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06/11/2013

Interview – Jairam Ramesh: Narendra Modi has marginalized his own party – India Insight – Reuters

Jairam Ramesh, the rural development minister in the Congress-led government, told Reuters on Tuesday that Narendra Modi’s career reminded him of the rise of the Third Reich, the strongest comments yet by a minister of his rank on the Bharatiya Janata Party leader.

(Click here for main story)

Here are the edited excerpts from the interview:

Where do you feel public sentiment is at the moment?

If you look at the social media, the sentiment is in one way. If you travel like the way I do to remote parts of the country where social media footprint is very very inconspicuous, the sentiment is some other way. We are going through the noise phase of the election campaign … Sentiments change, by the way; there is no such thing like a permanent sentiment.

The Modi campaign has got a lot of momentum and the perception is that the Congress campaign lacks that momentum.

Modi-entum, not momentum. The BJP is a master of hype. I have seen them now for 20 years closely and they are the world’s greatest experts at hype. And very soon they come down to earth because they begin to take their hype very seriously. When you start believing that hype, then you run into serious trouble. This is what happened to the BJP in the past. India Shining was a good example of that hype.

I think a time will come when Mr Modi will begin to get judged differently. But India right now in 2013, I would say, we are going through what Germany went through in 1932. The classic symptoms, I am beginning to read all my old books about how the Third Reich came into being, how fascism overtook parts of Europe. Because, look at Mr Modi’s — what are the three principles of his ideology? Political autocracy, social divisiveness and economic liberalism. This is sort of Mr Modi reduced to three dimensions, the 3D Mr Modi. This is exactly what created the autobahns and Volkswagens in the 30s but also created the disaster of Germany.

Don’t you think it’s a bit over-the-top to compare Modi to Hitler?

It’s not. It’s certainly not. I didn’t compare him to Hitler, by the way. I never took the word Hitler anywhere. Mr Modi has demonstrated in 12 years that he’s been in power. He runs a one-man show in Gujarat. It’s a one-man political party. He has marginalized not only us, he’s also marginalized his own party. Yes, he is industry friendly. But whether he is crony-friendly or market-friendly, I don’t know. Mr Modi has demonstrated a singular incapacity to abide by rules.

via India Insight.

Posted in Economics, India alert, Internal politics, Politics | 1 Comment »

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05/11/2013

Beijing slashes car sales quota in anti-pollution drive | Reuters

China\’s capital, Beijing, infamous for its thick smog and heavy traffic, will slash the city\’s new car sales quotas by almost 40 percent next year, as it looks to curb vehicle emissions and hazardous levels of pollution, the city government website said.

Lines of cars are pictured during a rush hour traffic jam on Guomao Bridge in Beijing July 11, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Lee

The change in policy gives greater support for new, cleaner cars and could strengthen foreign carmakers\’ determination to accelerate growth in China\’s less crowded lower-tier cities.

In the last month alone, high levels of pollution have forced China to all but shut down the northeastern city of Harbin, a major urban center with a population of 11 million.

via Beijing slashes car sales quota in anti-pollution drive | Reuters.

Posted in carbon emission, China alert, Economics, Environment, greenhouse gas, Pollution | Leave a Comment »

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05/11/2013

India launches spacecraft to Mars – BBC News

India has successfully launched a spacecraft to the Red Planet – with the aim of becoming the fourth space agency to reach Mars.

The PSLV- C25 with India's Mars Orbiter on board lifting off majestically at 2.38 p.m on Tuesday from the First Launch Pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. Photo courtesy: ISRO

The Mars Orbiter Mission took off at 09:08 GMT from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the country\’s east coast.

The head of India\’s space agency told the BBC the mission would demonstrate the technological capability to reach Mars orbit and carry out experiments.

The spacecraft is set to travel for 300 days, reaching Mars orbit in 2014.

If the satellite orbits the Red Planet, India\’s space agency will become the fourth in the world after those of the US, Russia and Europe to undertake a successful Mars mission.

In order for the MOM to embark on the right trajectory for its 300-day, 780-million km journey, it must carry out its final orbital burn by 30 November.

via BBC News – India launches spacecraft to Mars.

Posted in Aerospace, Economics, GeoPolitics, India alert, Technology | Leave a Comment »

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04/11/2013

Florentijn Hofman’s Big Yellow Duck Rakes In $33 Million While on Display in Beijing – China Real Time Report – WSJ

It was a goose that laid golden eggs, according to Aesop. But with a little help from Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, China appears to have changed the storyline.

Anyone living in or paying attention to China in the past six months will be familiar – maybe too familiar – with Mr. Hofman’s big yellow duck. Since May, multiple versions of the inflatable plastic creation, some authorized and some not, have made appearances in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Beijing, and countless malls and souvenir stands across Asia. There’s even been an online commemoration of a certain political anniversary.

The bird’s ubiquity has given rise to an ever-growing population of duck haters. But it has proven to be such a crowd-pleaser in Beijing that officials had to work hard to count all the money it brought in.

Mr. Hofman signed rubber ducks for fans during a farewell ceremony at the Summer Palace.

In just 52 days, more than 3 million people flocked to see the 18-meter tall plastic duck at the Summer Palace and the Garden Expo, according to organizers. Some 70,000 showed up on the last day to say goodbye to their plastic friend, local media reported. And the outsized installation didn’t have to do anything besides float and look photogenic.

When an earthquake struck Taiwan on Thursday, one of Mr. Hofman’s mammoth bath toys stationed in Taoyuan proved to be – well, a sitting duck. Suddenly he had the wind knocked out of him, and when workers tried to reinflate him, his tail-end exploded. A local councilor reportedly called for a moment of silence, though others rejoiced.

Sailing was smoother in Beijing. The yellow plastic fantastic brought in an estimated of 200 million yuan ($33 million) at its two venues in the Chinese capital. Maybe not everyone had gone specifically to see it, but having it there certainly didn’t hurt. At the Summer Palace, there were two million visitors over the duck-viewing period, up 30% from a year ago.

The combined tally of cash brought in didn’t include the 7 million yuan from sales of plastic duck spin-off toys that can fit in your bathtub and don’t need a private lake to display them.

“We were happy with the results,” said Sun Qun, who organized the shows. So was the government, which partnered with him on the duck extravaganza.

Financial details of the deal with the Dutch creator weren’t disclosed.

via Florentijn Hofman’s Big Yellow Duck Rakes In $33 Million While on Display in Beijing – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

Posted in China alert, Economics, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

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04/11/2013

China sends graft busters to more provinces, government departments | Reuters

As the anti-corruption campaign gathers pace, one cannot but be reminded of the Joe McCarthy ‘red under every bed’ anti-communist ‘witch hunt’ of the 50s in the US. See – http://www.coldwar.org/articles/50s/senatorjosephmccarthy.asp.  

The main difference, I suppose, is that there were far fewer ‘commies’ than McCarthy suspected; but one wonders if there will be far more corrupt officials than the Chinese Watchdog suspects.

“China has sent anti-corruption investigators to six more provinces and four government departments, the Chinese Communist Party\’s corruption watchdog said on Monday, in the government\’s latest move to tackle graft.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has dispatched inspectors to government departments that include official news agency Xinhua and the Commerce Ministry, the watchdog said in a statement on its website.

Other targets include the southern economic powerhouse of Guangdong, coal-rich Shanxi and the Ministry of Land and Resources.

Since taking office in March, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called corruption a threat to the ruling Communist Party\’s survival and vowed to go after powerful \”tigers\” as well as lowly \”flies\”.

Authorities have already announced the investigation or arrest of a handful of senior officials. Among them, former executives from oil giant PetroChina are being investigated in what appears to be the biggest graft probe into a state-run firm in years. These investigations are unrelated to this new round of probes, or the previous one, which began in May.

The May probes, which lasted through the summer and reported back in September, targeted five regions and five departments, including the poor southern province of Guizhou, the southeastern province of Jiangxi and coal-rich Inner Mongolia, as well as the state-owned China Grain Reserves Corporation and the China Publishing Group Corp.

The party has so far given few details of the outcome of the first round of investigations, in line with its secretive nature, though the anti-corruption watchdog publishes website reports of a steady stream of minor officials being probed.

Speaking to officials in October ahead of this new round of probes, Wang Qishan, the head of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, urged colleagues to spare no effort in rooting out corruption.”

via China sends graft busters to more provinces, government departments | Reuters.

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04/11/2013

In China’s Xinjiang, poverty, exclusion are greater threat than Islam | Reuters

If the analysis in this report is correct, then it is good news for China and Xinjiang. Alleviating poverty is difficult, but far easier than eliminating religious extremism.

“In the dirty backstreets of the Uighur old quarter of Xinjiang\’s capital Urumqi in China\’s far west, Abuduwahapu frowns when asked what he thinks is the root cause of the region\’s festering problem with violence and unrest.

A police officer stops a car to check for identifications at a checkpoint near Lukqun town, in Xinjiang province in this October 30, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/Files

\”The Han Chinese don\’t have faith, and the Uighurs do. So they don\’t really understand each other,\” he said, referring to the Muslim religion the Turkic-speaking Uighur people follow, in contrast to the official atheism of the ruling Communist Party.

But for the teenage bread delivery boy, it\’s not Islam that\’s driving people to commit acts of violence, such as last week\’s deadly car crash in Beijing\’s Tiananmen Square – blamed by the government on Uighur Islamist extremists who want independence.

\”Some people there support independence and some do not. Mostly, those who support it are unsatisfied because they are poor,\” said Abuduwahapu, who came to Urumqi two years ago from the heavily Uighur old Silk Road city of Kashgar in Xinjiang\’s southwest, near the Pakistani and Afghan border.

\”The Han are afraid of Uighers. They are afraid if we had guns, we would kill them,\” he said, standing next to piles of smoldering garbage on plots of land where buildings have been demolished.

China\’s claims that it is fighting an Islamist insurgency in energy-rich Xinjiang – a vast area of deserts, mountains and forests geographically located in central Asia – are not new.”

via In China’s Xinjiang, poverty, exclusion are greater threat than Islam | Reuters.

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Posted in China alert, Dissident, Economics, Ethnic clash, Freedom, Human rights, immigration, income-wealth gap, Inequalities, Instability, Insurgency, Internal politics, Politics, self determination, separatism | Leave a Comment »

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04/11/2013

Seven killed in rebel attack in India’s Assam state – BBC News

At least seven people have been killed in an attack by suspected militants in India\’s north-eastern state of Assam, police said.

map

Rebels belonging to the Garo National Liberation Army opened fire on migrant workers who were playing cards late on Sunday in Goalpara district.

Nine workers were also injured in the attack, police said.

Assam has been plagued by ethnic clashes and separatist violence in recent years.

Goalpara has witnessed violence between the Rabha and Garo tribes.

Reports say that Sunday night\’s violence happened after Garo militants from neighbouring Meghalaya state fired at a group of Hindi-speaking migrant workers who were playing cards and gambling to celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights.

\”These militants in army dress came and fired indiscriminately… after the attack, they retreated to Meghalaya,\” AP Raut, a senior Assam police official, told the NDTV news channel.

Correspondents say many tribespeople resent the presence of outsiders, who they believe are taking their jobs and marrying local women.

via BBC News – Seven killed in rebel attack in India’s Assam state.

Posted in Dissident, Economics, Ethnic clash, India alert, Inequalities, Instability, Insurgency, Internal politics, Politics | Leave a Comment »

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03/11/2013

A Culture of Bidding: Forging an Art Market in China – NY Times

When the hammer came down at an evening auction during China Guardian’s spring sale in May 2011, “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree,” a 1946 ink painting by Qi Baishi, one of China’s 20th-century masters, had drawn a startling price: $65.4 million. No Chinese painting had ever fetched so much at auction, and, by the end of the year, the sale appeared to have global implications, helping China surpass the United States as the world’s biggest art and auction market.

But two years after the auction, Qi Baishi’s masterpiece is still languishing in a warehouse in Beijing. The winning bidder has refused to pay for the piece since doubts were raised about its authenticity.

“The market is in a very dubious stage,” said Alexander Zacke, an expert in Asian art who runs Auctionata, an international online auction house. “No one will take results in mainland China very seriously.”

Indeed, even as the art world marvels at China’s booming market, a six-month review by The New York Times found that many of the sales — transactions reported to have produced as much as a third of the country’s auction revenue in recent years — did not actually take place.

Just as problematic, the market is flooded with forgeries, often mass-produced, and has become a breeding ground for corruption, as business executives curry favor with officials by bribing them with art.

Fraud is certainly no stranger to the international art world, but experts warn that the market here is particularly vulnerable because, like many industries in China, it has expanded too fast for regulators to keep pace.

In fact, few areas of business offer as revealing a view of this socialist society’s lurch toward capitalism as the art market. Like many luxury businesses in China, the explosion of buyers for art here has been fueled by the pent-up consumerism of the newly rich. The demand is so great that last year, in a country that barely had an art market two decades ago, reported auction revenues were up 900 percent over 2003 — to $8.9 billion. (The United States auction market for 2012 was $8.1 billion.)

While the luxury-buying habits in China often mimic those in the West, the demand for art reflects uniquely Chinese tastes. While the rest of the world bids up Pollocks and Rothkos, Chinese buyers typically pursue traditional Chinese pieces, some by 15th-century masters, and others by modern artists, like Zhang Daqian, one of many who have chosen to work in that old style.

Ceramic vases and jugs dry before being fired in the kilns at the Xiong Jianjun factory, one of China’s best-known makers of reproductions, in Jingdezhen, the ancient center of porcelain making. ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

This very reverence for the cultural past is now contributing greatly to the surge in forgeries. Artists here are trained to imitate the old Chinese masters, and they routinely produce high-quality copies of paintings and other works, such as ceramics and jade artifacts. That tradition has intersected with the newly lucrative art market, in which reproductions that so many have the skills to create are often offered as the real thing. It would be hard to create a more fertile environment for the proliferation of fakes.

via A Culture of Bidding: Forging an Art Market in China.

Posted in China alert, Economics, fake | Leave a Comment »

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03/11/2013

China? They’ll make it cheaper in Yorkshire | The Sunday Times

We spotted this trend – initially called “reverse outsourcing”, now re-labelled Reshoring – 15 months ago.  See:

Reshoring is surely gathering pace.

“THE EXODUS is over. British business is coming home.

A growing number of firms, like fashion chain Zara, are looking to bring their manufacturing operations to Britain

A decade ago, companies began to move to the Far East on the promise of cheap labour. Thousands were lured offshore as they sought to keep up with more nimble foreign rivals.

Today, that trend may be reversing. The boardroom buzzword is “reshoring” as a growing number of firms of all sizes look to repatriate their manufacturing operations to Britain.

Rapidly rising wages and energy costs in Asia have soured the dream for many businesses. By contrast, falling real wages in Britain are making domestic production look attractive again.

Detailed numbers are difficult to come by but Zara, the fashion chain, Symington’s, the food manufacturer, and Hornby, the model train producer, are among those that have pledged to produce more domestically.

Tony Caldeira’s textile company is another. It has been shrinking its operations in China and ramping up production in Britain.

“The tide began to turn about 18 months ago with a worsening exchange rate and increasing labour and freight costs,” he said.

Ten years ago, in the face of growing pressure to compete with more efficient foreign competitors, Caldeira closed a factory in St Helens, Merseyside and opened one in Hangzhou, a city of nearly 9m people in eastern China.

“Overseas rivals were selling goods cheaper than we could produce them. Our customers said we needed to lower our prices or they would go elsewhere. We thought, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’,” Caldeira said.

Hangzhou is the textiles capital of the world, with about half the industry’s production emanating from within a 100-mile radius of the city, including many of Caldeira’s suppliers.

The company’s transport costs fell dramatically and it grew quickly. It moved into a new factory four times in five years, on each occasion into larger premises.

But the benefits began to decline as the value of the renminbi climbed. When Caldeira arrived in China, the exchange rate was 14 renminbi to the pound; now, a decade later, it is less than 10.

The biggest factor pushing many British companies to abandon China has been soaring labour costs. From 2000 to 2008, real wages in Asia rose 7%-8% a year, according to the International Labour Organisation. In China, pay jumped 19% a year between 2005 and 2010, according to Boston Consulting. In advanced economies, real wages increased less than 1% over a similar period.

“We redid the maths and realised it was no longer cost-effective,” Caldeira said.

The company’s Chinese workforce has been halved from 150 to about 70. In Britain, it has hired 25 cutters, sewers, warehouse workers and designers.

Caldeira doesn’t plan to pull out of the Far East altogether. China still has some benefits, and he plans to make some goods there and others back home. “For us, it is literally the best of both worlds,” he said.

James Laxton’s timing was brave, if not suicidal. In 2009, as the financial crisis was unleashing misery around the globe, he decided to shut down the overseas operations of his family’s 100-year-old wool manufacturing company and open a mill in Yorkshire.

The company’s products had been produced in Turkey and China for eight years but its foreign partners were becoming increasingly unreliable. Laxton, great-grandson of the company’s founder George, decided to try it himself.

“The issues were getting bigger and bigger. Delivery times were getting longer, the service was deteriorating and transport costs were rising,” he said.

Since opening the Yorkshire mill at the start of 2010, the company has made two further investments so it can expand and upgrade the plant. Employee numbers have grown from 3 to 25.

“The quality of our goods and services has improved and we can bring new products to market much quicker,” he said.

Bathrooms.com, a maker of bathroom products, recently cancelled orders worth £1m with Chinese manufacturers and awarded them to businesses in the Midlands.

“Instead of taking nine months from design to production, it can take as little as two months,” said Ian Monk, the company’s founder.

But it won’t be bringing all its manufacturing back to Britain. Some products, such as shower doors, are produced so cheaply in China that others can never compete.”

via China? They’ll make it cheaper in Yorkshire | The Sunday Times.

Posted in China alert, Economics, Reshoring, Reverse off-shoring | 1 Comment »

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01/11/2013

Chinese land reform: A world to turn upside down | The Economist

MORTGAGING a village home is a sensitive issue in China. A nervous local official has warned residents of Gumian, a small farming community set amid hills and paddies in Guangdong province, that they risk leaking state secrets if they talk to a foreign reporter about the new borrowing scheme that lets them make use of the value of their houses. They talk anyway; they are excited by what is going on.

Urban land in China is owned by the state, and in the 1990s the state allowed a flourishing property market to develop in the cities. That went on to become a colossal engine of economic growth. But rural land, though no longer farmed collectively, as it was in Mao’s disastrous “people’s communes”, has stayed under collective ownership overseen by local party bosses. Farmers are not allowed to buy or sell the land they work or the homes they live in. That hobbles the rural economy, and the opportunities of the farmers who have migrated to the cities but live as second-class citizens there.

Hence the importance of experiments like those in Gumian. Cautious and piecemeal, they have been going on for years. Some are ripe for scaling up. Handled correctly, such an expansion could become a centrepiece of Xi Jinping’s rule.

On October 7th Mr Xi said the government was drawing up a “master plan” for not just more reform, but a “profound revolution”. Such talk is part of the preparations for a plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee which will begin on November 9th. It is the third such meeting since Mr Xi came to power; because the first two plenums of a party chief’s term are given over largely to housekeeping matters, including party and government appointments, third plenums are the ones to watch.

And Mr Xi is marking this one out as particularly important. In private conversations with Western leaders he has been comparing the event to the third plenum that, in 1978, saw Deng Xiaoping’s emergence as China’s new strongman after the death of Mao two years earlier, and set the stage for the demise of the people’s communes. Indeed “profound revolution” is a deliberate echo of a phrase of Deng’s.

via Chinese land reform: A world to turn upside down | The Economist.

Posted in agriculture, China alert, Economics, land transfer, Reform | Leave a Comment »

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