Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
Countries must respect each others’ systems and be wary of US political forces who want to ‘hijack relations’, Wang tells press conference at ‘two sessions’
Beijing is not looking for confrontation and wants to work with Washington to fight coronavirus, minister says
Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China did not want to replace or change the US. Photo: Xinhua
China and the US should try to avoid a new cold war and find new ways to cooperate despite their differences, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Sunday.
“We need to be alert to efforts by some political forces in America to hijack China-US relations and who try to push the two countries towards a so-called ‘new cold war’.
“This is a dangerous attempt to turn back the course of history,” Wang told a press conference on the sidelines of the annual parliamentary meetings known as the ‘two sessions’.
Ties between the two countries have further worsened due to escalating tensions over the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Voices calling for decoupling have been on the rise in the US, with some arguing that the two countries are edging towards a new cold war akin to that against the Soviet Union.
Wang called for the two countries to respect each other’s political systems and to find a way to get along despite their differences.
The two nations should step up cooperation on global pandemic control, and coordinate on macro policies to deal with the economic impact.
“China has no intention of changing the United States, much less replacing it. The US should give up the wishful thinking that it can change China.”
“For the benefit of the two peoples, as well as the future and well-being of humankind, China and the US should and must find a way to coexist peacefully despite the differences in system and cultures of the two societies.”
Wang said China will not seek confrontation with the United States, but China is determined to protect its sovereignty, territorial integrity and development.
Buffett’s Berkshire posted a record quarterly net loss of nearly US$50 billion
Company sells entire stakes in US airlines, Buffett says ‘world has changed’
Warren Buffett speaks during the virtual Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting. Photo: Bloomberg
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Saturday he’s confident the US economy will bounce back from its pummelling by the coronavirus pandemic because “American magic has always prevailed”.
The 89-year-old made the sanguine prediction about the world’s largest economy as his holding company Berkshire Hathaway reported first-quarter net losses of nearly US$50 billion.
Buffett also announced Saturday that his company had sold all its stakes in four major US airlines last month, as the pandemic clobbered the travel industry.
“It turns out I was wrong,” he said of his acquisitions of 10 per cent stakes in American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines.
Berkshire Hathaway had paid US$7 billion to US$8 billion, and “we did not take out anything like that,” he said.
Between the purchases that took place over months, and the sale, “the airlines business I think changed in a very major way” and could no longer meet Berkshire criteria for profitability, he said.
Buffett’s announcement may further hurt airlines already pushed to the brink by coronavirus lockdown measures, now looking to the US government for US$25 billion in relief funds.
Berkshire Hathaway, based in Omaha, Nebraska, called its first-quarter setback “temporary” but said it could not reliably predict when its many businesses would return to normal or when consumers would resume their former buying habits.
Warren Buffett (left) and vice-chairman Charlie Munger at the annual Berkshire shareholder shopping day in Omaha, Nebraska in 2019. Photo: Reuters
“We’ve faced great problems in the past, haven’t faced this exact problem – in fact we haven’t really faced anything that quite resembles this problem,” Buffett said in a lengthy speech on the country’s economic history.
“But we faced tougher problems, and the American miracles, American magic has always prevailed and it will do so again.”
“We are now a better country, as well as an incredibly more wealthy country, than we were in 1789 … We got a long ways to go but we moved in the right direction,” he said, referencing the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage.
Warren Buffett has traded his old flip phone for Apple’s iPhone
25 Feb 2020
“Never bet against America.”
Buffett is considered one of the savviest investors anywhere. His fortune of US$72 billion is the fourth-largest in the world, according to Forbes, and in normal years, the company’s annual gathering in Omaha is a high-point of the calendar for investors, a “Woodstock for capitalists”.
But the devastating economic impact of the pandemic has hit hard at Berkshire Hathaway’s wide range of investments, and the need for social distancing forced it to hold the annual meeting online.
Buffett addressed his shareholders in a live-stream flanked only by Gregory Abel, who is in charge of Berkshire’s non-insurance operations.
His business partner for six decades, 96-year-old Charlie Munger, did not appear.
China’s first-quarter GDP shrinks for the first time since 1976 as coronavirus cripples economy
Buffett, in a statement, played down his company’s bleak-looking net figure. He said a better measure of the company’s performance was its operating earnings, which exclude investments and are less subject to sharp fluctuations.
By that measure, Berkshire Hathaway saw growth to US$5.9 billion from US$5.55 billion a year earlier.
The brutal drop in the net – to a loss of US$49.75 billion from a profit last year of US$21.7 billion – resulted primarily from the virus-related decline in value of its broad investment portfolio, which ranges from energy to transport to insurance and technology.
Chinese cryptocurrency billionaire finally sits down to eat with Warren Buffett
7 Feb 2020
The annual meeting often has an almost carnival atmosphere, as thousands of fans and investors flock to Nebraska to hear from the celebrated “Oracle of Omaha”. Buffett, famous for his relatively modest lifestyle, turns 90 on August 30.
In documents filed Saturday, Berkshire noted that until mid-March many of its companies were posting “comparative revenue and earnings increases” over the same 2019 period.
Many of its companies – including in rail transport, energy production and some manufacturing and service businesses – are deemed essential and are able to continue working amid the far-reaching confinement orders.
But their turnover slowed considerably in April, the company statement said.
Moves taken by those companies such as employee furloughs, salary cuts and reductions, and capital spending reductions are “necessary actions” and “temporary,” it said.
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma has sent the first shipment of surgical masks and coronavirus test kits to the US.
The Chinese billionaire tweeted two pictures of the pallets of goods being loaded on to a plane in Shanghai.
Earlier this month he said he would give 500,000 testing kits and one million masks to America.
Mr Ma is also sending consignments of medical supplies to Europe as he called for international cooperation efforts to combat the pandemic.
In his first tweet, Asia’s richest person posted photos of a China Eastern Airlines jet being loaded with boxes of coronavirus test kits and face masks as they were shipped to the US.
It comes after the Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation last week announced that they had prepared 500,000 testing kits and 1 million masks to be sent to America.
They also said that they had already donated supplies to other countries including Japan, South Korea, Italy, Iran and Spain, with two million protective masks pledged for distribution across Europe.
The first consignment of 500,000 masks and other medical supplies such as test kits, which was destined for Italy, arrived in Belgium on Friday.
He joins other high-profile technology executives in pledging support for coronavirus research and disease prevention.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who is the world’s second-richest person, has announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would give $100m to help efforts to stop the spread of the virus.
On Friday Mr Gates announced that he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board to spend more time on philanthropic activities. He said he wanted to focus on global health and development, education and tackling climate change.
Chinese tech giants, including Tencent, ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing, and TikTok owner ByteDance, have all pledged money and resources to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
Image copyright SWALLOW YANImage caption A Chinese student puts up a yard sign of presidential candidate Andrew Yang in Des Moines, Iowa.
To some Americans, Iowa, a rural state in the middle of the US, is dismissively thought of as “fly-over country”.
Yet the Hawkeye state is well-known in China. Chinese President Xi Jinping has visited twice – before he took office in 2012, and in an earlier stay as a low-level local official on a 1985 trip to study farming technology.
Iowa was once again a destination for Chinese visitors last week, though those who descended upon the state were not there to study soybeans, but democracy in America.
Amid its chaos, young “democracy tourists” learnt first-hand that it can be a messy way to govern.
The results of Iowa’s caucuses were delayed for days because of a technical failure, causing political uproar in the US.
But the Chinese students didn’t seem to mind.
Over the weekend leading up to the 3 February contest – the first step in selecting the candidates who will stand in the November presidential election – they could be spotted at a rally for Andrew Yang, a Democratic hopeful.
The students, aged about 16, were part of a winter break tour of the US that included stops in Iowa to see democracy in action.
The trip cost $7,000 (£5,428) – a huge sum for the average Chinese household – but Liu Junhao, 16, thought it had been money well spent.
He’d experienced something unique and meaningful, unlike his classmates’ visits to typical American tourist attractions, he said.
“If I could vote, I would vote for Andrew Yang,” he said. Mr Liu could only hear half of the candidate’s speech, but stared at him awe, star-struck, for the whole event.
Some 360,000 Chinese students now study in the US. In the UK, the figure is more than 100,000. As Chinese people become more affluent and international education more accessible to them, an increasing number of young Chinese want to study in the West.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Chinese students attend multiple campaign rallies in Iowa, including former Vice-President Joe Biden’s event
Understanding democracy has now become part of that education.
Steven Hu, a Hubei native who attends high school in Boston, has canvassed for six months for Joe Biden, working for his campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote in the primaries.
Mr Hu, 17, had ambitions beyond promoting democracy, though.
He arrived at a Biden rally in Des Moines armed with a university recommendation letter- and hopes that the former vice-president would sign it for him.
“Steven has been very proactive in making a positive impact on my campaign,” said the letter, written by the student for Mr Biden to sign.
Image copyright STEVEN HUImage caption Chinese student Steven Hu meets presidential hopeful Joe Biden
Dressed up in a three-piece suit, the college hopeful stood waiting next to the aisle, poised to pounce when Mr Biden was to pass through after his speech.
The moment came. The silver-haired politician approached. Mr Hu seized the chance to tell Mr Biden about his canvassing work, and asked him to sign the letter.
“Thank you,” Mr Biden responded. Though he appeared to be puzzled by the paper presented to him, he signed it after taking a glimpse.
However, before Mr Hu could get the letter back, a Biden aide seized it and explained the candidate was in no position to sign such a document.
A disappointed Mr Hu took it in his stride. “I didn’t expect such a letter would be accepted by colleges anyway,” he said.
He said he just wanted proof that he had participated in the campaign.
Mr Hu viewed politics as a game that everyone in the US plays – a game with high participation but low efficiency, given America’s partisan gridlock.
But he still appreciates it. “The US is a great country,” he said, “because it successfully created a system that lets everyone be a part of it.”
Two classrooms on Nanjing campus were chosen for pilot project
Camera automatically captures students’ faces without their cooperation
Students pass through a facial recognition turnstile at China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing. Photo: Weibo
A university in eastern China has installed a facial recognition system at its entrance and in two classrooms to monitor the attendance and behaviour of students.
China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, announced on its website on Thursday that it was one of the first higher education institutions in the country to put such a system in place.
“It can effectively solve the management difficulties and low efficiencies in a traditional attendance system, and make it easier for managers to track their students,” Xu Jianzhen, director of the university’s library and information centre, told news website Thepaper.cn
In a pilot project, two classrooms were equipped with an attendance system using facial recognition software, with a camera that automatically captured the faces of students in class without their cooperation, the university said.
“Besides attendance, the system installed in the classroom can provide surveillance of the students’ learning, such as whether they are listening to the lectures, how many times they raise their heads, and whether they are playing on their phones or falling asleep,” Xu told the news website.
“The school is taking action to cut down on students skipping class, leaving classes early, paying for a substitute to attend classes for them and not listening in class,” he said.
The plan was not well received online, with some critics raising privacy concerns for staff and students.
Why are Hong Kong protesters targeting lamp posts?
“What kind of talent are they trying to cultivate?” a user of the Twitter-style Weibo network asked. “I’ve never seen such a method.”
Another wrote: “If this system was being installed in Europe or America, they’d be sued and the school would have to close down.”
But Xu said the university had consulted the police and sought legal advice, and was told the system would not be considered an invasion of privacy as classrooms were public spaces.
“You are complaining about [a system] that’s meant to urge you to learn? Are you a student?” he told the news website.
A spokesman said China Pharmaceutical University was using a facial recognition system to improve class attendance. Photo: Weibo
The university would seek feedback from teaching staff before deciding whether to install facial recognition systems in all of its classrooms, according to the report.
In May last year, a school in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, installed cameras to monitor pupils’ facial expressions and attentiveness in class as part of a “smart classroom behaviour management system” to give teachers real-time information on their students.
Elsewhere, facial recognition has been used to catch unlicensed drivers in the southern technology hub of Shenzhen, jaywalkers in Shanghai, and criminal suspects at public events across China.
Image captionSneh, 22, attended the awards ceremony where the film won an Oscar
A film based on young women in an Indian village who make sanitary pads has won an Oscar for best documentary short. The BBC’s Geeta Pandey met with the women in their village before the ceremony.
Sneh was 15 when she started menstruating. The first time she bled, she had no idea what was happening to her.
“I was very scared. I thought I was sick with something very serious and began crying,” she told me when I visited her home in Kathikhera village not far from Delhi earlier this week.
“I didn’t have the courage to tell my mother so I confided in my aunt. She said: ‘You’re a grown woman now, don’t cry, it’s normal.’ It was her who told my mother.”
Sneh, now 22, has travelled a long way from that point. She works in a small factory in her village that makes sanitary pads and is the protagonist of Period. End of Sentence., a documentary that has been nominated for an Oscar. She will be attending Sunday’s ceremony in Los Angeles.
The film came about after a student group in North Hollywood used crowdfunding to send a pad-making machine – and Iranian-American filmmaker Rayka Zehtabchi – to Sneh’s village.
Just 115km (71 miles) from Delhi, Kathikhera village in Hapur district is a world far removed from the glitzy malls and high-rises of the Indian capital. Normally, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Delhi, but construction work on the highway slows it down to four hours for us. And the final 7.5km drive to the village from Hapur town is a crawl, on narrow winding roads lined with open drains on both sides.
The documentary is filmed in the farms and fields – and classrooms – of Kathikhera. Like in the rest of India, periods are a taboo topic; menstruating women are considered impure and barred from entering religious places and often excluded from social events too.
Image captionSneh says that previously, menstruation was not discussed – even among girls
With so much stigma surrounding the issue, it’s no surprise that Sneh had never heard of periods before she started getting them herself.
“It was not a topic that was discussed – even among girls,” she says.
But things began to change when Action India, a charity that works on reproductive health issues, set up a sanitary napkin manufacturing unit in Kathikhera.
Image captionThe women employees work from 9-5 six days a weekImage captionA pack is priced at 30 rupees ($0.40; £0.30)
In January 2017, Sneh was asked by Suman, a neighbour who works with Action India, if she wanted to work in the factory.
A college graduate who dreams of working for the Delhi police one day, Sneh says she was excited. After all, there were “no other job opportunities” in the village.
“When I sought my mum’s permission, she said, ‘ask your father’. In our families, all important decisions are taken by men.”
She was too embarrassed to tell her father that she was going to be making pads so she told him that she would be making children’s diapers.
“It was two months into the job that mum told him that I was making pads,” she laughs. Much to her relief, he said, “That’s alright, work is work.”
Today, the unit employs seven women, between 18 and 31 years of age. They work from 9-5, six days a week and are paid a monthly salary of 2,500 rupees ($35; £27). The centre produces 600 pads a day and they are sold under the brand name Fly.
Image captionThe centre produces 600 pads a dayImage captionMost women in the village used to use old clothes when they got their periods, now 70% use pads“The biggest problem we face is power cuts. Sometimes we have to come back at night to work when the power is back to meet the targets,” Sneh says.
This little business, run from two rooms in a village home, has helped improve feminine hygiene. Until it was set up most women in the village were using pieces of cloth cut out from old saris or bedsheets when they had their period, now 70% use pads.
It’s also de-stigmatised menstruation and changed attitudes in a conservative society in ways that were unimaginable just a couple of years ago.
Sneh says menstruation is now discussed openly among women. But, she says, it’s not been an easy ride.
“It was difficult at the start. I had to help my mother with housework, I had to study and do this job. Sometimes during my exams, when the pressure became too much, my mother went to work instead of me,” she says.
Her father, Rajendra Singh Tanwar, says he is “very proud” of his daughter. “If her work benefits the society, especially women, then I feel happy about it.”
Image captionRajendra Singh Tanwar says he’s proud of what Sneh (left) has doneImage captionSushma Devi’s husband does not want her to work there – but she won’t give it up
Initially, the women faced objections from some villagers who were suspicious about what was happening at the factory. And once the film crew arrived, there were questions about what they were doing.
And some, like 31-year-old Sushma Devi, still have to fight daily battles at home.
The mother-of-two says her husband agreed to let her work only after Sneh’s mother spoke to him. He also insisted that she finish all the housework before going to the factory.
“So I wake up at 05:00, clean the house, do the laundry, feed the buffaloes, make dung cakes which we use as cooking fuel, bathe, and make breakfast and lunch before I step out. In the evening, I cook dinner once I get back.”
But her husband is still unhappy with the arrangement. “He often gets angry with me. He says there’s enough work at home, why do you have to go out to work? My neighbours too say it’s not a good job, they also say the salary is low.”
Two of Sushma’s neighbours had worked at the factory too, but left after a few months. Sushma has no intention of doing the same: “Even if my husband beats me up, I will not give up my job. I enjoy working here.”
Image captionAction India, a charity that works on reproductive health issues, set up the manufacturing unit two years ago
In the documentary, Sushma is heard saying she’d spent some of her earnings to buy clothes for her younger brother. “If I’d known this was going to go to Oscars, I would have said something more intelligent,” she says, laughing.
For Sushma, Sneh and their fellow workers, the Oscar nomination has come as a big boost. The film, which is available on Netflix, is nominated in the Best Short Documentary category.
As Sneh prepares to leave for Los Angeles, her neighbours are appreciative of the “prestige and fame” she has brought the village.
“No-one from Kathikhera has ever travelled abroad so I’ll be the first one to do so,” she says. “I’m now recognised and respected in the village, people say they are proud of me.”
Sneh says she had heard of Oscars and knew they were the biggest cinema awards in the world. But she had never watched a ceremony, and certainly didn’t think that one day she would be on the red carpet.
“I never thought I would go to America. Even now I can’t fully process what’s happening. For me, the nomination itself is an award. It’s a dream that I’m dreaming with my eyes open.”
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 