Archive for ‘Politics’

« Older Entries  |   Newer Entries »
26/07/2013

India, China trying to develop mechanism to prevent face-off: AK Antony

Daulat Beg Oldi is in northernmost Ladakh.

Daulat Beg Oldi is in northernmost Ladakh. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Times of India: “NEW DELHI: India and China are trying to develop effective mechanisms to prevent the “embarrassing” face-offs between their troops along the “disputed” points of the Line of Actual Control, defence minister AK Antony said here on Friday.

 

Terming the 21-day stand-off between the two sides in Depsang valley in Daulat Beg Oldi area as an “unusual” incident, the defence minister said the two countries will meet soon in Beijing to discuss issues and try to find a solution for such “unpleasant incidents”.

“Till the final settlement of the border issue, we are trying to find out more effective mechanisms to prevent occasional incidents. There are many points in the LAC that are disputed and they are patrolled by both sides. So, sometimes it leads to some face-off,” he told reporters on the 14th anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas.”

via India, China trying to develop mechanism to prevent face-off: AK Antony – The Times of India.

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Chindia Alert, Defence, Diplomacy, Foreign invasion, GeoPolitics, History, India alert, Military, Neighbour conflict, non-military intervention, peace keeping, Politics, Territorial dispute, war | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
26/07/2013

Shoulder lights to make police more visible

China Daily:

Shoulder lights to make police more visible

Policemen wear their new shoulder lights at a ceremony to launch the use of the night lights in Southwest China‘s Chongqing on July 25, 2013. The shoulder lights are being used by the city’s police for the first time and will make policemen on patrol visible for 100 meters. Other public security guards will also be equipped with the lights, which can run for five days on two batteries. [Photo/CFP]

Posted in China alert, innovation, Law enforcement | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , ,
24/07/2013

Sri Lanka teams up with Chinese firm for $1.4 billion port city

Reuters: “Sri Lanka has finalized a $1.43 billion deal with China Communications Construction Co Ltd (601800.SS) to build a city on a 230 hectare site that will be reclaimed from the sea, the head of the state-run Ports Authority said on Wednesday.

A general view of the Colombo South Harbor at Colombo Port July 24, 2013. REUTERS-Dinuka Liyanawatte

The site is next to the island nation’s main Colombo port and Colombo‘s historic Galle Face Green seafront. It is also close to where Shangri-La Hotels Lanka Ltd, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed Shangri-La Asia Ltd (0069.HK), is building a 500-room hotel.

“The Chinese firm will invest in reclaiming the land and infrastructure of the port city,” Priyath Wickrama, chairman of Sri Lanka Ports Authority, told reporters. “It will be given around 50 hectare of reclaimed land on a 99-year lease for its investment.”

The 39-month long construction project will start in September, Wickrama said, adding the city would include eco-parks, residential areas, offices and shopping malls.

Since the end of a nearly three-decade war in May 2009, the Indian Ocean island nation has been spending heavily on infrastructure, including ports to attract foreign investments to its $59 billion economy.

It has already created new land near the proposed port city as part of its expansion of the Colombo port to double its capacity by 2015.”

via Sri Lanka teams up with Chinese firm for $1.4 billion port city | Reuters.

Posted in China alert, Economics, Governance, Transport | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , ,
23/07/2013

China to expand imports from ASEAN members

Is this action based on genuine economic reasons or is it partly to diffuse China‘s tension with many ASEAN countries involved with the on–going maritime territorial disputes?

China Daily: “China pledged to increase its imports from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as bilateral trade started to favor China in the second half of 2012, Vice-Minister of Commerce Gao Yan told a news briefing on Tuesday.

Emblem of ASEAN

Emblem of ASEAN (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

China will enhance trade facilitation through cooperation with ASEAN members in areas including customs and quality checking while sending purchasing groups for agricultural products from ASEAN members, Gao said.

In addition, exhibitions, including the 10th CAEXPO to be held September 3-6 in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, will serve as opportunities for ASEAN exporters to expand their sales to China, she added.

China is the biggest trade partner of ASEAN and bilateral trade hit $400.1 billion in 2012, with Chinese exports totaling $204.3 billion and imports of $195.8 billion, leaving a trade surplus of $8.5 billion. China previously had a trade deficit with ASEAN, Gao said.”

via China to expand imports from ASEAN members |Economy |chinadaily.com.cn.

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Economics, Neighbour conflict, Territorial dispute, Trade | 1 Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
23/07/2013

First U.S. citizen detained as China pharma probe spreads

First crackdown on party members and officials, now on commercial organisations.  China‘s anti-corruption campaign gathers pace.

Reuters: “The first U.S. citizen has been detained in China in connection with probes sparked by an unfolding corruption scandal in the drugs industry, as China widens the range of international firms and staff under the spotlight.

A Chinese national flag flutters in front of a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) office building in Shanghai July 12, 2013. REUTERS/Aly Song

Police have also questioned two further Chinese employees from drug maker AstraZeneca in Shanghai, after a local sales representative was taken away for questioning earlier.

And China’s health ministry said 39 hospital staff would be punished for taking bribes from drug companies.

The unnamed American is the first U.S. citizen to be detained in connection with the investigations, and the second foreign national, after a British risk consultant linked with GlaxoSmithKline was held last week.

GSK has been accused by China of funneling up to 3 billion yuan ($489 million) to travel agencies to facilitate bribes to doctors and officials.

“We are aware that a U.S. citizen has been detained in Shanghai. We are in contact with the individual and are providing all appropriate consular assistance,” U.S. embassy spokesman Nolan Barkhouse said on Tuesday, when asked about the involvement of U.S. citizens in the widening probe.

He declined to say which company the individual was associated with.

The latest moves by Chinese officials underline the country’s tough stance on corruption and high prices in the pharmaceutical industry, as it unrolls wider healthcare access and faces an estimated $1 trillion healthcare bill by 2020.

“Momentum is gathering and if you are a big international firm, then you’re a good example to be held up. This is a wake-up call for the rest of the industry,” said Jeremy Gordon, director of China Business Services, a risk management company focusing on China.

AstraZeneca said that the Shanghai Public Security Bureau had asked on Tuesday to speak with two line managers linked to the sales representative questioned earlier.

“The Public Security Bureau is describing this as an individual case. We have no reason to believe it is related to other investigations,” the company said in the statement.

via First U.S. citizen detained as China pharma probe spreads | Reuters.

Posted in corruption, Economics, Politics, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , ,
23/07/2013

Indian development: Beyond bootstraps

The Economist: “An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. By Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze. Allen Lane; 434 pages; £20. To be published in America in August by Princeton University Press; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AS A conundrum it could hardly be bigger. Six decades of laudably fair elections, a free press, rule of law and much else should have delivered rulers who are responsive to the ruled. India’s development record, however, is worse than poor. It is host to some of the world’s worst failures in health and education. If democracy works there, why are so many Indian lives still so wretched?

Social indicators leave that in no doubt. A massive blackout last summer caught global attention, yet 400m Indians had (and still have) no electricity. Sanitation and public hygiene are awful, especially in the north: half of all Indians still defecate in the open, resulting in many deaths from diarrhoea and encephalitis. Polio may be gone, but immunisation rates for most diseases are lower than in sub-Saharan Africa. Twice as many Indian children (43%) as African ones go hungry.

Many adults, especially women, are also undernourished, even as obesity and diabetes spread among wealthier Indians. Despite gains, extreme poverty is rife and death in childbirth all too common. Prejudice kills on an immense scale: as many as 600,000 fetuses are aborted each year because they are female. Compared even with its poorer neighbours, Bangladesh and Nepal, India’s social record is unusually grim.

“An Uncertain Glory”, an excellent but unsettling new book by two of India’s best-known development economists, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, sets out how and why this is so. They argue that Indian rulers have never been properly accountable to the needy majority. Belgian-born Mr Drèze has lived in India since 1979 and became an Indian citizen in 2002. Now at Allahabad University in the north, he is influential among Indian policymakers, particularly for pushing a right-to-information law. Mr Sen, a Nobel laureate, now at Harvard, famously showed how famines have never happened in democracies. The two men want a debate on India’s social failures and how to fix them.”

via Indian development: Beyond bootstraps | The Economist.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/prognosis/and-india/

Posted in Economics, India alert, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , ,
22/07/2013

Knife attacks and bomb threats follow Beijing airport explosion

SCMP: “Several incidents of violence have been reported in Beijing in the aftermath of the attempted suicide by an aggrieved petitioner at the capital’s international airport on Saturday.

screen_shot_2013-07-22_at_2.22.12_pm.png

On Monday, a man armed with a knife went on a rampage at a Carrefour shopping centre, in Beijing’s western district, wounding at least four people. Police have arrested a Beijing-native surnamed Wang, born in 1963 at the scene, local police said in a statement.

One child was among those wounded, Beijing News reported on its microblog. The report did not say what triggered the attack.

Last Thursday, a knife-yielding man stabbed two people, including one US woman, to death, in a similar incident.

In two unrelated incidents, Beijing police arrested two men for “threatening to carry bombs and attempting to disturb social order” in the capital.

Four hours after petitioner Ji Zhongxing caused an explosion at Beijing Capital International Airport on Saturday, a 39-year-old man surnamed Wang from Beijing’s Miyun county threatened to set off explosives at a Beijing airport to protest against land seizures, according to a statement by Beijing police.

Only one hour later, a 31-year-old man surnamed Liu from Jiangsu province, threatened to detonate explosives at a video arcade, police said. Both men have since been arrested.

Many Chinese netizens blamed a “butterfly effect” and criticised the government for failing to address petitioners’ grievances. “If the government continues in its corrupt ways, everybody will become Ji Zhongxing,” said one Weibo user. “Using lives to protest is the last way for ordinary people to seek changes,” wrote another.

via Knife attacks and bomb threats follow Beijing airport explosion | South China Morning Post.

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Petition, Politics, public protest, social media | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , ,
21/07/2013

Kashmir militants rebuild their lives as hopes of a lasting peace grow

The Observer: “Shabir Ahmed Dar has come home. His children play under the walnut trees where he once played. His father, white-bearded and thin now, watches them. The village of Degoom, the cluster of traditional brick-and-wood houses in Kashmir where Dar grew up, is still reached by a dirt road and hay is still hung from the branches of the soaring chinar trees to dry.

Shabir Ahmed Dar with one of his children

But Dar has changed, even if Degoom has not. It is 22 years since he left the village to steal over the “line of control” (LoC), the de facto border separating the Indian and Pakistani parts of this long-disputed former princely state high in the Himalayan foothills. Along with a dozen or so other teenagers, he hoped to take part in the insurgency which pitted groups of young Muslim Kashmiris enrolled in Islamist militant groups, and later extremists from Pakistan too, against Indian security forces.

“I went because everyone else was going. The situation was bad here. I had my beliefs, my dream for my homeland. I was very young,” he said, sitting in the room where he had slept as a child.

The conflict had only just begun when he left. Over the next two decades, an estimated 50,000 soldiers, policemen, militants and, above all, ordinary people were to die. Dar’s aim had been to “create a true Islamic society” in Kashmir. This could only be achieved by accession to Pakistan or independence, he believed.

But once across the LoC, even though he spent only a few months with the militant group he had set out to join and never took part in any fighting, he was unable to return. “I was stuck there. I made a new life. I married and found work. I didn’t think I would ever come back here,” Dar said.

But now the 36-year-old has finally come home, with his Pakistani-born wife and three children. He is one of 400 former militants who have taken advantage of a new “rehabilitation” policy launched by the youthful chief minister of the state, Omar Abdullah.

Dar’s father heard of the scheme and convinced his son to return last year. “I am an old man. I wanted to see my son and grandchildren before I die. I wanted him to have his share of our land,” said Dar senior, who is 70.

The scheme is an indication of the changes in this beautiful, battered land. In recent years, economic growth in India has begun to benefit Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority state. At the same time, despite a series of spectacular attacks on security forces by militants in recent months, violence has fallen to its lowest levels since the insurgency broke out in the late 1980s. The two phenomena are connected, many observers say.

It is this relative calm that has allowed Dar and the others to return – and allows even some hardened veterans who have renounced violence to live unmolested. “A few years ago the [Indian intelligence] agencies would have shot this down because they would have seen it as another move to infiltrate [militants from Pakistan],” Abdullah, the chief minister, said.

The scheme is not, however, an amnesty. “If there are cases against them they will still be arrested [and] prosecuted … Largely this scheme has been taken up by those who have not carried out any acts of terrorism. Either they never came [across the LoC], or if they came we never knew about it,” Abdullah said.”

via Kashmir militants rebuild their lives as hopes of a lasting peace grow | World news | The Observer.

Posted in Defence, Dissident, India alert, Insurgency, Internal politics, Military, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
20/07/2013

Joe Biden’s India Itinerary

WSJ: “U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrives in New Delhi Monday for a visit focused on improving business ties between the two nations.

Mr. Biden, 70, begins his four-day India tour with a trip to Gandhi Smriti in New Delhi, a museum dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, who led India to independence from Britain in 1947. The Democratic Party politician, who is visiting India with his wife, is also expected to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Mohammad Hamid Ansari, among other leaders, before travelling to Mumbai. Mr. Biden last visited India in 2008, when he was a member of the American Senate.

Mr. Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, will visit the Taj Mahal in Agra and is expected to address school children in Mumbai.

Relations between Washington and New Delhi have been warming in recent years, with the U.S. viewing India as an emerging superpower that can serve as a counterbalance to China’s growing influence in South Asia.

In a speech at the George Washington University in the U.S. on Friday, Mr. Biden singled out civil-nuclear cooperation, trade and investment as key issues the U.S. sought to collaborate on with India in the coming years. “There’s a lot of work to do,” Mr. Biden said in his speech, referring to strengthening India-U.S. ties. He also welcomed India’s decision this week to ease overseas-investment rules for telecom, defense and insurance.”

via Joe Biden’s India Itinerary – India Real Time – WSJ.

Posted in Diplomacy, Economics, GeoPolitics, India alert, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , ,
20/07/2013

China officials held over watermelon-seller death

BBC : “Six urban security personnel have been detained by police investigating the death of a fruit seller in southern China, state media say.

Local residents demonstrate with a banner saying "urban enforcers (chengguan) killed people" in Linwu county, central China's Hunan province, 17 July 2013

Deng Zhengjia, in his 50s, died on Wednesday in Chenzhou City, Hunan.

He was hit with a weight from a set of scales after a row erupted with the officials, known as “chengguan”, Xinhua reported, citing Mr Deng’s niece.

The six are being held on suspicion of intentionally harming others, added the news agency.

 

The row in Linwu county, Chenzhou, erupted after Mr Deng, 56, and his wife tried to sell home-grown watermelons at a scenic riverside spot without a licence, the county government said in a statement.

Having asked the couple to leave, “the enforcers temporarily confiscated four of the watermelons, requesting that the couple sell their melons in an authorised location instead”.

The couple began “insulting” the officers when they encountered them again 50 minutes later, the statement said.

“The enforcers tried to reason with the couple, the dispute between the two sides became a physical conflict, and in the process Deng Zhengjia suddenly collapsed and died,” it added.

There were anti-chengguan protests in Linwu on Wednesday, and the fruit seller’s death has also sparked outrage on China’s microblogs.

In July 2011, the death of a disabled street vendor who was reportedly beaten by local law enforcers sparked a riot in Guizhou province.

Who are the chengguan?

Urban law enforcers tasked with enforcing ”non-criminal administrative regulations” such as traffic, environment and sanitation rules

Chengguan operate separately from the police

They are employed by the Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureaux of their individual cities

Critics call them “violent government thugs”

Reports that a disabled street vendor was beaten to death by chengguan in 2011 sparked riots in China’s Guizhou province

There are thousands of chengguan in at least 656 cities across China, Human Rights Watch says

The chengguan, or Urban Management Law Enforcement force, support the police in tackling low-level crime in cities and have become unpopular with the Chinese public after a series of high-profile violent incidents.

“They are now synonymous for many Chinese citizens with physical violence, illegal detention and theft,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a report last year.

via BBC News – China officials held over watermelon-seller death.

Related articles

Posted in China alert, Human rights, Illegal practices, Justice, Politics, public protest, Rule of law, social media | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries  |   Newer Entries »
CCChang

Law of Unintended Consequences

continuously updated blog about China & India

ChiaHou's Book Reviews

continuously updated blog about China & India

What's wrong with the world; and its economy

continuously updated blog about China & India