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.
Children from Hejiazhuang primary school paint in Hejiazhuang Village of Wangba Township in Kangxian County, northwest China’s Gansu Province, May 30, 2020. (Xinhua/Chen Bin)
BEIJING, May 31 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping has greeted children of all ethnic groups across the country on International Children’s Day, which falls on June 1.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, called on children to study hard, firm up their ideals and convictions and develop strong bodies and minds to prepare for realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.
Xi noted that children nationwide have experienced a special period during the country’s fight against COVID-19 as all Chinese people stand united.
Children paint elephants at the Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou, south China’s Guangdong Province, May 27, 2020. Two female Asian elephants gave birth to two babies respectively on April 30 and May 12 in the Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou, adding the total number of the Asian elephants here to 27. (Xinhua/Liu Dawei)
Witnessing the great feats of Chinese people working together and rising to challenges, the children have followed the call of the Party and the government to support the anti-epidemic battle with their concrete actions, demonstrating the fine spirit of the country’s children, Xi said.
He stressed that China’s children today are not only undergoing and witnessing the realization of the country’s first centenary goal, they are also a new force for achieving the second centenary goal and building China into a great modern socialist country.
Xi urged Party committees and governments at all levels as well as the society to care for children and create favorable conditions for their growth.
The richest man in China opened his own Twitter account last month, in the middle of the Covid-19 outbreak. So far, every one of his posts has been devoted to his unrivalled campaign to deliver medical supplies to almost every country around the world.
“One world, one fight!” Jack Ma enthused in one of his first messages. “Together, we can do this!” he cheered in another.
The billionaire entrepreneur is the driving force behind a widespread operation to ship medical supplies to more than 150 countries so far, sending face masks and ventilators to many places that have been elbowed out of the global brawl over life-saving equipment.
But Ma’s critics and even some of his supporters aren’t sure what he’s getting himself into. Has this bold venture into global philanthropy unveiled him as the friendly face of China’s Communist Party? Or is he an independent player who is being used by the Party for propaganda purposes? He appears to be following China’s diplomatic rules, particularly when choosing which countries should benefit from his donations, but his growing clout might put him in the crosshairs of the jealous leaders at the top of China’s political pyramid.
Other tech billionaires have pledged more money to fight the effects of the virus – Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is giving $1bn (£0.8bn) to the cause. Candid, a US-based philanthropy watchdog that tracks private charitable donations, puts Alibaba 12th on a list of private Covid-19 donors. But that list doesn’t include shipments of vital supplies, which some countries might consider to be more important than money at this stage in the global outbreak.
The world’s top coronavirus financial donors
How Alibaba compares to the top five. No one else other than the effervescent Ma is capable of dispatching supplies directly to those who need them. Starting in March, the Jack Ma foundation and the related Alibaba foundation began airlifting supplies to Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and even to politically sensitive areas including Iran, Israel, Russia and the US.
Ma has also donated millions to coronavirus vaccine research and a handbook of medical expertise from doctors in his native Zhejiang province has been translated from Chinese into 16 languages. But it’s the medical shipments that have been making headlines, setting Ma apart.
“He has the ability and the money and the lifting power to get a Chinese supply plane out of Hangzhou to land in Addis Ababa, or wherever it needs to go,” explains Ma’s biographer, Duncan Clark. “This is logistics; this is what his company, his people and his province are all about.”
A friendly face
Jack Ma is famous for being the charismatic English teacher who went on to create China’s biggest technology company. Alibaba is now known as the “Amazon of the East”. Ma started the company inside his tiny apartment in the Chinese coastal city of Hangzhou, in the centre of China’s factory belt, back in 1999. Alibaba has since grown to become one of the dominant players in the world’s second largest economy, with key stakes in China’s online, banking and entertainment worlds. Ma himself is worth more than $40bn.
Officially, he stepped down as Alibaba’s chairman in 2018. He said he was going to focus on philanthropy. But Ma retained a permanent seat on Alibaba’s board. Coupled with his wealth and fame, he remains one of the most powerful men in China.
Media caption The BBC’s Secunder Kermani and Anne Soy compare how prepared Asian and African countries are
It appears that Ma’s donations are following Party guidelines: there is no evidence that any of the Jack Ma and Alibaba Foundation donations have gone to countries that have formal ties with Taiwan, China’s neighbour and diplomatic rival. Ma announced on Twitter that he was donating to 22 countries in Latin America. States that side with Taiwan but who have also called for medical supplies – from Honduras to Haiti – are among the few dozen countries that do not appear to be on the list of 150 countries. The foundations repeatedly refused to provide a detailed list of countries that have received donations, explaining that “at this moment in time, we are not sharing this level of detail”.
However, the donations that have been delivered have certainly generated a lot of goodwill. With the exception of problematic deliveries to Cuba and Eritrea, all of the foundations’ shipments dispatched from China appear to have been gratefully received. That success is giving Ma even more positive attention than usual. China’s state media has been mentioning Ma almost as often as the country’s autocratic leader, Xi Jinping.
AFP
So far…
Over 150 countries have received donations from Jack Ma, including about:
120.4mface masks
4,105,000testing kits
3,704ventilators
Source: Alizila
It’s an uncomfortable comparison. As Ma soaks up praise, Xi faces persistent questions about how he handled the early stages of the virus and where, exactly, the outbreak began.
The Chinese government has dispatched medical teams and donations of supplies to a large number of hard-hit countries, particularly in Europe and South-East Asia.
However, those efforts have sometimes fallen flat. China’s been accused of sending faulty supplies to several countries. In some cases, the tests it sent were being misused but in others, low-quality supplies went unused and the donations backfired.
In contrast, Jack Ma’s shipments have only boosted his reputation.
“It’s fair to say that Ma’s donation was universally celebrated across Africa,” says Eric Olander, managing editor of the China Africa Project website and podcast. Ma pledged to visit all countries in Africa and has been a frequent visitor since his retirement.
“What happens to the materials once they land in a country is up to the host government, so any complaints about how Nigeria’s materials were distributed are indeed a domestic Nigerian issue,” Olander adds. “But with respect to the donation itself, the Rwandan leader, Paul Kagame, called it a “shot in the arm” and pretty much everyone saw it for what it was which was: delivering badly-needed materials to a region of the world that nobody else is either willing or capable of helping at that scale.”
Walking the tightrope
But is Ma risking a backlash from Beijing? Xi Jinping isn’t known as someone who likes to share the spotlight and his government has certainly targeted famous faces before. In recent years, the country’s top actress, a celebrated news anchor and several other billionaire entrepreneurs have all “disappeared” for long periods. Some, including the news anchor, end up serving prison sentences. Others re-emerge from detention, chastened and pledging their allegiance to the Party.
“There’s a rumour that [Jack Ma] stepped down in 2018 from being the chairman of the Alibaba Group because he was seen as a homegrown entrepreneur whose popularity would eclipse that of the Communist Party,” explains Ashley Feng, research associate at the Centre for New American Security in Washington DC. Indeed, Ma surprised many when he suddenly announced his retirement in 2018. He has denied persistent rumours that Beijing forced him out of his position.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Ma discussed trade with then-President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017
Duncan Clark, Ma’s biographer, is also aware of reports that Ma was nudged away from Alibaba following a key incident in January 2017. The Chinese billionaire met with then-President-elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower, ostensibly to discuss Sino-US trade. The Chinese president didn’t meet with Trump until months later.
“There was a lot of speculation of time that Jack Ma had moved too fast,” Clark says. “So, I think there’s lessons learned from both sides on the need to try to coordinate.”
“Jack Ma represents a sort of entrepreneurial soft power,” Clark adds. “That also creates challenges though, because the government is quite jealous or nervous of non-Party actors taking that kind of role.”
Technically, Ma isn’t a Communist outsider: China’s wealthiest capitalist has actually been a member of the Communist Party since the 1980s, when he was a university student.
But Ma’s always had a tricky relationship with the Party, famously saying that Alibaba’s attitude towards the Party was to “be in love with it but not to marry it”.
Even if Ma and the foundations connected to him are making decisions without Beijing’s advance blessing, the Chinese government has certainly done what it can to capitalise on Ma’s generosity. Chinese ambassadors are frequently on hand at airport ceremonies to receive the medical supplies shipped over by Ma, from Sierra Leone to Cambodia.
China has also used Ma’s largesse in its critiques of the United States. “The State Department said Taiwan is a true friend as it donated 2 million masks,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry tweeted in early April. “Wonder if @StateDept has any comment on Jack Ma’s donation of 1 million masks and 500k testing kits as well as Chinese companies’ and provinces’ assistance?”
Perhaps Ma can rise above what’s happened to so many others who ran afoul of the Party. China might just need a popular global Chinese figure so much that Ma has done what no one else can: make himself indispensable.
“Here’s the one key takeaway from all that happened with Jack Ma and Africa: he said he would do something and it got done,” explains Eric Olander. “That is an incredibly powerful optic in a place where foreigners often come, make big promises and often fail to deliver. So, the huge Covid-19 donation that he did fit within that pattern. He said he would do it and mere weeks later, those masks were in the hands of healthcare workers.”
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Ma at an Electronic World Trade Platform event with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed last year
Duncan Clark argues that Ma already had a seat at China’s high table because of Alibaba’s economic heft. However, his first-name familiarity with world leaders makes him even more valuable to Beijing as China tries to repair its battered image.
“He has demonstrated the ability, with multiple IPOs under his belt, and multiple friendships overseas, to win friends and influence people. He’s the Dale Carnegie of China and that certainly, we’ve seen that that’s irritated some in the Chinese government but now it’s almost an all hands on deck situation,” Clark says.
There’s no doubt that China’s wider reputation is benefiting from the charitable work of Ma and other wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs. Andrew Grabois from Candid, the philanthropic watchdog that’s been measuring global donations in relation to Covid-19, says that the private donations coming from China are impossible to ignore.
“They’re taking a leadership role, the kind of thing that used to be done by the United States,” he says. “The most obvious past example is the response to Ebola, the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The US sent in doctors and everything to West Africa to help contain that virus before it left West Africa.”
Chinese donors are taking on that role with this virus.
“They are projecting soft power beyond their borders, going into areas, providing aid, monetary aid and expertise,” Grabois adds.
So, it’s not the right time for Beijing to stand in Jack Ma’s way.
“You know, this is a major crisis for the world right now,” Duncan Clark concludes. “But obviously, it’s also a crisis for China’s relationship with the rest of the world. So they need anybody who can help dampen down some of these those pressures.”
Team from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics says its goal is to ‘develop an all-season battery that is low cost but high safety for consumer products’
Researchers make breakthrough by using hard carbon and lithium vanadium phosphate
Chinese researchers say they have made a breakthrough in the development of small lithium batteries that can withstand low temperatures. Photo: Xinhua
Chinese researchers say they have found a way to produce a tiny, lightweight lithium battery for use in mobile phones and electric cars that can hold up to 80 per cent of its charge in temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius.
The breakthrough came by using a combination of a new material called hard carbon along with lithium vanadium phosphate, the team from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics said in a paper published in this month’s edition of the scientific journal Nano Energy.
“Our goal is to develop an all-season battery that is low-cost but high-safety for consumer products,” said Song Zihan, its lead author.
It was an unprecedented approach, but “we proved it works”, he said.
The idea of a battery that can withstand extreme cold is not new. Photo: Shutterstock
The idea of a battery that can withstand extreme cold is not new, and they are already in use in space and in the Arctic and Antarctic.
But they tend to be very bulky because of the heating system and large amount of insulation they need to function properly at sub-zero temperatures.
Such measures are neither physically nor economically viable for applications like smartphones, cameras, laptops or electric cars. The trick, Song said, was replacing the soft graphite in normal lithium batteries with hard carbon.
Graphite is a good conductor and often used for the anode at the bottom of a battery, where electrons are generated. But the performance of graphite drops as the mercury slides.
How military tech sparked a robot revolution in firework factories
Song said that hard carbon was a new material that had attracted a lot of research interest in recent years, and compared with graphite, it had a much higher tolerance for the cold.
That was because of its highly irregular and “almost messy” structure, comprising layers of carbon atoms that are interconnected with each other, he said.
However, hard carbon also caused a rapid depletion of the lithium ions that served as an agent carrying the electric flow in battery, he said.
The researchers want to make battery suitable for use in consumer products. Photo: EPA-EFE
In the past, researchers have tried adding lithium powders or flakes to improve battery life, but the approach has proven costly and dangerous, mostly because pure lithium is highly reactive.
So Song and his colleagues used a composite material called lithium vanadium phosphate as the positive cathode on top of the battery.
The composite was capable of providing enough extra lithium ions for the hard carbon’s need without increasing the risk of fire or explosion, and it was cheap, he said.
“The pairing of hard carbon and lithium vanadium phosphate worked a charm,” Song said.
But the technology is still a long way from being commercially viable.
The battery Song’s team made is far too small for any real-life applications, and enlarging it would require some “innovative engineering solutions”, he said.
Another scientist involved in the project said the team was working with battery manufacturers to see if the technology could be commercialised.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Economists and investors are increasingly showing that they have little or no confidence in India’s official economic data – presenting whoever is elected as the next prime minister with an immediate problem.
There have been questions for many years about whether Indian government statistics were telling the full story but two recent controversies over revisions and delays of crucial numbers have taken those concerns to new heights.
The government itself has admitted there are deficiencies in its data collection.
A study conducted by a division of the statistics ministry in the 12 months ending June 2017 found that as much as 36 percent of the companies in the database used in India’s GDP calculations could not be traced or were wrongly classified.
But the ministry said there was no impact on GDP estimates as due care was taken to adjust corporate filings at the aggregate level.
Last December, the government held back the release of jobs data but an official report leaked to an Indian newspaper showed the unemployment rate had touched its highest level in 45 years.
Economists and investors are now voting with their feet – by using alternative sources of data and in some cases creating their own benchmarks to measure the Indian economy.
Ten economists and analysts at banks, think-tanks and foreign funds interviewed by Reuters said they were moving to use alternative data sources, or at least official data of a different kind.
Among the numbers they prefer are fast-moving indicators like car sales, air and rail cargo levels, purchasing managers’ index data, and proprietary indices created by the institutions themselves to track the economy.
Many economists said they were stunned when the government upwardly revised GDP growth for 2016/17 to 8.2 percent from 6.7 percent, although the demonetization of high value notes hit businesses and jobs in that financial year.
“Our response has been to spend time developing an Indian Activity Index, which takes a range of time series data that in the past were strongly correlated with real GDP growth and extract the common signal from them,” said Jeremy Lawson, chief economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments, which manages more than $700 billion in assets.
The preliminary evidence from the index, which includes components like car sales, air cargo and purchasing managers’ index data suggests the government has over-estimated GDP growth, he said.
Our index would suggest that there was stable growth, rather than the rapid acceleration suggested by the GDP figures,” he said, referring to three years of data from 2014.
Even those close to the government have said the lack of accuracy in the official data makes it much more likely that authorities will miss major swings in activity and be unable to react quickly to head off a crisis. It is also a problem for investors who may be misled into thinking the economy is more robust than it really is.
The economic wing of the Rashtriya Swayemsewak Sangh, the fountainhead of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, said the government and the Indian central bank missed anticipating a farm crisis that has now gripped the countryside, with low crop prices driving down farmers’ incomes.
“The fact is the government advisers and the monetary policy committee of the central bank could not diagnose the farm crisis, deflationary conditions in rural economy, and ignored the need to boost growth,” said Ashwani Mahajan, the co-convenor of the group, Swadeshi Jagran Manch, adding the government was now taking steps to address the problem.
The delayed response has cost Prime Minister Narendra Modi at least some support in the countryside in the current general election – although most political strategists still think he can probably hang onto power.
The opposition and other critics have said Modi suppressed jobs data and “massaged” economic growth numbers in an attempt to show that his government has done better than the previous administration.
A spokesman at Modi’s office said no official was available for comment as they were busy with the election while a finance ministry spokesman referred to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s previous comments.
In a blog in March, Jaitley criticized economists for doubting the credibility of data and accused them of running a fake campaign against the government.
IDLE CAPACITY
Some investors have been burned by believing in India’s high growth story.
Private power producers invested billions of dollars based on expectations of electricity demand that didn’t pan out in the rural economy. With economic growth pegged at over 8 percent a year, they had expected a pick up in demand by small businesses and household.
Many of the power producers are now facing bankruptcy and legal disputes as many of the new plants they built are working at about 60 percent of capacity.
In the real estate sector, developers said, it could take 3-4 years to clear about 500,000 unsold flats in and around New Delhi that were built on the assumption of higher income jobs in urban areas.
To be sure, the proportion of the Indian economy that is based on the unofficial sector, such as household enterprises, makes it a nightmare to assess economic activity.
P. C. Mohanan, former acting chairman of the national oversight body for statistics, who resigned to protest government interference over the release of the jobs figures and back series data on GDP, said the government hasn’t allocated the resources it needs to measure activity given the growth in the economy.
Gita Gopinath, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, told an Indian TV channel last month the IMF had raised the issue of “transparency” with Indian officials in data collection and, in particular, measurement of the GDP deflator – the adjusted inflation rate used to estimate real GDP.
In a statement, the statistics ministry said it was working to address the issue.
A senior official earlier said they were open to suggestions for improvement, just not “politically motivated” criticism.
There are already plans to revamp data compilation and capture the nuanced relationship between prices and real GDP, he said.
BEIJING, March 6 (Xinhua) — Chinese companies operating in Africa have created huge opportunities for the continent’s development, a senior political advisor said Wednesday at a press conference on the sidelines of the annual sessions of the top legislative and political advisory bodies.
There are more than 10,000 Chinese companies in Africa and over 90 percent of them are private businesses, said Nan Cunhui, a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee, citing a recent survey.
These companies have built roads, railways, airports, ports and other infrastructure projects in Africa, addressing the bottleneck in development, said Nan, also a vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. They have also invested in green energy development, including photovoltaic power stations, to boost local power supply.
The Chinese companies have also brought advanced technologies, development concepts and management to the continent, Nan said.
Citing the operation of an industrial park in Egypt as an example, Nan said over 95 percent of the employees are locals who develop professional skills and gain managerial know-how through their work.
“Chinese companies in Africa have contributed a lot to the local economic development through infrastructure construction, job creation and tax payment,” Nan said. “I believe China-Africa cooperation will go from strength to strength.”
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 