Archive for April, 2013

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05/04/2013

* Economic development must be environmentally sustainable, says Manmohan

The Hindu: “Warning that environmental degradation could have serious consequences, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday emphasised that economic growth should be based on optimal use of natural resources and development must be environmentally sustainable.

Globally, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, environmental degradation is manifesting itself through the loss of fertile soils, desertification, decreasing forest cover, reduction of fresh water availability, and an extreme loss of bio-diversity. File Photo

Often, he regretted, “economic policies designed to promote growth have been implemented without considering their full environmental consequences, presumably on the assumption that these consequences would either take care of themselves or could be dealt with separately.”

Mr. Singh said this while inaugurating the International Workshop on Green National Accounting for India in New Delhi.

He said India’s commitment to planned economic development reflects the government’s determination to improve the economic conditions of people and an affirmation of the role of the government in bringing about this outcome through a variety of social, economic, and institutional initiatives.

“But as the economy develops the capacity to grow rapidly, it gives rise to many new challenges. For instance, natural resources are limited, and final.

“And one needs to decide how to use these scarce resources optimally, both from the economic development and the sustainability perspectives,” Mr. Singh said.

The Prime Minister said there is evidence to suggest that such policies may actually result in a net decrease in human well-being.

Globally, he said, environmental degradation is manifesting itself through the loss of fertile soils, desertification, decreasing forest cover, reduction of fresh water availability, and an extreme loss of bio-diversity.

“These are serious consequences, and it has become clear today that economic development must be environmentally sustainable,” he added.

Mr. Singh said through planned economic development, India aims to attain economic growth and poverty alleviation, and doing so in a sustainable manner.”

via Economic development must be environmentally sustainable, says Manmohan – The Hindu.

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04/04/2013

* Rahul pitches for inclusive growth, says India largest pool of human capital

Times of India: “In a veiled criticism of BJP‘s policies, Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said politics of alienating communities affects growth and the Congress stood for inclusive growth even as he sidestepped questions on becoming Prime Minister.

Rahul Gandhi at a rally in Ernakulam, Kerala.

Rahul Gandhi at a rally in Ernakulam, Kerala. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

India had witnessed faster economic growth under the UPA because it had greatly lowered tensions among communities and fostered harmony, the Congress vice-president said.

“When you play the politics of alienating communities, you stop the movement of people and ideas. When that happens we all suffer. Businesses suffer and the seeds of disharmony are sown and the dreams of our people are severely disrupted,” he said, adding that this damage takes a very long time to reverse.

“It is very dangerous to leave people behind. Inclusive growth is a win-win for everybody,” Rahul said addressing the Annual General Meeting of the CII here.

Likening India to a movement where a billion people were trying to break the shackles, he said there was a need to use the energy and ideas generated by this exercise to help everybody.

“There are two ways this movement can go. It can go harmoniously or it can go disruptively. The idea of the Congress party is that it should go harmoniously and everybody should move together and happily,” he said.

Anger, hatred and prejudice did not contribute to growth, he added.

Spelling out his priorities for India’s growth, Rahul Gandhi said: “The biggest danger is excluding people, excluding the poor, the middle class, the tribals, the Dalits.”

“Whenever we excluded women, the minorities, Dalits… we have always fallen back,” the 42-year-old Gandhi scion said.”

via Rahul pitches for inclusive growth, says India largest pool of human capital – The Times of India.

Posted in Economics, India alert, Leadership change, Politics | 4 Comments »

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03/04/2013

* China, ASEAN agree to develop code of conduct in South China Sea

Maritime claims in the South China Sea

Maritime claims in the South China Sea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is China becoming more pragmatic on the territorial disputes?

Xinhua: “All participants in the 19th China-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Senior Officials’ Consultation have agreed to work toward a code of conduct in the South China Sea.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry press release on Tuesday said after the conclusion of the consultation it was agreed that all parties will commit themselves to fully implement the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.

They will make joint efforts toward “a code of conduct in the South China Sea” and continue to exchange views on the issue.

According to the press release, China and ASEAN also agreed to co-host celebrations on the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the China-ASEAN strategic partnership and further expand friendly communication and cooperation in all fields.”

via China, ASEAN agree to develop code of conduct in South China Sea – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

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02/04/2013

* China’s next generation Net is way ahead of the West

The Nation: “The Net is getting creaky and old: it is rapidly running out of space and remains fundamentally insecure. And it turns out that China is streets ahead of the West in doing anything about it.

Internet!

Internet! (Photo credit: LarsZi)

A report published in the “Philosophical Transactions” of the Royal Society this month details China’s advances in creating a next-generation Internet that is on a national level and on a larger scale than anything in the West.

At the root of the problem are “two major gaps in the architecture of the Internet”, according to a report from the New England Complex Systems Institute, compiled in 2008 for the US Navy and released to the public this month. First up is the Internet’s inability to block malicious traffic as a whole. While malware can rapidly replicate and distribute itself across the Net, organisations can only respond to individual instances of online aggression.

China is already coming up with better defences. One of the most important aspects of its next-generation backbone is a security feature known as source address validation architecture (SAVA). Many of the existing security problems stem from an inability to authenticate IP addresses of computers that try to connect to your network. SAVA fixes this by adding checkpoints across the network. These build up a database of trusted computers matched up with their IP addresses. Packets of data will be blocked if the computer and IP address don’t match. Steve Wolff, one of the Internet’s early pioneers, calls it a “model that should be much more widely adopted”.

Even setting security worries aside, the Internet is running out of room. The current standard for assigning space to computers – known as Internet Protocol Version Four (IPv4) – uses a numbering system which has just under 4.3 billion possible spaces. Internet engineers have been working on the new standard for years. It is called IPv6 and will boost the number of available Internet slots by a mind-boggling 80,000 trillion trillion times. But progress on IPv6 has been painfully slow, and time is running out. IPv4 slots are due to run out in multiple regions around the world this year.

But China has been planning for that day for a long time, under pressure from its massive population, all of whom want to be connected to the Net. So says Donald Riley, an information systems specialist at the University of Maryland, who also chairs the Chinese American Network Symposium.

“China has a national Internet backbone in place that operates under IPv6 as the native network protocol,” says Riley. “We have nothing like that in the US.”

China is already running next-generation services: Internet service provider 3TNet provides television over IPv6, streaming programmes in high definition. It is the basis for a system that monitors and controls traffic flow over the Internet and provides remote medical services – even long-distance, real-time violin lessons in high definition. All have the potential to reach more people at higher speeds than any equivalent service on the old Internet.

“If you are thinking about the future of the Internet, anyone that explores that territory and maps it out first has a definite competitive advantage,” Riley says, “especially with the resources available to China.””

via China’s next generation Net is way ahead of the West – The Nation.

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02/04/2013

* Uyghur Jailings Highlight Chinese Media Controls

Eurasia review: “China’s jailing of 20 ethnic Uyghurs this week on terrorism and separatism charges using online activism as a basis for their conviction reflects government moves to increase media controls and use weak laws to suppress voices in the troubled Xinjiang region, Uyghur rights groups say.

Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China

The courts said the 20 Uyghur Muslims had had their “thoughts poisoned by religious extremism” and used cell phones and DVDs “to spread Muslim religious propaganda,” the government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region said on its official news website.

Nineteen of them were given prison sentences ranging from 5 years to life in prison in Xinjiang’s Kashagar prefecture while the 20th suspect was sentenced to 10 years in jail on the same day in the Bayingolin Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture.

They were accused of using the Internet, mobile phones and digital storage devices to organize, lead and participate in an alleged terrorist organization with the intent to “incite splittism,” reports have said.

Leading Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) said that the sentences showed the new Chinese leadership’s “indifference for human rights and democracy” and that it will “continue with the ‘strike hard’ practices of the previous regimes.”

“It further indicates that the Chinese government will not contribute to the peaceful resolution of the conflict in the region in the near future, preferring instead to continue its counterproductive and destructive practices,” the WUC president said in a statement Thursday.”

via Uyghur Jailings Highlight Chinese Media Controls Eurasia Review | Eurasia Review.

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02/04/2013

* China’s Glass Ceiling

Foreign Policy: “It’s over for America,” a Chinese academic told me in late 2008, two days after Goldman Sachs turned itself into a commercial bank in order to fend off possible collapse. “From here on, it’s all downhill.” Sitting in Beijing as American capitalism seemed to be hanging by a thread, it was easy to believe that one era was ending and another beginning.

The past half-decade should have been the glory years for the spread of Chinese influence around the world. After China’s ravishing 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, and its startling recovery from the financial crisis, it had a platform to push for a bigger voice in international affairs. At a time when the United States has been navel-gazing on its own deficiencies and beset by dysfunction and infighting in Congress, China has quickly become the main trading partner for a long list of countries, not just in Asia, which should give it all sorts of sway. And at the very least, many Chinese assume, the country should start to resume its role as the natural leader in Asia.

Yet the years since the crisis have demonstrated something very different. Rather than usher in a new era of Chinese influence, Beijing’s missteps have shown why it is unlikely to become the world’s leading power. Even if it overtakes the United States to have the biggest economy in the world, which many economists believe could happen over the next decade, China will not dislodge Washington from its central position in global affairs for decades to come.

China is certainly not lacking in ambition, even if many of its final goals are not clearly articulated. It is implementing plans which challenge U.S. military, economic, and even political supremacy. But on each front, the last few years have demonstrated China’s limitations, not the inevitability of its rise.

China’s effort to gradually squeeze the U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific did not start with the financial crisis in 2008. The financial crisis did, however, coincide with a new aggressiveness in the way China has pushed its territorial claims in the South China Sea and the East China Sea. Beijing has scored at least one victory, securing control of the Scarborough Shoal, a group of small islands in the South China Sea, from the Philippines in 2012.

But among these tactical successes, China has been sowing the seeds of a strategic defeat. China’s assertiveness is generating intense suspicion, if not outright enmity, among its neighbors. Its “peaceful rise” is not taking place in isolation. There may be echoes in today’s Asia of the late-nineteenth century in Europe and North America, but this is the one critical difference. The United States came into its own as a great power without any major challenge from its neighbors, while Germany’s ascent was aided by the collapsing Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and Russian monarchy on its frontiers. China, on the other hand, is surrounded by vibrant countries with fast-growing economies, from South Korea to India to Vietnam, who all believe that this is their time, as well. Even Japan, after two decades of stagnation, still has one of the most formidable navies in the world, as well as the world’s third largest economy. China’s strategic misfortune is to be bordered by robust and proud nation-states which expect their own stake in the modern world.

The last few years have shown that these countries have no desire to return to a Sinocentric Asia, as existed before the arrival of Western powers in the late-fifteenth century, and one where China is the undisputed leader. All the talk about the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia has obscured the much bigger shift that has taken place in the region since the crisis — almost all of China’s neighbors are now deeply anxious about what a powerful, expansionist leadership in Beijing portends for their future. They still want to trade with China, but they also want protection from Beijing’s bullying.”

via China’s Glass Ceiling – By Geoff Dyer | Foreign Policy.

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02/04/2013

Wish it was this simple.

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02/04/2013

Surely not. Robbing from its own people?

Posted in China alert, Economics, Illegal practices, land grab, Politics, urban development | Leave a Comment »

02/04/2013

Let us hope this author is correct.

Posted in GeoPolitics, History, Politics | 1 Comment »

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