Must be brave of the police to make such a claim! Safety in numbers!!
02/08/2013
China’s Coal Thirst Strains Its Water Supplies
BusinessWeek: “The Wulanmulun River once ran through Daliuta, a town in China’s northern Shaanxi province. All that remains of the waterway today is a pond, which locals say is contaminated by waste from the world’s biggest underground coal mine. Environmentalists also contend that mining is sapping the area’s groundwater supplies. “I worry about the water,” says Zhe Mancang, the 58-year-old owner of a liquor store in town. “But my family’s here, and my customers are from the mines.”
Daliuta is the epicenter of a looming collision between China’s scarce supplies of water and heavy reliance on coal, which diverts millions of liters a day for its extraction and cleaning. “You can’t reconcile targets for coal production in, say, Shaanxi province and Inner Mongolia with their water targets,” says Charles Yonts, head of sustainable research at brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets in Hong Kong.
About 28,000 rivers have dried up across China since 1990, according to the country’s Ministry of Water Resources and National Bureau of Statistics of China, and those that remain are mostly polluted. China’s per-person share of fresh water is 1,730 cubic meters, close to the 1,700 cubic meter level the United Nations deems “stressed.”
The situation is worse in the north, where half of China’s population, most of its coal, and only 20 percent of its water are located. A government plan to boost coal production and build more power plants near mines will lift industrial demand for water in Inner Mongolia 141 percent by 2015 from 2010 levels, causing aquifers to dry up and deserts to expand, according to a report Greenpeace commissioned from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “After five years there won’t be enough water in Ordos in Inner Mongolia,” says Sun Qingwei, director of the climate and energy campaign at Greenpeace in Beijing. “The mines are stealing groundwater from agriculture. Local governments want their economies to boom.”
China’s central government is responding with tighter limits on water usage, a new approach to rates that allows for steep price increases, and plans to spend 4 trillion yuan ($652 billion) by 2020 to boost water infrastructure. Rules enacted this year require the manufacturing hubs of Jiangsu and Guangdong provinces and Shanghai to reduce water use every year even as their economies expand. In May 2012 authorities in the city of Guangzhou hiked prices 50 percent for residents and 89 percent for industrial users to help pay for improvements in the water supply, according to an April report by Goldman Sachs Group (GS).
To alleviate shortages in the north, the central government in 2002 approved the 500 billion yuan South-to-North water diversion project. The plan is to move 44.8 billion cubic meters of water from the Yangtze River annually along three routes. The first leg, slated for completion this year, will measure 1,467 kilometers, roughly double the length of the Erie Canal.
Even this massive undertaking may not be enough: A 2009 report by a group that includes Coca-Cola (KO) and SABMiller (SBMRY) noted that China’s annual demand may exceed supply by as much as 200 billion cubic meters by 2030, unless “major capital investments to strengthen water supplies are made beyond those presently planned.”
Chinese industry uses 4 to 10 times more water per unit of production than the average in developed countries, according to research firm China Water Risk in Hong Kong. Only 40 percent of industrial water is recycled, compared with 75 percent to 85 percent in developed countries, the World Bank says.
If the situation becomes dire enough, companies might consider transferring production elsewhere. “In an absolute worst case you’d see a large-scale shift in economic activity and population further south for lack of water, and manufacturing increasingly moving abroad,” says Scott Moore, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Sustainability Science Program.
Farmers in some parts of China are already paying the price, as they have to dig deeper and deeper wells to find clean water or are being forced out by local governments who see bigger economic gains from mining. In Zhanggaijie village, in Shaanxi province, Li Qiaoling says she is one of 200 people awaiting compensation after a coal mine polluted the local water supply. Officials have also promised to relocate the villagers. “We’re angry because we have to leave,” says Li, who still grows corn on her small plot, despite the contamination. “We’re worried about moving to a strange place.”
via China’s Coal Thirst Strains Its Water Supplies – Businessweek.
Related articles
- Does China Have Enough Water to Burn Coal? (scientificamerican.com)
- Greenpeace Accuses Chinese Coal Company of Draining Water Resources (voatibetanenglish.com)
- China’s Shenhua drains groundwater for coal project-Greenpeace (reuters.com)
01/08/2013
China’s first lady Peng Liyuan makes Vanity Fair’s best dressed list
SCMP: “Seventy years after China’s Madame Chiang Kai-shek made it to the “best dressed women in wartime” list in 1943, it is now first lady Peng Liyuan‘s turn.
The wife of President Xi Jinping has earned a coveted spot on the fashion magazine’s International Best Dressed list, cementing her status as the stylish first lady of China.
She ranks with fashion icons Justin Timberlake, the Duchess of Cambridge, Victoria Beckham and American burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese. Peng is the only Chinese person to have made the list this year.”
via China’s first lady Peng Liyuan makes Vanity Fair’s best dressed list | South China Morning Post.
01/08/2013
Telangana Effect: Protests Brewing for Gorkhaland
As we thought (see – https://chindia-alert.org/2013/07/31/divide-uttar-pradesh-into-four-states-mayawati-says/ ), one permissible split leads to others’ great expectations.
WSJ: “Protesters in Darjeeling, a tea-producing mountainous town in West Bengal in northern India, have stepped up calls for their own separate state of Gorkhaland, promising strikes and protests until their demands are met, after New Delhi gave the green-light to create Telangana state out of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, in the south of the country.
The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha [Gorkha People’s Liberation Campaign], a political party spearheading a movement for the creation of Gorkhaland state, has called for a complete shutdown in the popular Himalayan town starting Saturday after protests brought life there to a standstill earlier this week.
“Now that Delhi is creating Telangana, Gorkhaland should be considered too. We have no option but to intensify our movement,” Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s general secretary, Rooshan Giri, told India Real Time Thursday.
Mr. Giri said his party had advised tourists and students of boarding schools to leave the town as protests were planned over the next few days that will restrict movement of public transport and trucks carrying food grains to Darjeeling from Siliguri, a commercial center in the northern part of West Bengal, about 40 miles south of Darjeeling.
“There’s no way out. We will not stop until our demand is met,” Mr. Giri said.”
via Telangana Effect: Protests Brewing for Gorkhaland – India Real Time – WSJ.
01/08/2013
Analysis: China risks following Japan into economic coma
Let us hope that this analysis is incorrect. Because if it is then the world economy will experience a tailspin that will make the 2008 recession seem like a picnic! Any of you, my readers, have a strong view one way or the other?
Reuters: “After decades of emulating Japan‘s export-driven economic miracle, China appears in danger of following it into the same kind of economic coma that Japan is trying to wake up from 20 years later.
China is struggling to wean itself off a habit picked up from its more advanced neighbor: relying for growth on exports and credit-fuelled investment. That has left its economy lopsided, economists say, with massive over investment in property and industries rapidly losing their cost advantage, from mining and electronics to cars and textiles. Wages are rising, the return on investments falling.
With growth slipping, China’s President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang seem determined to avoid a U.S.-style financial crisis, complete with widespread bankruptcies and job losses.
Preventing such a crisis though could embalm diseased sectors, stifling efforts to make growth more sustainable and instead create the kind of “zombie” banks and companies that sucked the life out of Japan’s economy, economists say.
Add a population graying faster than Japan’s did, and economists worry China may be attempting the impossible.
“There is a huge amount of denial. People think that demographics don’t matter,” said Chetan Ahya, chief Asia economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. “I’m worried about the deflationary risk.”
Deflation may seem unlikely in an economy still growing at a 7.5 percent clip and where consumer prices are rising 2.7 percent a year. But economists warn that China in many ways resembles Japan in 1989, two years before its crash.
Like Japan, China relied on banks to funnel investment into export industries to create jobs and finance development. In return, interest rates were regulated to ensure banks a healthy profit. Because the most profitable loans were those to the least-risky borrowers, banks concentrated their lending on big state-owned companies.
As Japan did in the 1980s, China tried to remedy this by partially liberalizing the financial sector, creating new avenues of finance, a bond market and other non-bank lending. But as in Japan, this encouraged banks to lend more, not more wisely, helping fuel a property bubble. Things got worse in 2009, when China launched a 4 trillion yuan, credit-powered stimulus to ward off the global crisis.
While Japan saw credit expand from 127 percent of GDP to 176 percent between 1980 and 1990, China’s credit rose from 105 percent in 2000 to 187 percent of GDP last year, JPMorgan Chase in Hong Kong says.”
via Analysis: China risks following Japan into economic coma | Reuters.
31/07/2013
Divide Uttar Pradesh into four states, Mayawati says
As we said in our post yesterday – https://chindia-alert.org/2013/07/30/bbc-news-india-coalition-approves-new-state-of-telangana/, India now has double the states it started with after independence. And the more sub-divisions are approved, it seems that more ethnic/language groups want their own state. Where will it all end?
Times of India: “The Bahujan Samaj Party demanded splitting of Uttar Pradesh into four smaller states on Wednesday, a day after the Congress Working Committee (CWC) urged the government to form a separate state of Telangana.
“We have always supported smaller states,” BSP chief Mayawati said here at a press conference.
She said Uttar Pradesh should be divided into four smaller states — Purvanchal, Bundelkhand, Awadh Pradesh and Pashchim Pradesh.
English: Map of UP subregions. It has been built on the public domain work “Uttar Pradesh locator map.svg” in Wikipedia. This work is also public domain. Free for any and all use without any restrictions whatsoever. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“When this population is divided between four states, development will increase,” she said.
“Ministers in central government who hail from Uttar Pradesh should build pressure on the central government for formation of these states,” she added.”
via Divide Uttar Pradesh into four states, Mayawati says – The Times of India.
31/07/2013
China’s New Migrant Workers Want More
BusinessWeek: “The red neon sign over the front door of a new entertainment complex in Beijing’s suburban Daxing district—a local garment manufacturing hub—reads simply “The Skating Rink.” Inside, Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” crackles over loudspeakers, and a strobe light casts red and green pixels of light across a hardwood floor. The young migrant workers who toil in the garment factories nearby typically work on weekends, and have only two or three days off a month. So a crowd begins to form only in the evenings, after overtime shifts end around 9 or 10 p.m.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, the rink has just a handful of early skaters. Among them is a family of five. (Many migrant families manage to disregard China’s one-child policy.) Pudgy 3-year-old Zhefang, wearing a yellow sundress and short pigtails, tugs playfully on the laces of her 5-year-old brother’s skates. Her other brother, who is 9, races full speed around the rink. Juping and Xinfing, the parents, are both 29 and moved here from Jiangxi province seven years ago. Today is one of the precious few days all year that they are together as a family. Because the parents lack a Beijing hukou—or residence permit—they cannot enroll their children in local schools. The two boys now live with their grandparents back in Jiangxi. Xinfing says she “really wants our girl to stay with us” once Zhefang reaches school age, but knows it’s not likely. She scoops up the little girl in her arms and lovingly pats down stray hairs that have shaken loose of her pigtails.
China’s great modern migration from countryside to city began roughly 30 years ago. Starting in the 1980s, new factories in southeastern China began to churn out goods for export and lured workers who could make more on the assembly line than on the farm. In the 1980s and ’90s, most of those who left home were young single people, like the women described in Leslie Chang’s book, Factory Girls. A majority of migrants expected to work for a few years, save money, and eventually return to their hometowns. However, in recent years this pattern has notably shifted. Government planning documents refer to migrants born after 1980 as “new generation migrant workers,” and recent reports from China’s National Bureau of Statistics show how they differ from their predecessors. Just as Juping and Xinfing moved to Beijing as a married couple with a young child in tow, several studies show that a majority of migrant workers now move with at least one other family member.
Beijing’s Daxing district lies outside the Sixth Ring Road, a 90-minute drive from the city center. The local government has made a push to attract garment factories ranging in size from those with a few hundred employees to those with less than a dozen. The workers who come here are mostly in their late teens and twenties. Like previous generations, they have come to start a new life with little savings and a lot of gumption. But they are more tech-savvy, fashion-conscious, and educated than their parents. Most significant, they expect to integrate permanently into city life—putting more urgent pressure on the government to change China’s current system of allocating social services (including schooling and health care) only to those with difficult-to-obtain city residence permits.
In his recent book, China’s Urban Billion, analyst Tom Miller of GK Dragonomics writes, “Surveys show that the majority of the new generation of migrant workers [have] no intention of returning to the penury of rural life.” In explaining the attitudinal shift, he notes: “They are significantly better educated than their parents, and usually adapt far more quickly to urban ways. They hope to become fully fledged urban citizens and enjoy a modern consumer lifestyle.””
via China’s New Migrant Workers Want More – Businessweek.
Related articles
- https://chindia-alert.org/2012/02/23/china-finally-realises-that-migrant-workers-are-not-a-transient-issue/
- https://chindia-alert.org/2013/03/03/migrant-workers-feel-like-outsiders-in-mainland-cities-says-survey/
- https://chindia-alert.org/2012/12/31/reform-plans-published-for-migrants-education/
- China’s Smartphone Generation – Businessweek (chindia-alert.org)
- The Difficulty Divining China’s Unemployment (businessweek.com)
- Revisiting Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls”: Chinese Translation Brings Exported Story Back to China (tealeafnation.com)
30/07/2013
China urbanization cost could top $106 billion a year: think-tank
Reuters: “The cost of settling China’s rural workers into city life in the government’s urbanization drive could be about 650 billion yuan ($106 billion) a year, the equivalent of 5.5 percent of fiscal revenue last year, a government think-tank said on Tuesday.
The figure is based on the assumption that 25 million people a year settle in cities, with the government spending the money on making sure they enjoy the same benefits in healthcare, housing and schools that city residents have, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences(CASS) said.
“I think the biggest obstacle for turning rural migrant workers into urban citizens is the cost issue,” Wei Houkai, a researcher at CASS, told a news conference, adding that to achieve equality of treatment could take until 2025.
Millions of migrant workers from the countryside and smaller towns work in China’s big cities, often in low-paid manual work, but lack access to education, health and other services tied to the country’s strict household registration – or hukou – system.
China sees the urbanization drive as pushing domestic consumption, which it wants to make the main engine of growth for the economy, replacing exports and manufacturing and investment.
Rural migrant laborers only earned an average 2,049 yuan a month in 2011, or 59 percent of average urban workers’ salary, CASS added.
But they need to pay about 18,000 yuan annually per capita to be able to live in cities and another 100,000 yuan on average for housing, it said.”
via China urbanization cost could top $106 billion a year: think-tank | Reuters.
Related articles
- China Moves on Reforming Hukou? (chindia-alert.org)
- The big roadblock to China’s ‘reset’ (blogs.seattletimes.com)
- Li Keqiang makes urbanization his watchword for growth (wantchinatimes.com)
- https://chindia-alert.org/2013/06/19/7205/
- https://chindia-alert.org/2013/05/31/urbanisation-some-are-more-equal-than-others/
- https://chindia-alert.org/2013/05/23/china-urbanization-plan-hits-roadblock-over-spending-fears-sources/
- https://chindia-alert.org/2013/05/09/chinas-vision-for-a-new-urbanization/
- https://chindia-alert.org/2013/03/07/china-faces-social-financial-risks-in-urbanization-push/
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 