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.
Patten says to watch out for any future attempts by Beijing to ‘undermine the rule of law and to corrupt the electoral process in the months ahead’
The plea comes as the ruling Conservative Party in Britain toughens up China policies
Chris Patten is an outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s handling of Hong Kong affairs. Photo: AFP
Britain’s last colonial governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has asked the British government to watch out for Chinese attempts to interfere with the city’s affairs while the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic.
He made the plea to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab as the ruling Conservative Party toughens up China policies, amid what many party members see as Beijing’s deliberate failures to be transparent about the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.
The call also comes amid growing worry among Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists, as police have rounded up dissidents and Beijing authorities have stepped up the rhetoric of national security concerns.
Patten, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s handling of Hong Kong affairs, said: “I hope we can … count on the British government to call out China for its breaches of the [Sino-British] Joint Declaration and to watch carefully for future attempts by Beijing to undermine the rule of law and to corrupt the electoral process in the months ahead.”
Wave of arrests of Hong Kong pro-democracy figures draws global criticism
The declaration provided for Hong Kong’s status quo until 2047.
The Foreign Office has not responded to an inquiry by the Post on Patten’s letter.
Citing their roles in unlawful protests, Hong Kong police rounded up at least 15 opposition camp activists earlier this month, including media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and prominent barrister Martin Lee Chu-ming, known as the city’s “father of democracy”.
On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers wrote Secretary of State Mike Pompeo requesting that his department’s upcoming assessment of Hong Kong’s autonomy reflect a recent wave of arrests by the city’s authorities of pro-democracy activists.
Hong Kong police to respond with force to any Labour Day protests
30 Apr 2020
Patten also asked the British government to investigate the origin of the coronavirus.
“I would be grateful for your assurance that the British government will press for an expert mission to Wuhan and will encourage other countries to do the same,” he wrote, underscoring the need to “make sure that we know everything about the nature of the virus in order to fight it effectively. We also need to prevent anything similar happening in the future.”
On Wednesday, Britain’s ambassador to the US Karen Pierce backed calls for an investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus and the response of the World Health Organisation.
“We need to learn after all these crises, just as we did after Ebola in 2014. We need to learn how we can always do things better,” she said.
The comments came after Britain’s foreign affairs parliamentary committee asked the government whether it plans to use international bodies to hold China to account over the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘Aggressive and targeted’ tactics needed to curb spread of Covid-19 as more than 100,000 new infections recorded in just four days
Global political commitment and coordination needed to halt trajectory, agency chief says
A customs officer speaks to passengers on board an inbound flight at Beijing Capital International Airport. Photo: Xinhua
The World Health Organisation has warned that the Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating, calling for “aggressive and targeted tactics” to curb its spread after more than 100,000 new infections were recorded in just four days.
The warning, by the UN agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, came as the number of deaths from the disease, caused by the new coronavirus, continued to rise, and as mainland China reported a doubling in new cases.
The outbreak, which was first reported in December in China, is rapidly spreading across the globe. Tedros said it had taken 67 days from the first reported case to the first 100,000 infections, and just 11 days for the number to soar to the second 100,000.
“[It was] just four days for the third 100,000 cases. You can see how the virus is accelerating,” he said on Tuesday.
“But we’re not prisoners to statistics. We’re not helpless bystanders. We can change the trajectory of this pandemic.”
China’s National Health Commission reported 74 imported coronavirus infections on Monday – the highest since March 4, when it began including data on such cases and noted two infections that had originated abroad.
They bring the total number of imported cases on the mainland to 427, as of Monday. The total number of infections there now stands at 81,171, and the death toll has risen to 3,277, with seven new fatalities.
Tedros said political commitment and coordination at the global level were needed to stop the spread, but warned against using untested medicines, saying they could raise false hope.
“To win, we need to attack the virus with aggressive and targeted tactics – testing every suspected case, isolating and caring for every confirmed case, and tracing and quarantining every close contact,” he said.
Italy’s number of new Covid-19 cases dropped to a five-day low on Monday, easing the strain on overstretched hospitals, but the situation in Spain continued to worsen.
Italian health authorities announced 4,789 new cases on Monday, a drop from 5,560 on Sunday and 6,557 on Saturday. Spanish authorities announced 462 deaths on Monday, the country’s worst day since the start of the epidemic.
Italy has a glimpse of hope as new coronavirus cases drop to a 5-day low
24 Mar 2020
The British government said on Monday that another 54 people had died in the previous 24 hours after testing positive for the coronavirus, raising the country’s deaths from the pandemic to 335. The number of confirmed cases in Britain rose to 6,650 on Monday, from 5,683 on Sunday.
Mainland China officials have said the risk facing the nation was to contain imported infections. Among the new imported infections, 31 were recorded in Beijing, 14 in Guangdong and nine in Shanghai.
Beijing has stepped up measures to contain imported infections, diverting all arriving international flights from Monday to other cities, including Shanghai and as far west as Xian, where passengers will undergo virus screening.
Guangzhou also requires all travellers to the city, except for those from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, to undergo the coronavirus test. Beijing has required the test for incoming travellers with symptoms and epidemic history.
The coastal province of Zhejiang, near Shanghai, will also put all arrivals from overseas in centralised quarantine facilities for 14 days, according to media reports.
LONDON (Reuters) – The British government has not talked to China about helping build High Speed 2, the major rail project given the green light last week despite being billions of pounds over budget, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said on Sunday.
A report in the Financial Times said China had offered to build the rail line, known as HS2, in five years and for less money.
“I’ve certainly had no advice on the subject, obviously I will be asking to see what the communication has been,” Shapps told the BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday.
“This has not been a discussion with the department, it’s been a discussion with HS2 as I understand it.”
Shapps said he wanted to push ahead with major projects more quickly.
“There are things we can do to speed this up and I want to learn from everyone but I also want to make sure the British ingenuity and skills and apprentices and all the rest of it come through on this massive project,” he said.
Shapps also told Marr the resignation of finance minister, or chancellor, Sajid Javid on Thursday could result in a delay to the budget planned for March 11.
“This is a matter for the new chancellor Rishi (Sunak),” he said.
“I don’t think we’ve said it will definitely go ahead on the same date that was mentioned before in March, that will be a matter for the chancellor.”
Image copyrightAFPImage captionVisitors can inspect a bullet-ridden wall at the site of the massacre
Hundreds of Indians attending a public meeting were shot dead by British troops in the northern Indian city of Amritsar in 1919. Historian Kim Wagner sifts fact from fiction as the UK House of Lords prepares to debate the massacre, including if Britain should apologise.
On 13 April 1919, Sergeant WJ Anderson witnessed first-hand the brutal massacre of hundreds of Indian civilians at Jallianwala Bagh, a public garden in Amritsar city.
“When fire was opened the whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground, a whole flutter of white garments, with however a spreading out towards the main gateway, and some individuals could be seen climbing the high wall,” Anderson later recalled.
“There was little movement, except for the climbers. The gateway would soon be jammed. I saw no sign of a rush towards the troops.”
He had served as the bodyguard of Brigadier General RH Dyer, who had rushed to Amritsar a few days earlier to quell what he believed to be a major uprising.
The crowd of more than 20,000 people, however, were not armed rebels. They were local residents and villagers from the surrounding countryside who had come to listen to political speeches or simply to spend a few hours in the gardens.
It was also the day of the Baisakhi festival, which marked the anniversary of the creation of the Khalsa, or Sikh community, and annually attracted thousands of visitors and pilgrims.
The crowd comprised Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Most were men and young boys, including some infants; only a few women were present.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionBrigadier General Dyer rushed to Amritsar to quell what he believed to be a major uprising
When Gen Dyer ordered his troops to cease firing, Jallianwala Bagh resembled a battlefield strewn with corpses. Between 500 and 600 people were killed, and probably three times as many wounded. The exact numbers will never be known for certain but the official death count, reached months later, was just 379.
In recent years, much of the public debate has focused on calls for a formal British apology – the demand has been led by, among others, Indian politician and author Shashi Tharoor.
Queen Elizabeth II visited the memorial at Jallianwala Bagh in 1997 and then Prime Minister David Cameron visited in 2013 – both showed their respect yet carefully avoided making an actual apology.
In December 2017, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, nevertheless urged the British government to make just such a gesture during his own visit to Amritsar.
“I am clear that the government should now apologise, especially as we reach the centenary of the massacre. This is about properly acknowledging what happened here and giving the people of Amritsar and India the closure they need through a formal apology,” he said.
Image copyrightAFPImage captionOn his 2013 visit, Cameron avoided making an actual apology but said the massacre was “deeply shameful”
Exactly what happened at Jallianwala Bagh, however, remains unclear, and a century later, the actual circumstances of the massacre are still shrouded in myth and misconceptions.
There are, for instance, people, often with a nostalgic attachment to the Empire, who still insist that Gen Dyer only opened fire as a final resort when the crowd ignored his warning to disperse – even though the general himself was quite clear that he gave no such warning.
Similarly, the idea that the shooting was necessary and prevented much worse violence conveniently ignores the fact that Indian riots in April 1919 were in each and every case precipitated by British actions.
Factual inaccuracies are also to be found at the Jallianwala Bagh memorial today. Among other things, a sign claims that 120 bodies of the victims of the massacre were recovered from what has become known as the Martyrs’ Well. It’s believed that many people jumped into the well to escape the bullets.
But there is no evidence for this story, which appears to be based on a mix-up with the infamous well at Kanpur city, where the bodies of British women and children were disposed after a massacre in 1857.
Visual depictions of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre also show machine guns being used, when the historical record is quite clear that the shooting was carried out by 50 Gurkha and Baluchi troops armed with rifles.
Gen Dyer also did not orchestrate the massacre, and deliberately trap the crowd inside the gardens, as some popular accounts have it.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionThe crowd were not armed rebels but local residents and villagers
In fact, it was British panic and misreading of the political turmoil in India that was at the root of the violence.
While Indian nationalists were looking forward to political reforms and greater self-determination after the end of World War One, the British were still haunted by the spectre of the 1857 “mutiny”, an uprising that is often referred to as India’s first war of independence.
So, when riots broke out in Amritsar on 10 April – and five Europeans and dozens of Indians were killed – the authorities responded with immediate and indiscriminate force. Three days later, Gen Dyer entered what he mistakenly perceived to be a war zone.
Where popular depictions show a peaceful crowd of locals quietly listening to a political speech, Gen Dyer instead perceived a defiant and murderous mob, which had only days before run rampant through Amritsar. When he ordered his troops to open fire, it was an act of fear, spurred on by a disastrously flawed threat assessment.
None of this exonerates Gen Dyer or detracts from the sheer brutality of the massacre – nor does it justify the subsequent torture and humiliation of Indians under martial law. The indisputable violence of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre hardly requires any embellishment. Nevertheless, facts matter if we are to pay our respect to those who died rather than simply perpetuate politically convenient fiction. And to understand is not the same as to condone.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionThere are bullet marks on a wall in the garden
Apologies and centenaries, which are essentially about the present rather than the past, are rarely conducive to an honest and nuanced reckoning with history.
An apology from a British government in the throes of Brexit, at the moment, seems highly unlikely. It it indeed doubtful whether an official acknowledgement of the massacre would be construed as more than an act of political expediency.
The question thus remains whether an apology without a genuine understanding of the past can ever provide the “closure” that so many seek.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 