035.
Sitting in traffic is not just annoying; it is also wasteful. The World Bank estimates that 3.2m working hours are lost each day, at a cost of billions of dollars each year.
According to Mr Alam, slow-moving but highly manoeuvrable vehicles like rickshaws are a big part of the problem. There are between 600,000 and 1m of them in Dhaka. They can change lanes or make u-turns very abruptly. “That creates chaos,” he says. Another reason to get rid of them, he adds, is that most are illegal. Only around 80,000 of Dhaka’s are licensed. No new licences have been granted since 1986.
For the city’s rickshaw-drivers such concerns seem beside the point. “What am I supposed to do?” asks Abdul Mubin, a 32-year-old. “I have mouths to feed.” He and thousands of other rickshaw-drivers went on strike in protest against the proposed ban in July. By blocking several big roads, they exacerbated the jams across the city.
The drivers are not the only ones with reason to worry. There are also hundreds of thousands of rickshaw-owners (who rent out the vehicles to drivers), makers, mechanics and spare-parts traders who rely on the business for their livelihood.
Then there are Dhaka’s commuters, who rely on rickshaws more than any other form of transport. At least 40% of the 3.5m trips that take place each day on Dhaka’s streets are made by rickshaw. There is little public transport. The city has only 8,000 public buses to cater to its 18m people. Worse, they do not follow any timetable and the drivers are often unlicensed. Last year students took to the streets when racing buses, competing for passengers, hit and killed two schoolchildren.
Buses will soon come under one regulatory authority, Mr Alam promises. The routes will be “rationalised” to provide “smooth service”. A metro system is also under construction, though it will not initially be big or cheap enough to make much of a dent in traffic. Meanwhile, the number of private cars is rising fast. They will soon undo all the benefits of banning rickshaws and then some, Mr Alam says, if public transport is not improved.
Mr Mubin says rickshaw-drivers are too poor to strike again. He sees no redress. But he finds the double standard galling: “Rich people are buying cars and motorbikes. A lot of them have more than one. How is banning rickshaws going to help traffic?”
Photo at:
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/ ... a/341817/n
World Toilet Day this week is not a joke, but deadly serious
The lack of toilets costs lives. Just look at India
TO STROLL AT dawn through most inhabited parts of the Indian countryside—or even to land at many provincial airports—used to be to intrude on a vast latrine. In every secluded and not-so-secluded corner, men could be seen squatting, to defecate. In 2014 India led the world in “open defecation”, with an estimated 600m of the 1bn people in the world reliant on the practice. It is an extremely dangerous one.
One gram of faeces contains 10m viruses, 1m bacteria and 1,000 parasitic cysts. Since people often relieve themselves near water sources (to clean themselves and remove the waste) and faeces attract vectors such as flies, diseases spread fast. Where open defecation is practised, more children die—according to one estimate, it kills 1.5m children under five every year. Women, usually excluded from the dawn assembly, have to risk embarrassment, assault and worse with sorties in the dark. So one of the UN’s “sustainable development goals” (SDGs) adopted by the world’s leaders in 2015 reads: “By 2030, achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations.” An “interim” target brings forward to 2025 the date for ending open defecation.
As part of the campaign for improved sanitation, November 19th has since 2013 been designated as the UN’s official World Toilet Day. That gave new credibility to what was originally an initiative of the World Toilet Organisation, a charity launched by an energetic Singaporean businessman, Jack Sim, in 2001.
More...
https://www.economist.com/international ... a/344935/n
The lack of toilets costs lives. Just look at India
TO STROLL AT dawn through most inhabited parts of the Indian countryside—or even to land at many provincial airports—used to be to intrude on a vast latrine. In every secluded and not-so-secluded corner, men could be seen squatting, to defecate. In 2014 India led the world in “open defecation”, with an estimated 600m of the 1bn people in the world reliant on the practice. It is an extremely dangerous one.
One gram of faeces contains 10m viruses, 1m bacteria and 1,000 parasitic cysts. Since people often relieve themselves near water sources (to clean themselves and remove the waste) and faeces attract vectors such as flies, diseases spread fast. Where open defecation is practised, more children die—according to one estimate, it kills 1.5m children under five every year. Women, usually excluded from the dawn assembly, have to risk embarrassment, assault and worse with sorties in the dark. So one of the UN’s “sustainable development goals” (SDGs) adopted by the world’s leaders in 2015 reads: “By 2030, achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations.” An “interim” target brings forward to 2025 the date for ending open defecation.
As part of the campaign for improved sanitation, November 19th has since 2013 been designated as the UN’s official World Toilet Day. That gave new credibility to what was originally an initiative of the World Toilet Organisation, a charity launched by an energetic Singaporean businessman, Jack Sim, in 2001.
More...
https://www.economist.com/international ... a/344935/n
How to Fix Pakistan’s Crashing Economy
To change course, the country’s leaders must take on the moneyed elite and religious extremism.
If an airplane took off a dozen times only to come crashing down each time, the only logical conclusion would be that the aircraft requires a fundamental redesign. Pakistan’s economy, like the airplane, has crashed 13 times in the last 60 years, each time requiring an International Monetary Fund bailout.
It wasn’t always so. During the 1980s, in per capita terms Pakistan was richer than India, China and Bangladesh by 15, 38 and 46 percent. Today Pakistan is the poorest. Its most recent gross domestic product growth estimate was only 3.3 percent, barely sufficient to keep pace with population growth.
Pakistan’s federal government is effectively bankrupt. Last year, the sum of interest payment due on the government’s debt obligations and pension payments owed to retired employees was more than the federal government’s net revenue. The entire government machinery, including the military, is running on borrowed money.
The consequences of Pakistan’s crashing economy have been devastating for its over 200 million people. They are instinctively aware of how far they have fallen behind and there is a clamor for change for a future where their children can live in dignity and comfort.
It was this public desire for change that propelled Pakistan’s most famous cricketer, Imran Khan, and his relatively new party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, into power in 2018. Prime Minister Khan promised change and a “naya” or new Pakistan to his people, but change is proving far more difficult than imagined.
The fundamental challenge in bringing change is that those who are benefiting the most from the dysfunctional economy and stand to lose the most from change would fight every attempt at reform and attack the people trying to ensure reform.
Pakistan’s leadership must muster the courage to take on two primary forces of the status quo that hold the country back. First, the moneyed elite who tip the scales of markets in their favor through unfair business practices, tax evasion and preferential access to power. They use their privilege to grab the fruits of other people’s labor rather than create something of value through their own enterprise.
The second force inhibiting Pakistan’s progress is religious extremism. Decades of patronage by successive military and civilian governments for promoters of religious hate has created a culture of institutionalized intolerance. The result has been devastating for society. Thousands have been killed, communities have been ripped apart and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced or forced to flee the country altogether. It is no wonder then that few want to invest in an environment afflicted with violence and intolerance. Many whose talents are sorely needed in Pakistan are forced to flee the country because of extremism.
The combined effect of extremism and an unproductive rent-seeking elite is that Pakistan has one of the lowest investment rates in the world. Pakistan invests only 15 percent of its output compared with 30 percent for the rest of South Asia. This has led to diminished productivity. Pakistan’s total volume of exports has not risen since 2005. It has become a nation of consumers with limited capacity to produce and innovate. Last year, the country imported more than two times as much as it exported.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/opin ... 0920191211
To change course, the country’s leaders must take on the moneyed elite and religious extremism.
If an airplane took off a dozen times only to come crashing down each time, the only logical conclusion would be that the aircraft requires a fundamental redesign. Pakistan’s economy, like the airplane, has crashed 13 times in the last 60 years, each time requiring an International Monetary Fund bailout.
It wasn’t always so. During the 1980s, in per capita terms Pakistan was richer than India, China and Bangladesh by 15, 38 and 46 percent. Today Pakistan is the poorest. Its most recent gross domestic product growth estimate was only 3.3 percent, barely sufficient to keep pace with population growth.
Pakistan’s federal government is effectively bankrupt. Last year, the sum of interest payment due on the government’s debt obligations and pension payments owed to retired employees was more than the federal government’s net revenue. The entire government machinery, including the military, is running on borrowed money.
The consequences of Pakistan’s crashing economy have been devastating for its over 200 million people. They are instinctively aware of how far they have fallen behind and there is a clamor for change for a future where their children can live in dignity and comfort.
It was this public desire for change that propelled Pakistan’s most famous cricketer, Imran Khan, and his relatively new party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, into power in 2018. Prime Minister Khan promised change and a “naya” or new Pakistan to his people, but change is proving far more difficult than imagined.
The fundamental challenge in bringing change is that those who are benefiting the most from the dysfunctional economy and stand to lose the most from change would fight every attempt at reform and attack the people trying to ensure reform.
Pakistan’s leadership must muster the courage to take on two primary forces of the status quo that hold the country back. First, the moneyed elite who tip the scales of markets in their favor through unfair business practices, tax evasion and preferential access to power. They use their privilege to grab the fruits of other people’s labor rather than create something of value through their own enterprise.
The second force inhibiting Pakistan’s progress is religious extremism. Decades of patronage by successive military and civilian governments for promoters of religious hate has created a culture of institutionalized intolerance. The result has been devastating for society. Thousands have been killed, communities have been ripped apart and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced or forced to flee the country altogether. It is no wonder then that few want to invest in an environment afflicted with violence and intolerance. Many whose talents are sorely needed in Pakistan are forced to flee the country because of extremism.
The combined effect of extremism and an unproductive rent-seeking elite is that Pakistan has one of the lowest investment rates in the world. Pakistan invests only 15 percent of its output compared with 30 percent for the rest of South Asia. This has led to diminished productivity. Pakistan’s total volume of exports has not risen since 2005. It has become a nation of consumers with limited capacity to produce and innovate. Last year, the country imported more than two times as much as it exported.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/opin ... 0920191211
Pakistan Ex-President Musharraf Gets Death Sentence for Treason
(Bloomberg) -- A Pakistani special court sentenced former military dictator and president Pervez Musharraf to death in absentia, ending a six-year long high treason case against him and delivering a historic verdict against the country’s powerful army.
In a two-to-one majority, the three-member special court headed by judge Waqar Ahmad Seth announced the verdict, Musharraf’s spokesman Mohammad Amjad said by phone on Tuesday.
Musharraf, who has been in Dubai since 2016 seeking medical treatment and never attended the legal proceedings, has the right to appeal in the Supreme Court, according to former attorney general Ashtar Ausaf. “We’ll definitely challenge it in the Supreme Court,” Musharraf’s lawyer Raza Bashir said on the television channel Samaa, expressing concern the verdict was given in hurry and his client didn’t get fair trial.
It is the first time in Pakistan’s 72-year history that a military ruler has been tried with high treason -- in this case for imposing emergency rule and suspending the constitution in 2007. Musharraf, as the army chief, toppled the civilian government of ex-premier Nawaz Sharif in 1999 and later became the country’s military president. The south Asian nation has a history of being ruled by army dictators, who have imposed four martial laws since independence from the U.K. in 1947.
Historic Verdict
The verdict will “have a major positive impact on democracy and the rule of law as after decades, a person has been tried and sentenced,” Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, president of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, said in Islamabad. “It will have a deterrent value.”
Musharraf was a key ally of the U.S. after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York until he was forced to step down in 2008 to avoid impeachment by Parliament. Sharif began treason proceedings against Musharraf soon after he came back to power in 2013.
Pakistan’s biggest political parties, whose government’s have been toppled at least once in past by military dictators, welcomed the verdict.
“The verdict is historic and it will be welcomed by all democratic forces,” said Ahsan Iqbal, a senior leader of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party. “Democracy is the best revenge,” tweeted Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is the co-chief of Pakistan Peoples Party, echoing his mother’s comments before she was slain in a terrorist attack in 2007.
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https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/pa ... ailsignout
(Bloomberg) -- A Pakistani special court sentenced former military dictator and president Pervez Musharraf to death in absentia, ending a six-year long high treason case against him and delivering a historic verdict against the country’s powerful army.
In a two-to-one majority, the three-member special court headed by judge Waqar Ahmad Seth announced the verdict, Musharraf’s spokesman Mohammad Amjad said by phone on Tuesday.
Musharraf, who has been in Dubai since 2016 seeking medical treatment and never attended the legal proceedings, has the right to appeal in the Supreme Court, according to former attorney general Ashtar Ausaf. “We’ll definitely challenge it in the Supreme Court,” Musharraf’s lawyer Raza Bashir said on the television channel Samaa, expressing concern the verdict was given in hurry and his client didn’t get fair trial.
It is the first time in Pakistan’s 72-year history that a military ruler has been tried with high treason -- in this case for imposing emergency rule and suspending the constitution in 2007. Musharraf, as the army chief, toppled the civilian government of ex-premier Nawaz Sharif in 1999 and later became the country’s military president. The south Asian nation has a history of being ruled by army dictators, who have imposed four martial laws since independence from the U.K. in 1947.
Historic Verdict
The verdict will “have a major positive impact on democracy and the rule of law as after decades, a person has been tried and sentenced,” Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, president of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, said in Islamabad. “It will have a deterrent value.”
Musharraf was a key ally of the U.S. after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York until he was forced to step down in 2008 to avoid impeachment by Parliament. Sharif began treason proceedings against Musharraf soon after he came back to power in 2013.
Pakistan’s biggest political parties, whose government’s have been toppled at least once in past by military dictators, welcomed the verdict.
“The verdict is historic and it will be welcomed by all democratic forces,” said Ahsan Iqbal, a senior leader of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party. “Democracy is the best revenge,” tweeted Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is the co-chief of Pakistan Peoples Party, echoing his mother’s comments before she was slain in a terrorist attack in 2007.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/pa ... ailsignout
The Dictator and His Death Sentence
Pakistan’s army lashes out as a court rules that Pervez Musharraf should hang for treason.
MULTAN, Pakistan — This week, in a verdict that was described as historic by opposition politicians, a special court in Pakistan sentenced the former military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf to death for high treason.
The Pakistan Army responded with a statement that also was historic: It said that its rank and file felt “pain and anguish” over the decision. The military leadership didn’t talk about the national interest or regional security as it usually does, but instead used the poetic language of a long-suffering lover. How could you do this to one of us? it asked, in essence. A man who “has served the country for 40 years, fought wars for the defense of the country can surely never be a traitor,” its statement read — and with that single sentence, the army dismissed the country’s courts and Constitution.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opin ... 0920191219
Pakistan’s army lashes out as a court rules that Pervez Musharraf should hang for treason.
MULTAN, Pakistan — This week, in a verdict that was described as historic by opposition politicians, a special court in Pakistan sentenced the former military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf to death for high treason.
The Pakistan Army responded with a statement that also was historic: It said that its rank and file felt “pain and anguish” over the decision. The military leadership didn’t talk about the national interest or regional security as it usually does, but instead used the poetic language of a long-suffering lover. How could you do this to one of us? it asked, in essence. A man who “has served the country for 40 years, fought wars for the defense of the country can surely never be a traitor,” its statement read — and with that single sentence, the army dismissed the country’s courts and Constitution.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opin ... 0920191219
China’s New Civil Religion
The Communist Party is reviving traditional beliefs for political gain — while cracking down on some faiths.
BEIJING — In the northern suburbs of this city is a small temple to a Chinese folk deity, Lord Guan, a famous warrior deified more than a millennium ago. Renovated five years ago at the government’s expense, the temple is used by a group of retirees who run pilgrimages to a holy mountain, schoolchildren who come to learn traditional culture and a Taoist priest who preaches to wealthy urbanites about the traditional values of ancient China.
Perched atop a hillock overlooking the sprawling capital, the temple is a microcosm of a new civil religion taking shape in China — an effort by the Chinese Communist Party to satisfy Chinese people’s search for moral guidelines by supplementing the largely irrelevant ideology of communism with a curated version of the past.
This new state-guided religiosity is the flip side of the government’s harsh policies toward Islam and Christianity. Officials believe these two global faiths are hard to control because of their foreign ties, and they have used negotiation or force — diplomacy with the Vatican, arrests of prominent Protestants, internment camps for Muslims — to try to bring these religions to heel.
Yet Beijing’s recent turn to tradition may be even more significant. Even though Islam and Christianity are world religions, in China they remain minor, with the number of their combined adherents amounting to less than 10 percent of the population. Most Chinese believe in an amalgam of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and other traditional values and ideas that still resonate deeply.
For this silent majority of hundreds of millions of people, the government’s newfound support for things like the temple to Lord Guan is welcome — a feeling that the Chinese Communist Party hopes will bolster its legitimacy, especially given the irrelevance today of its founding ideas. The benefits of its move to embrace the past may seem obvious, but the shift marks a radical departure, not just for a party officially committed to atheism but also from how reformers over the past century have imagined a modern, prosperous China.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/opin ... 0920191223
The Communist Party is reviving traditional beliefs for political gain — while cracking down on some faiths.
BEIJING — In the northern suburbs of this city is a small temple to a Chinese folk deity, Lord Guan, a famous warrior deified more than a millennium ago. Renovated five years ago at the government’s expense, the temple is used by a group of retirees who run pilgrimages to a holy mountain, schoolchildren who come to learn traditional culture and a Taoist priest who preaches to wealthy urbanites about the traditional values of ancient China.
Perched atop a hillock overlooking the sprawling capital, the temple is a microcosm of a new civil religion taking shape in China — an effort by the Chinese Communist Party to satisfy Chinese people’s search for moral guidelines by supplementing the largely irrelevant ideology of communism with a curated version of the past.
This new state-guided religiosity is the flip side of the government’s harsh policies toward Islam and Christianity. Officials believe these two global faiths are hard to control because of their foreign ties, and they have used negotiation or force — diplomacy with the Vatican, arrests of prominent Protestants, internment camps for Muslims — to try to bring these religions to heel.
Yet Beijing’s recent turn to tradition may be even more significant. Even though Islam and Christianity are world religions, in China they remain minor, with the number of their combined adherents amounting to less than 10 percent of the population. Most Chinese believe in an amalgam of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and other traditional values and ideas that still resonate deeply.
For this silent majority of hundreds of millions of people, the government’s newfound support for things like the temple to Lord Guan is welcome — a feeling that the Chinese Communist Party hopes will bolster its legitimacy, especially given the irrelevance today of its founding ideas. The benefits of its move to embrace the past may seem obvious, but the shift marks a radical departure, not just for a party officially committed to atheism but also from how reformers over the past century have imagined a modern, prosperous China.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/opin ... 0920191223
In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared
In Xinjiang the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.
HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.
“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog. “When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”
The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities. The girl’s father had passed away, he added. But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western Xinjiang region.
As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to internment camps and prisons in Xinjiang over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam. Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.
Nearly a half million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of Xinjiang’s 800-plus townships by the end of next year.
The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.
But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017. Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/worl ... 778d3e6de3
In Xinjiang the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.
HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.
“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog. “When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”
The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities. The girl’s father had passed away, he added. But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western Xinjiang region.
As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to internment camps and prisons in Xinjiang over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam. Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.
Nearly a half million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of Xinjiang’s 800-plus townships by the end of next year.
The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.
But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017. Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/worl ... 778d3e6de3