Archive for November, 2013

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19/11/2013

India buys third aircraft carrier amid rivalry with China | World news | theguardian.com

India has heightened its rivalry with China by taking possession of its third aircraft carrier, a refurbished Soviet-era vessel.

The Indian Navy's aircraft carrier Viraat is reaching the end of its service

The £1.4bn ($2.3bn) aircraft carrier, handed over on Saturday at a north Russian shipyard, will help India to counterbalance the expansion of the Chinese navy.

The 45,000-tonne ship, built in the final years of the Soviet Union and named the Admiral Gorshkov, will be escorted by warships to India on a two-month voyage from Russia\’s northern coast. It has been renamed INS Vikramaditya.

A recent upgrade means the carrier, originally designed to carry Yak-38 vertical take-off aircraft, has been re-equipped to carry Mig-29K fighter jets. It can carry up to 30 aircraft and will have a crew of around 2,000.

China and India, the world\’s most populous countries, co-existed peacefully for centuries but relations became strained after the Communist party won the Chinese civil war in 1948. There were three conflicts between the neighbours in the second half of the 20th century, although since 1987, Sino-Indian trade has grown rapidly. India views China\’s relations with Pakistan with suspicion and China is concerned over Indian activity in the South China Sea. In March this year, tensions between troops were defused after a three-week standoff along their disputed border.

India signed the deal to buy the carrier in 2004 after a decade of negotiations. Its reconditioning was to be finished in 2009, but the price was increased and delivery postponed until 2012 under a new agreement, according to the Indian navy.

The handover was later delayed by another year.

India\’s first, British-built, aircraft carrier was bought in the 1960s and was decommissioned in 1997. Another ex-British carrier, the INS Viraat, is reaching the end of its service.

In August, India launched its first home-built carrier. The 37,500-tonne INS Vikrant is expected to undergo extensive trials in 2016 before being inducted into the navy by 2018.

India is the world\’s largest arms buyer and Russia\’s biggest arms customer, buying about 60% of its arms needs from there. But it has started to look for new suppliers and aims to build more hardware itself as part of plans to spend $100bn in the next 10 years on modernising its military. It has recently rolled out new military purchase rules to attract local companies into the sector.

The INS Vikramaditya was commissioned into the Indian navy at the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, on the White Sea, in a ceremony attended by the Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, and Indian defence minister, AK Antony.

China put its first-ever aircraft carrier, another retooled Soviet-made craft called the Liaoning, into service in 2011 amid tensions with Japan over contested islands and a show of strength in the South China Sea.

In the past year China has been involved in a series of territorial spats with Japan over islets in the East China Sea; and with the Philippines, Vietnam and others over the South China Sea, the location of essential shipping lanes and important natural resources, including oil and gas.

via India buys third aircraft carrier amid rivalry with China | World news | theguardian.com.

Posted in China alert, Chindia Alert, Defence, Diplomacy, Foreign invasion, GeoPolitics, History, India alert, Neighbour conflict, Politics, Territorial dispute | Leave a Comment »

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19/11/2013

China to ease decades-old one-child policy nationwide | Reuters

China will ease family planning restrictions nationwide, the government said on Friday, allowing millions of families to have two children in the country\’s most significant liberalization of its strict one-child policy in about three decades.

A mother pushes her daughter on a swing in Beijing April 3, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Lee

Couples in which one parent is an only child will now be able to have a second child, one of the highlights of a sweeping raft of reforms announced three days after the ruling Communist Party ended a meeting that mapped out policy for the next decade.

The plan to ease the policy was envisioned by the government about five years ago as officials worried that the strict controls were undermining economic growth and contributing to a rapidly ageing population the country had no hope of supporting financially.

A growing number of scholars had long urged the government to reform the policy, introduced in the late 1970s to prevent population growth spiraling out of control, but now regarded by many experts as outdated and harmful to the economy.

While the easing of the controls will not have a substantial demographic impact in the world\’s most populous nation, it could pave the way for the abolition of the policy.

\”The demographic significance is minimal but the political significance is substantial,\” said Wang Feng, a sociology professor at Fudan University specializing in China\’s demographics, before the announcement.

\”This is one of the most urgent policy changes that we\’ve been awaiting for years. What this will mean is a very speedy abolishment of the one-child policy.\”

In the 1980s, the government allowed rural families with a girl to have two children, Wang said. \”Ever since the \’80s, there\’s been nothing as clear as this,\” he said.

Wang Guangzhou, a demographer from top government think-tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, estimated the new policy would affect 30 million women of child-bearing age In a country which has nearly 1.4 billion people.

Although it is known internationally as the one-child policy, China\’s rules governing family planning are more complicated. Under current rules, urban couples are permitted a second child if both parents do not have siblings and rural couples are allowed to have two children if their first-born is a girl.

There are numerous other exceptions as well, including looser rules for ethnic minorities and allowing parents who are themselves only children to have two children at most.

Any couple violating the policy has to pay a large fine.

The one-child policy covers 63 per cent of the country\’s population and Beijing says it has averted 400 million births since 1980.

Many analysts say the one-child policy has shrunk China\’s labor pool, hurting economic growth. For the first time in decades the working age population fell in 2012, and China could be the first country in the world to get old before it gets rich.

\”It\’s not a huge reform, there have been small adjustments all along,\” said Liang Zhongtang, a demographer from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

\”I am just worried that they will make no further adjustments for a very long time after they\’ve made this one.\”

Tian Xueyuan, a retired family planning scholar who helped draft the original one-child policy, told Reuters the rules were only meant to last about 25 years.

\”They could have implemented this policy several years ago,\” he said.

Numerous studies have shown the detrimental effects of the one-child policy. China\’s labor force, at about 930 million, will start declining in 2025 at a rate of about 10 million a year, projections show. Meanwhile, its elderly population will hit 360 million by 2030, from about 200 million today.

A skewed gender ratio is another consequence.

Like most Asian nations, China has a traditional bias for sons. Many families abort female fetuses or abandon baby girls to ensure their only child is a son. About 118 boys are born for every 100 girls, against a global average of 103-107 boys per 100 girls.

Family planning officials have been known to compel women to have abortions to meet birth-rate targets.

Still, the adjustment is likely to be popular.

Zhang Yuanyuan, who has a one-year-old son, said she had already decided to have one more child before the new policy and was willing to pay the fine.

\”We are very, very happy about this new policy,\” Zhang told Reuters.

via China to ease decades-old one-child policy nationwide | Reuters.

Posted in China alert, Economics, Gender issues, One-child policy, Politics, Reform | Leave a Comment »

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19/11/2013

Reform in China: Every move you make | The Economist

DO YOU understand “the three represents” or “the six tightly revolve-arounds”? Have you fully embraced “ecological development civilisation” or “socialist modernisation construction”? No, neither have we. The communiqué issued after the Communist Party’s third plenum of the 18th Central Committee is as opaque and dense as ever. As usual, optimists can find cause for hope and pessimists will see their worst fears confirmed. The one thing they both agree on is that it is unusually important. Third plenums have a special place in Chinese politics as the venue for big changes in direction—and President Xi Jinping had hinted that this one would be no different.

Will this third plenum turn out to transform China as Deng Xiaoping’s did in 1978? More details will emerge. But on the basis of the document, issued on November 12th, and the choreography before the plenum, we are optimistic.

SOE far, so good

With an increasingly vocal Chinese public making growing demands on its leaders, Mr Xi, like his predecessor, Hu Jintao, has learned to talk a good reformist game. But Mr Hu failed to change much, partly because he never found a way round the mass of vested interests, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and local governments, who benefit from the current system and so stand in the way. Although the communiqué laying down Mr Xi’s priorities contains plenty of party-speak (just as Deng’s did in 1978), some of its content suggests that this chief may be more serious about reform than Mr Hu was.

In economic policy the communiqué calls for the market to play a “decisive” role in allocating resources. Until now, party literature has said the role of market forces should be “basic”. Words matter in China. This tweak is a sign that Mr Xi wants the market to play a bigger part in shaping the economy; it may even signal that he wants to take on the SOEs, which squander vast amounts of capital. In the political arena, the communiqué proposes the setting up of a new “leading small group” to oversee reforms. Made up of senior party leaders, these groups report directly to the Politburo. The job of this new one will probably be to bang together the heads of obstructionist SOE bosses and provincial leaders to make them work together better, and Mr Xi himself could well chair it.

A new “state-security committee” could be more contentious. In foreign affairs, this is expected to mirror America’s National Security Council, which advises the president and helps co-ordinate government agencies. America has long complained about the lack of coherence within Chinese policy-making, which leaves its most important bilateral relationships vulnerable to unpredictable hiatuses and sudden changes in direction. The committee is expected to include the army and police. If so, it could be a sign of Mr Xi’s growing clout and determination to rein in the free-wheeling security forces to ensure that they work with the rest of the state.

Pessimists will find plenty to be gloomy about. Asian markets fell when the plenum made its announcements, perhaps because of the lack of news about financial reform. The communiqué barely mentions the need for changes in rural land ownership let alone household registration (hukou). Although it nods towards judicial reform, it does not speak of allowing any more political freedom. There are fears that the security committee could be used for internal repression. Some see it as a power grab by Mr Xi to give himself a more direct role in the security apparatus.

Yet if Mr Xi is to overcome China’s conservative interests, these changes or something like them are necessary. Too many people do too well out of today’s system to make change easy. The new small leading group should act as an economic commando force, tackling obstacles to reform within the bureaucracy and the party. The state-security committee could aim to ensure that factions do not embroil China in disputes abroad that escalate to the central leadership only very late, when much of the damage has been done.

The new committees leave Mr Xi with more power than any Chinese leader since Deng. A lot depends on what he does with it. If the coming years see more changes, such as economic reform in the countryside, curbs on the party’s clout and greater recognition of the rule of law, then people will look back on the plenum as the start of a better China just as they do now to the 1978 meeting. If Mr Xi does nothing, the country will be heading in a dangerous direction.

via Reform in China: Every move you make | The Economist.

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19/11/2013

New Chinese Agency to ‘Manage’ Social Unrest | StratRisks

Source: RFA

The ruling Chinese Communist Party on Tuesday said it would establish an agency to “manage” growing social unrest, as part of a set of reforms largely focusing on the economy.

The new “state security committee” will tackle social instability and unify other agencies in charge of increasing security challenges, both foreign and domestic, the party’s Central Committee said in a statement after a four-day plenary meeting in the nation’s capital ended Tuesday.

State news agency Xinhua said the committee would “improve the system of national security and the country’s national security strategy” so as to “effectively prevent and end social disputes and improve public security”.

But it gave no further details of how the new plan, which was announced amid a raft of economic reforms, would be implemented.

China’s nationwide “stability maintenance” system, which now costs more to run than its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), tracks the movements and activities of anyone engaged in political or rights activism across the country.

Under this system, activists and outspoken intellectuals are routinely put under house arrest or other forms of surveillance at politically sensitive times.

However, analysts said that the agency was likely a bid by China’s new leadership under President Xi Jinping to curb the powers of the Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which administers the “stability maintenance” budget and has been slammed for behaving like a law unto itself.

“I think they have suddenly decreed the creation of this state security committee because the political and legal affairs committees have got such a bad name now,” said Chen Ziming, a former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement who is now based in the United States. “Maybe they want to give it a makeover.”

“Also, they want to boost their overseas contacts,” he said. “It’s not just anti-terrorism; it has to do with many aspects of internal security and diplomatic relations.”

“All of those will be strengthened via this new agency,” he said.

New curbs

Shenzhen-based independent commentator Zhu Jianguo said the new committee would likely herald further attempts by the government to stamp out activism and curb online freedom of expression.

“This is exactly what everybody was afraid would happen,” Zhu said. “It will set new curbs and limitations on freedom of speech and thought.”

“If these reforms were genuine, they would be encouraging freedom of thought and expanding opportunities for public supervision [of government],” he said.

He said there had been no signal from China’s leadership that any reforms of the political system were in the pipeline.

“This is very far from any reform of the political system,” he said.

Cheng Li, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and an expert on Chinese politics, said Xi’s administration had taken inspiration from the U.S.’ National Security Council, and was aiming to place more power in the hands of president.

“The official line is to better coordinate the very different domains: the intelligence, military, foreign policy, public security and also national defense,” Cheng told Reuters.

“This gives tremendous power to the presidency,” he said.

Sensitive session

Authorities in Beijing detained or dispersed hundreds of petitioners who tried to voice grievances against the government during the plenary session of the party’s Central Committee.

Police appeared to be on full alert after detaining or intercepting more than 300 former PLA officers last week.

The requisitioning of rural land for lucrative property deals by cash-hungry local governments also triggers thousands of “mass incidents” across China every year.

Many result in violent suppression, the detention of the main organizers, and intense pressure on the local population to comply with the government’s wishes.

Reported by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

via New Chinese Agency to ‘Manage’ Social Unrest | StratRisks.

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19/11/2013

How U.S. and China may administer the “Six Wars”

Hope the scenarios do not actually play out as predicted by The Inndian Defence Review.  See – https://chindia-alert.org/2013/10/20/six-wars-china-is-sure-to-fight-in-the-next-50-years-stratrisks/

Posted in China alert, Chindia Alert, India alert | 2 Comments »

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19/11/2013

China: Post-plenum blues?

A well thought through analysis, in my opinion.

Posted in China alert, Economics, Politics, Reform | Leave a Comment »

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12/11/2013

China in numbers: secondhand view with salutary warning | The Times

3,000km . . . is the combined length of bargain-price underpants (if laid end-to-end) sold on Chinese websites between midnight on Sunday and 1am on Monday morning. If all the cut-price bras sold in the same period were piled on top of one another, the resulting pillar of lingerie would be three times the height of Mount Everest.

In those first, financially incontinent 60 minutes of Monday morning, China’s largest handler of online payments took 25 million orders with a combined value of 6.7 billion yuan (£686 million). About 340,000 of those orders were placed in the first minute. It was as if the world were about to end and China suddenly decided that the only hope of salvation lay in half-price knickers.

Astounding numbers of this sort were in plentiful supply on Monday as China delighted in the mad calculus of consumerism. It looks heartily encouraging, but appearances are deceptive. The cause of the online shopping frenzy was a deluge of sales promotions timed to coincide with “Singles Day” — a magnificently contrived “festival” prompted by the date 11.11. The whole thing was invented only four years ago.

Every online retailer in China (and there are an awful lot of them) was slashing prices as part of the fun. By mid-afternoon of Singles Day, the Alibaba online portal said that its sales promotions had generated more than ten billion yuan. That is already more than total online sales in the United States last year on “Black Friday”, the shopping day that follows Thanksgiving and historically is the biggest day for retail in the American calendar.

The temptation is to treat Singles Day as a bellwether, both of the general strength of online retail and of the ability of China’s nascent consumer economy to concoct its own events from thin air and convince people the best way of celebrating them is by shopping.

The reality, though, is less cut and dried. Taobao, the online shopping mall that enjoyed such fantastic sales on Monday, has another internet retail division that is telling a rather different story. For some months now, various courts in China have created online stores on Taobao to conduct what they call “judicial auctions” — sales of the various goods seized by the courts in criminal cases. The Government’s crackdown on corruption, now almost a year old, has swollen the items seized very significantly.

The auction site for the city of Wenzhou alone runs to more than 100 pages of items, including large vintage wine collections, mobile phones, office buildings, wedding rings, watches and even buses. Overwhelmingly, though, the items under the hammer are residential property, mostly medium to high-end flats. Activity in Wenzhou has always been seen as a weather vane for Chinese property prices and the signals are not encouraging.

The flats go on sale on the judicial auction sites with an estimated reserve price and, because the courts want a sale, that price tends to be at a decent discount to the prevailing market price. An additional appeal is that there is also no commission charged.

Yet many do not make the reserve price. Out of a batch of 157 auctions conducted by the Luchent District Court in Wenzhou, 72 fell through because there was no bid at all. Local property agents are starting to get very twitchy over what Taobao is telling them about the secondhand market.

Discounts may work for underpants, but they do not appear to do so for second-hand property. Chinese are still buying newly built apartments with gusto, on the assumption that eventually the resale market will be robust: the auctions seem to be sounding an alarm over that assumption.

via China in numbers: secondhand view with salutary warning | The Times.

Posted in Affluence, China alert, corruption, Economics, online sales, real estate | Leave a Comment »

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12/11/2013

China’s meager aid to the Philippines could dent its image | Reuters

To many, China‘s $200,000 against the US’s $20m will look more like an insult than aid. Even the UK has pledged £5m. Let’s hope it is a case of mis-reporting!

“China may have wasted the chance to build goodwill in Southeast Asia with its relatively paltry donation to the Philippines in the wake of a devastating typhoon, especially with the United States sending an aircraft carrier and Japan ramping up aid. People leave on a boat against the backdrop of a destroyed fishing community after the Super typhoon Haiyan battered Tacloban city in central Philippines November 12, 2013. REUTERS/Edgar Su

The world\’s second-largest economy is a growing investor in Southeast Asia, where it is vying with the United States and Japan for influence. But China\’s assertiveness in pressing its claim to the disputed South China Sea has strained ties with several regional countries, most notably the Philippines.

China\’s government has promised $100,000 in aid to Manila, along with another $100,000 through the Chinese Red Cross – far less than pledged by other economic heavyweights. Japan has offered $10 million in aid and is sending in an emergency relief team, for instance, while Australia has donated $9.6 million.

\”The Chinese leadership has missed an opportunity to show its magnanimity,\” said Joseph Cheng, a political science professor at the City University of Hong Kong who focuses on China\’s ties with Southeast Asia. \”While still offering aid to the typhoon victims, it certainly reflects the unsatisfactory state of relations (with Manila).\” China\’s ties with the Philippines are already fragile as a decades-old territorial squabble over the South China Sea enters a more contentious chapter, with claimant nations spreading deeper into disputed waters in search of energy supplies, while building up their navies. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also claim parts of the South China Sea, making it one of the region\’s biggest flashpoints. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-nation grouping that includes the Philippines, has been talking to China about a binding code of conduct in South China Sea to ease the friction, but Beijing\’s frugal aid hints at a deeply entrenched rivalry that could make forging consensus difficult.

Even China\’s state-run Global Times newspaper, known for its nationalistic and often hawkish editorial views, expressed concern about the impact on Beijing\’s international standing. \”China, as a responsible power, should participate in relief operations to assist a disaster-stricken neighboring country, no matter whether it\’s friendly or not,\” the paper said in a commentary. \”China\’s international image is of vital importance to its interests. If it snubs Manila this time, China will suffer great losses.\””

via China’s meager aid to the Philippines could dent its image | Reuters.

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12/11/2013

China vows ‘decisive’ role for markets, results by 2020 | Reuters

China\’s leaders pledged to let markets play a \”decisive\” role in the economy as they unveiled a reform agenda for the next decade on Tuesday, looking to secure new drivers of future growth.

A worker wields a hammer at a demolition site in front of new residential buildings in Hefei, Anhui province, October 19, 2013. REUTERS/Stringer

China aims to achieve \”decisive results\” in its reform push by 2020, with economic changes in focus, the ruling Communist Party said in a communiqué released by state media at the end of a four-day conclave of its 205-member Central Committee.

The self-imposed deadline for progress – rare for Beijing to lay out in such clear terms – together with the creation of a top-level working group and an emphasis on \”top-level design\”, suggest a more decisive reform push by the administration of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang than under the previous leadership.

They must unleash new sources of growth as the economy, after three decades of breakneck expansion, begins to sputter, burdened by industrial overcapacity, piles of debt and eroding competitiveness.

\”You should look back in history. When Deng Xiaoping started the reform and opening movement, he actually did something very similar in nature, creating a very powerful working group,\” said Steve Wang, China chief economist with The Reorient Group in Hong Kong.

\”These guys report direct into the power center of the Communist Party. This is definitely not something to be looked at as another layer of bureaucracy, this is something to speed things up, to make things more efficient.\”

The leaders also set up a state committee to improve security as Beijing seeks to tackle growing social unrest and unify the powers of a disparate security apparatus in the face of growing challenges at home and abroad.

While the statement was short on details, which prompted disappointment on social media, it is expected to kick off specific measures by state agencies over the coming years to gradually reduce the role of the state in the economy.

Historically, such third plenary sessions of a newly installed Central Committee have acted as a springboard for key economic reforms, and the follow-up to this meeting will serve as a first test of the new leadership\’s commitment to reform.

via China vows ‘decisive’ role for markets, results by 2020 | Reuters.

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11/11/2013

High-speed railways: Faster than a speeding bullet | The Economist

China’s new rail network, already the world’s longest, will soon stretch considerably farther

THE new high-speed railway line to Urumqi climbs hundreds of metres onto the Tibetan plateau before slicing past the valley where the Dalai Lama was born. It climbs to oxygen-starved altitudes and then descends to the edge of the Gobi desert for a final sprint of several hundred windblown kilometres across a Martian landscape. The line will reach higher than any other bullet-train track in the world and extend what is already by far the world’s longest high-speed rail network by nearly one-fifth compared with its current length. The challenge will be explaining why this particular stretch is necessary.

Record-breaking milestones have become routine in the breathtaking development of high-speed railways in China, known as gaotie. In just five years, since the first one connected Beijing with the nearby port of Tianjin in 2008, high-speed track in service has reached 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles), more than in all of Europe. The network has expanded to link more than 100 cities. In December the last section was opened on the world’s longest gaotie line, stretching 2,400km from Beijing to Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong (see map). The network has confounded some sceptics who believed there would not be enough demand. High-speed trains carry almost 2m people daily, which is about one-third of the total number of rail passengers.

 

Most of China’s gaotie construction has focused on the country’s densely populated east and centre. The Beijing-Shenzhen line, which is due to be extended into Hong Kong by 2015, links half a dozen provinces and 28 cities. In 2009 work began on the section that will connect the north-west of the country, a line that could hardly be more different from those that criss-cross the booming east. It stretches 1,776km from Lanzhou, the capital of the western province of Gansu, to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, an “autonomous region” bordering on Central Asia. Officials put the cost at 144 billion yuan ($24 billion); cheap perhaps compared with the 400-billion-yuan line from Beijing to Shenzhen, but it traverses such a vast stretch of barely inhabited terrain that land and rehousing costs are negligible.

Officials have given the project the ponderous name of the Lanxin Railway Second Double-Tracked Line. This is to distinguish it from a conventional line from Lanzhou to Xinjiang (the first syllables of which form the name Lanxin) that was completed in 1962. Oddly, however, it does not follow the same route. Instead of heading north from Lanzhou along the old Silk Road through Gansu, it detours into adjacent Qinghai province on the Tibetan plateau and opts for a far tougher route through the snowy Qilian Mountains before re-entering Gansu 480km later and picking up the old trail into Xinjiang.

via High-speed railways: Faster than a speeding bullet | The Economist.

Posted in China alert, Economics, Transport | 1 Comment »

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