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.
MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines on Tuesday allowed Filipino workers to travel to Hong Kong and Macau, relaxing the travel ban it imposed on China and its special administrative regions to control the spread of the coronavirus.
The Philippines announced its decision before Hong Kong reported that a Filipina domestic helper became its 61st case of coronavirus in the country.
There are more than 180,000 Filipinos in Hong Kong, many working as helpers, according to the Philippines Labour Ministry.
The Philippines had imposed a travel ban on China and its special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau. It later included Taiwan in the ban, but lifted it a few days after.
There was no immediate comment from Philippine officials on how the latest development in Hong Kong will affect its decision to relax its travel restriction.
The Philippines also said it would allow foreign spouses or children of Filipinos and holders of diplomatic visas travelling from China, Macau and Hong Kong to enter the country but they will be subjected to a 14-day quarantine.
Initially, only Filipinos and holders of permanent resident visas travelling from these areas were allowed entry.
Recruiters have appealed to the government to exempt Filipino workers from the travel ban because many of them are breadwinners. They could also lose their visas if they failed to report for work on time, the Society of Hong Kong Accredited Recruiters of the Philippines has said.
In 2019, Filipino workers in Hong Kong sent home $801 million in foreign exchange remittances, central bank data showed.
Filipinos leaving for Hong Kong and Macau for study and employment will be required to sign a declaration that they know the risks of going there, health officials said.
The Philippine government also said it will repatriate Filipino crew and passengers from the quarantined cruise ship Diamond Princess who wish to come home.
The cruise ship, owned by Carnival Corp and carrying some 3,700 passengers and crew, has been quarantined in Yokohama since Feb. 3, after a man who disembarked in Hong Kong before it travelled to Japan was diagnosed with the virus.
The Philippine Foreign Ministry said 35 of the 538 Filipinos onboard had tested positive for the coronavirus, including the eight new cases, who are all crew members.
In the Philippines, there have been three confirmed cases of coronavirus, including one death.
Media caption Americans are taken from the docked ship to Haneda airport in Tokyo
Two planes carrying hundreds of US citizens from a coronavirus-hit cruise ship have left Japan, officials say.
One plane has landed at a US Air Force air base in California, and its passengers will be isolated at military facilities for 14 days.
There were some 400 Americans on board the Diamond Princess. The ship with some 3,700 passengers and crew has been in quarantine since 3 February.
Meanwhile, China reported a total of 2,048 new cases on Monday.
Of those new cases, 1,933 were from Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak.
More than 70,500 people across China have been infected by the virus. In Hubei alone, the official number of cases stands at 58,182, with 1,692 deaths. Most new cases and deaths have been reported in Wuhan, Hubei’s largest city.
In other developments:
In Japan, a public gathering to celebrate the birthday of new Emperor Naruhito later this week has been cancelled, due to concerns over the spread of the virus while organisers of the Tokyo marathon due to take place on 1 March are considering whether to cancel the amateur part of the race, reports say
In China, the National People’s Congress standing committee said it would meet next week to discuss a delay of this year’s Congress – the Communist Party’s most important annual gathering – because of the outbreak
At the weekend, an American woman tested positive for the virus in Malaysia after leaving a cruise liner docked off the coast of Cambodia
A Russian court has ordered a woman who escaped from a quarantine facility to go back and stay there until she is confirmed to be disease-free, Fontanka news agency reports. Alla Ilyina has until Wednesday to return
What’s happening on the Diamond Princess?
The cruise ship was put in quarantine in Japan’s port of Yokohama after a man who disembarked in Hong Kong was found to have the virus.
On Monday, Japanese officials said there were 99 new cases of infections on board the ship, bringing the total to 454 confirmed cases. It is the largest cluster of cases outside China.
A Russian woman who was on board and tested positive is thought to be the first Russian national to contract the virus after the two previous cases found in Russia were Chinese nationals, Reuters news agency reports.
She will be taken to a hospital for treatment, the Russian embassy in Japan said.
At least 40 US citizens who were on board are infected and will be treated in Japan, Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told US broadcaster CBS.
Image copyright AFPImage caption Those bound for the US left from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport
The two aircraft chartered by the US government left Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the early hours of Monday. The second flight was due to land at another base in Texas.
More than 300 passengers are being repatriated voluntarily, the US state department said. Fourteen of them were reported during transit to have tested positive for the virus and were being kept separate from the other passengers, it said.
we would like to just finish the quarantine on the ship as planned, decompress in a non-quarantine environment in Japan for a few days, then fly back to the U.S. pursuant to our own arrangements. What’s wrong with that?
The smartphones were distributed so people could use an app, created by Japan’s health ministry, which links users with doctors, pharmacists and mental health counsellors. Phones registered outside of Japan are unable to access the app.
Other evacuation flights have been arranged to repatriate residents of Israel, Hong Kong and Canada. On Monday, Australia announced that it would evacuate 200 of its citizens too.
What is happening in China?
According to official figures for 16 February, 100 people died from the virus in Hubei, down from 139 on Saturday.
The Chinese authorities are tightening curbs on movement to combat the outbreak. People in Hubei province, which has 60 million people, have been ordered to stay at home, though they will be allowed to leave in an emergency.
In addition, a single person from each household will be allowed to leave the building or compound they live in every three days to buy food and essential items.
On housing estates, one entrance will be kept open. It will be guarded to ensure that only residents can enter or leave.
All businesses will stay closed, except chemists, hotels, food shops and medical services.
“The effects of epidemic prevention and control in various parts of the country can already be seen.”
The proportion of infected patients considered to be in a “serious condition” has dropped nationwide from more than 15% to just over 7%, according to China’s State Council.
Taiwan has reported a death from the illness – a taxi driver, 61, who had not travelled abroad recently but had diabetes and hepatitis B, Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said.
The minister said many of his passengers had come from China.
Outside China, there have been more than 500 cases in nearly 30 countries. Four others have died outside mainland China – in France, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Japan.
Meanwhile, a plane carrying 175 evacuated Nepalis, mostly students, has arrived in Kathmandu from Wuhan.
Freda Bedi lived an unusual life. Born in a small town in England, she moved to India for love and ended up joining the independence movement. Her biographer, Andrew Whitehead, writes about her remarkable story.
“There are things deeper than labels and colour and prejudice, and love is one of them.”
These were the words of Freda Bedi, an English woman who overcame prejudice to marry an Indian Sikh and went on to challenge Indian notions about the role of a woman and a wife.
Freda and her boyfriend, Baba Pyare Lal Bedi (his friends called him BPL), met at Oxford where both were students.
This was the early 1930s and romances across the racial divide were rare – almost as rare as a girl from Freda’s background securing a spot at a top university. She was born, quite literally, above the shop in the city of Derby in England’s East Midlands, where her father ran a jewellery and watch repair business.
Freda could barely remember her father. He enlisted during the First World War and served in the Machine Gun Corps, where casualties were so high it was known as the “suicide club”. He died in northern France when his daughter was just seven years old. “This death shadowed my whole childhood,” she recalled – it shaped her political loyalties and prompted her lifelong spiritual quest.
Her years at Oxford were “the opening of the gates of the world”, as Freda once put it. She was part of “the Depression generation” – those who were students at a time of global crisis, mass unemployment and the rise of fascism.
She made firm friends at her college with young women who were rebellious by nature, and went with them to meetings of the Labour Club and the communist October Club.
Image captionFreda and BPL met as students at Oxford University
Driven by curiosity and by sympathy with those struggling against the Empire, she also went along to the weekly meetings of the Oxford Majlis, where radicals among the university’s small number of Indian students asserted their country’s case for nationhood. BPL Bedi, a handsome and cheerful Punjabi, was a regular there. A friendship developed into intellectual collaboration and, within months, Freda and BPL were a couple.
In the early 1930s, women’s colleges at Oxford were obsessed with sex or rather with preventing it. If a male student came to have tea in a female student’s room, a chaperone had to be present, the door left wide open and the bed had to be taken into the corridor. Freda’s college did its best to derail her relationship – she was disciplined for visiting BPL without a chaperone in what she was convinced was a case of racial discrimination.
But she was fortunate in her student friends. Barbara Castle, who later became a commanding British woman politician of her era, was thrilled when Freda confided that she intended to marry her boyfriend. “Well, thank goodness”, Barbara exclaimed. “Now at least you won’t become a suburban housewife!” Freda’s mother didn’t see things that way though. Her family were sternly disapproving, until BPL made a visit to Derby and managed to charm them.
Freda commented that the engagement caused “a minor sensation” in Oxford. That was an understatement. She believed she was the first Oxford woman undergraduate to marry an Indian fellow student. Some didn’t hide their disapproval. The registrar who conducted the marriage ceremony pointedly refused to shake hands with the couple.
From the moment she married, Freda regarded herself as Indian and often wore Indian-style clothes. A year later, husband and wife and their four-month old baby, Ranga, set off by boat from Trieste, Italy, on the two-week journey to the western Indian city of Bombay (now Mumbai). “The nightmare was to get milk for myself to drink because I was feeding the baby”, Freda recalled. “And I remember the millions of cockroaches that used to come out at night in the ship’s kitchens – I used to go in and attempt to get milk.”
The couple had already been marked out by the British authorities as revolutionaries and potential trouble makers because of their student activism. When they disembarked in Bombay, their bags and cases were inspected for seven hours to check for left-wing propaganda. “Even Ranga’s little napkin was taken off and searched,” recalled Freda, “because they thought I might be carrying messages in it”.
The key test of Freda’s marriage was still to come – the first meeting with her Indian mother-in-law, a widow and matriarch known in the family as Bhabooji. From Bombay, the Bedis travelled non-stop for a couple of days to reach the small Punjabi city of Kapurthala, arriving at the family home close to midnight. Freda was wearing a white cotton sari – “not the ideal travelling dress, and nursing Ranga had not improved it”.
BPL bowed to touch his mother’s feet in the traditional expression of respect. “I copied him, feeling a little awkward,” Freda said, “but all my shyness disappeared when she smiled at us both with tears in her eyes, and embraced us and the child as if she could not hold us close enough.”
Although Freda was determined to fit in with her Indian extended family, her lifestyle was anything but conventional. BPL’s political stand extended to rejecting any share in his family’s wealth. They made their home in Lahore, one of the largest cities in Punjab, in a cluster of thatched huts without power or running water, keeping hens and a buffalo. It can’t have been the sort of life Freda had expected – nor would she have been used to the idea of sharing the household with her mother-in-law.
“Nowhere had I seen a white woman trying to be a typical Indian daughter-in-law”, commented Som Anand, a frequent visitor to the Bedis’ huts. “It surprised me to see Mrs Bedi coming to Bhabooji’s hut in the morning to touch her feet. In household matters she respected the old mother’s inhibitions. Her mother-in-law was an equally large hearted person; despite all her conservatism she had accepted a Christian into the family without a murmur.”
Image captionFreda and BPL moved to Kashmir after 1947 and remained politically active
When World War Two broke out, both BPL and Freda were outraged that India was being dragged into supporting the British war effort. BPL was detained in a desert prison camp to stop him sabotaging military recruitment in Punjab. Freda decided to make her own stand against her motherland.
She volunteered as a satyagrahi, a seeker of truth, and was among those chosen by Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi to defy emergency wartime powers. She travelled to her husband’s home village of Dera Baba Nanak and announced that she would “break the law by asking the people not to support the military effort until India became democratic”. The authorities didn’t know how to respond to a white woman staging such a protest – they hurriedly sent an English police inspector to the village, deeming it inappropriate for an Indian policeman to arrest an Englishwoman.
Freda was brought before a visiting magistrate that same morning – she has left her own account of the trial:
It was finished in 15 minutes. The man on the other side of the table was quite young still, and looked as though he had been to Oxford. His face was red.
“I find this as unpleasant as you do,” he murmured.
“Don’t worry. I don’t find it unpleasant at all.”
“Do you want the privileges granted to an Englishwoman?”
“Treat me as an Indian woman and I shall be quite content.”
She was sentenced to six months in jail, which was fairly standard, and also to hard labour, which she regarded as vindictive.
That turned out to be no more onerous than supervising the prison gardens, where women imprisoned for criminal rather than political offences – many were locked up for killing their abusive husbands – did most of the work.
“It was my destiny to go to India,” Freda asserted. It was her destiny too to make history as an English woman who went willingly to jail in support of India’s demand for freedom.
The Bedis’ political prominence persisted after independence, when they moved to Kashmir – Freda joined a left-wing women’s militia and worked with the radical nationalists who gained power there. In the 1950s, her life changed utterly when, during a UN assignment in Burma, she encountered Buddhism for the first time and became an enthusiastic convert.
Image captionFreda became a Buddhist nun in the 1950s
When thousands of Tibetans fled across the Himalayas in 1959 to escape Chinese oppression, Freda devoted herself to helping these “brave and wonderful” refugees. She became steeped in Tibetan spirituality. And once she felt that she had fulfilled her role as a mother (the film star Kabir Bedi is one of her three surviving children), she broke convention again by taking vows as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. In her sixties, she travelled relentlessly to spread the word about Buddhist teachings but never returned to live in the West.
“India is my womanhood and my wife-hood,” she once declared. “I too am ‘dust that England bore, shaped and made aware’. Yet I am living in an Indian way, with Indian clothes, with an Indian husband and child on Indian soil, and I cannot feel even the least barrier or difference in essentials between myself and the new country I have adopted.”
Throughout her life, Freda was determined not to be constrained by barriers of race, religion, nation or gender. She delighted in challenging convention and confounding expectations – that is what makes her story so beguiling.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 