This link comes courtesy of one of our readers: Aria Cahill – http://www.militaryeducation.org/chinese-military-growth/
Thank you, Aria.
See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/04/16/china-issues-white-paper-on-national-defense/
18/06/2013
Papua New Guinea reconsiders China as a partner
So not everyone who is wooed by China responds without reservations!
07/06/2013
Premier Li Keqiang Wants More Chinese in the Cities
BusinessWeek: “Li Zuobing is adjusting well to urban life in Chongqing’s Yubei district, where he lives in a massive housing complex built to house former farmers. He enjoys his job as a supervisor in the community service office, his wife says she is delighted to have a kitchen with natural gas (rather than coal), and his daughter has opened a clothing store. It’s a great improvement on their life growing rice and corn on a small plot. “A few years ago, the idea I could ever live this well was unimaginable,” he says, as instructions on living a “civilized life” drone from loudspeakers on the grounds.
Such success stories are essential for China’s future. As President Xi Jinping tries to bolster China’s international standing, the most daunting challenge at home is getting urbanization right, a task that falls to Premier Li Keqiang. Li is embarking on one of the most radical reconfigurations of Chinese society since the Mao era. His goal is to cut the rural population of 642 million roughly in half by nudging, urging, and sometimes forcing farmers and their families to settle in China’s cities.
Theoretically, this process will create a new, willing workforce to staff the cities’ service industries and factories. The ex-farmers’ incomes will rise, their children will get a better-quality education, and when they grow up they’ll land better jobs than their parents. The multiyear process will increase average income in China, where annual rural incomes of 7,917 yuan ($1,291) are less than one-third the income of city dwellers. “Urbanization will usher in a huge amount of consumption and investment demand, increase job opportunities, create wealth for farmers, and bring benefits to the people,” said Li in his first news conference after being named premier. This grand population shift comes as China’s three-decades-long export and investment-led boom starts to lose steam.
The 57-year-old Li is China’s first premier to have a doctorate in economics, earned at prestigious Peking University. He worked in the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution and has made transforming farmers into city dwellers a career theme, including during his time as governor of Henan and Liaoning provinces. Li recently asked the World Bank to work with his administration in drafting sustainable urbanization proposals. (World Bank officials were unavailable to comment.)
Cities such as Chongqing have been experimenting with urbanization for years, and Li wants to speed up the process across all of China. Another benefit of this policy, Li says, is that it will be easier to launch large-scale agriculture as farmers move to the cities. Chinese farmers tend plots that average a little bit more than one acre in size: Farms are three times larger in South Korea and Taiwan, 30 times larger in Europe, and 300 times larger in the U.S., says Cai Jiming, director of the Political Economy Research Center. “With such a small scale, it is impossible for any one farmer to become wealthy.”
It won’t be easy to get the economic payoff China’s leaders are counting on. One obstacle is China’s hukou, or household registration policy, which designates all citizens as officially either rural or urban, depending on what family they are born into and regardless of where they reside. Hukou prevents some 230 million migrant workers who already live in China’s cities from enjoying the health care, education, pensions, and access to lower-cost housing available to those with urban hukou. “None of them enjoy the rights of full urban residents. That makes their consumption ability much lower,” Cai says.
Another obstacle: Under the constitution, all rural land is owned collectively, a legacy of when agriculture was produced by people’s communes. That means farmers have no right to rent or directly sell their leased land, allowing them to set up life in the city.
Li hopes his policy will stop local governments from continuing their forcible takeovers of rural land. Local officials provide limited compensation to the farmers, then sell the long-term leases to factory owners and real estate developers. The authorities usually sell the seized land for 18 times what they paid the farmers, estimates Li Ping, senior attorney at the Beijing office of Landesa, a Seattle-based nonprofit that focuses on land-rights issues. “Local governments have an incentive to push this distorted urbanization, to grab all that profit,” says Landesa’s Li.”
via Premier Li Keqiang Wants More Chinese in the Cities – Businessweek.
06/06/2013
China’s reverse imperialism – West contains China’s East, China moves West
I have a hypothesis that a country’s mindset mimics its national sports and games. See – https://chindia-alert.org/2012/04/03/does-a-countrys-mindset-mimics-its-national-games/
If I am correct, how can America with its football and baseball hope to compete in geo-politics with China’s Go and chess?All Posts
04/06/2013
Iraq War Paying Off — for China
The New American: “Remember those assurances that the Iraq War would pay for itself, once those oil revenues began gushing forth from a liberated Iraq? Well, a decade later, the Iraq War is paying off after all — for China.
“We lost out,” said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration. “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war,” he told the New York Times, “but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply.”
China is the biggest customer of Iraq’s oil, buying nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, close to half the oil Iraq produces, the Times reported. Beijing is looking to increase that share as it bids for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.
“The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “They need energy, and they want to get into the market.”
With an estimated 143.1 billion barrels in extractable oil reserves, Iraq is the second largest exporter of oil among the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), trailing only Saudi Arabia. China has recently become the world’s biggest importer of oil and is investing in oil and gas fields around the world, having spent $12 billion in that effort in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Department. More than half of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East, even while the West’s economic sanctions against Iran over that nation’s nuclear program have reduced the amount of oil available from that source.
Iraq was already one of the world’s leading exporters of oil before the U.S.-led sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime over violations of UN resolutions crippled the nation’s economy, including its oil industry. Part of the rationale given for the invasion and “regime change” in Baghdad, in addition to Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” was to revive the oil industry to pre-sanction levels or higher. The WMD were never found, but the increased production of oil in Iraq, much of it pumped by Chinese workers, has added to the world supply, offsetting the effect of reduced exports from Iran. U.S.-led sanctions against Iran are based on claims the nation’s nuclear program is aimed at developing nuclear weapons, though all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have reported no evidence that the Tehran government has made that decision.
China National Petroleum is looking to expand its production in Iraq with its bid for a 60-percent share, now held by Exxon Mobil in a large oil field in southern Iraq. The U.S.-based company has so far refused to sell, but China National recently said it would be interested in forming a partnership with the American oil giant. Exxon Mobil may be forced to divest, the Times reported, because of its oil interests in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds are said to offer more generous terms than the Baghdad government, which is reportedly unhappy with companies making separate deals in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
The Chinese companies aggressively seek new contracts with Baghdad and are willing to accept lower profits to get them. “We don’t have any problems with them,” an Iraqi Oil Ministry official said, “They are very cooperative. There’s a big difference: the Chinese companies are state companies, while Exxon or BP or Shell are different.”
One big difference is that the American companies are profit-making enterprises. The state-owned Chinese firms don’t answer to shareholders, pay dividends, or necessarily make a profit. As a result they can make higher bids than their Western rivals as they strive to secure a steady and expanding supply of oil for their nation’s growing and energy-hungry economy.
Despite the violence and turmoil that has continued to plague Iraq since the 2011 departure of the combat units of the United States and its coalition partners, China has bet heavily on a steady supply of oil from the post-Saddam regime. In the desert near the Iran-Iraq border, China has built its own airport to fly workers in to Iraq’s oil fields. Chinese officials expect to have direct flights going from Beijing and Shanghai to Baghdad in the near future.
The Chinese have also done their homework on the language and culture of the nation where they have invested so much in the future of their energy supplies. “Chinese executives impress their hosts not just by speaking Arabic, but Iraqi-accented Arabic,” the Times reports. And they don’t interfere in local or national affairs. “They are practical people,” an Iraqi oil official said. “They don’t have anything to do with politics or religion. They just work and eat and sleep.”
A boom in American domestic oil and gas production in newly discovered shale fields, meanwhile, has reduced U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. Perhaps it will reduce as well the political temptation to conjure up reasons to go to war in that part of the world. The American people might be more than a little reluctant to back another war to make the Middle East safe for Chinese oil supplies.”
03/06/2013
China not disputing Japan sovereignty over Okinawa
Reuters: “China does not dispute Japanese sovereignty over Okinawa and recent comments in Chinese newspapers merely reflects the views of some academics, a senior Chinese military leader said on Sunday.
“China’s position has not changed… Scholars can put forth any idea they want and they do not represent the views of the Chinese government,” the deputy chief of general staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Lieutenant General Qi Jianguo, told delegates at a security conference in Singapore.
China’s state-owned People’s Daily last month published an article by two academics that said Okinawa was part of an island chain that used to be a vassal of imperial Chinese dynasties before it was annexed by Japan in the 19th century, implicitly asserting Chinese claims over the island.
Okinawa, host to the bulk of up to 50,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, is the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which extends south towards Taiwan.
China is already involved in a tense dispute with Japan over the latter’s move last year to nationalise the nearby Senkaku islets, which the Chinese call Diaoyu, which sits astride key shipping lanes and undersea energy resources.
That row has escalated in recent months to the point where both sides have scrambled fighter jets while patrol ships shadow each other in nearby seas, raising worry that an unintended collision or other incident could lead to a broader clash.”
via China not disputing Japan sovereignty over Okinawa | Reuters.
Related articles
- China Continues To Lay Claims To Okinawa (warnewsupdates.blogspot.com)
- Chinese general says Okinawa does not belong to Japan (japandailypress.com)
- * China mouthpiece claims rights over Okinawa (chindia-alert.org)
- Now China Says It Owns Okinawa, Too (businessinsider.com)
- People’s Daily hints Beijing may press claim to Okinawa (wantchinatimes.com)
- Japan Protests Chinese Report Questioning Sovereignty of Okinawa (voanews.com)
03/06/2013
Sonia seeks quick implementation of rural livelihood schemes
The Hindu: “Buoyed by the response to UPA’s rural livelihood scheme, Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Monday sought quick implementation of Aajeevika mission across the nation especially its central and eastern parts.
Ms. Gandhi’s thrust on the scheme comes at a time when Congress is bracing for Lok Sabha elections due next year and assembly elections in five states including BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh this year.
Giving a thrust to poverty alleviation in her address at the second anniversary of the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) here, Ms. Gandhi said that the empowerment of weaker sections and women has been the main pillar of our UPA government.
The Congress president also chose the occasion to announce that a special package is being prepared for North Eastern states and hilly states like Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh to give a fillip to such measures.
She said that in the next ten years, 7 crore BPL families have to be freed from poverty, which is not an easy job.
“But by adopting the Aajeevika Mission, many states have proved that through women SHGs, economical and social changes can be brought in the rural areas.
“Seeing this success, it seems that now the Aajivika Mission will have to be implemented fast across the country especially in central and eastern India,” Ms. Gandhi said.
Aajeevika was launched by Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) in June 2011. It aims at creating efficient and effective institutional platforms of the rural poor enabling them to increase household income through sustainable livelihood enhancements and improved access to financial services.
The NRLM has set out with an agenda to cover 7 Crore BPL households, across 600 districts, 6000 blocks, 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats and 6 lakh villages through self-managed Self Help Groups (SHGs) and support them for livelihood collectives in a period of 8-10 years.
Hailing the NRLM as an important programme of the UPA, Ms. Gandhi claimed that in no other country of the world, such an ambitious and huge scheme for the empowerment of women exists.
“Today everybody has proved that this programme can free women from the curse of poverty. Such an an emancipation is based on stable and self-made employment and not on the mercy and kindness of anybody.
“Our purpose is clear. We have to strengthen the women SHGs and their instruments financially,” she said.”
via Sonia seeks quick implementation of rural livelihood schemes | The Hindu.
03/06/2013
Nuclear weapons: India keeps pace with Pakistan, but focuses on China
Times of India: “China, India, and Pakistan all added 10 to 20 nuclear weapons to their arsenal last year even as the top four nuclear nations — US, Russia, UK and France — appear determined to retain their nuclear arsenals indefinitely even if they didn’t add to their inventory, the Swedish arms watchdog Sipri said in its 2013 handbook released this weekend.
NPT Nuclear Weapon States (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, US) Non-NPT Nuclear Weapon States (India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan) States accused of having nuclear weapons programs (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia) States formerly possessing nuclear weapons program (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sipri’s world nuclear forces chart showed India bumping up its nuclear warheads from 80-100 in 2012 to 90-110 in 2013, keeping pace with Pakistan, which went from 90-110 weapons to 110-120. China meantime went from 240 nuclear weapons in 2012 to 250 in 2013, while France and UK froze their arsenals at 300 and 225 weapons respectively, as did Israel at 80 weapons.
Russia and the USA were the only two countries reducing their inventories of strategic nuclear weapons under the terms of the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) as well as retiring ageing and obsolescent weapons. However, Sipri said, they, along with the three other recognized nuclear powers, France, Britain and China, are either deploying new nuclear weapon delivery systems or have announced programs to do so, and appear determined to retain their nuclear arsenals indefinitely.
As a result, although the total number of nuclear weapons in the world dropped from approximately 19000 in 2012 to 17265 in 2013, there was little to inspire hope that the nuclear weapon-possessing states are genuinely willing to give up their nuclear arsenals, the Sipri report said.”
via Nuclear weapons: India keeps pace with Pakistan, but focuses on China – The Times of India.
01/06/2013
Yuan may continue to appreciate
China Daily: “The yuan may be trading at below 6.1 against the US dollar as the Chinese currency continues to rise in the next few months, said a currency analyst at DBS Bank.
A trader with an Asian bank in Shanghai said that the yuan’s valuation has peaked for a few days, while sales of dollars are easing.
An employee from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is counting the renminbi and Japanese yen in Huaibei, Anhui province, on May 17. The yuan has gained some 20 percent against the yen since the beginning of the year. Woo He / For China Daily
“Most of my peers working in Shanghai share the opinion that in the short term the renminbi may further appreciate against the US dollar,” the trader said.
China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, set the yuan’s midpoint at a record-high level of 6.1796 against the US dollar, while the spot yuan closed at 6.1345 per dollar on Friday.
It has been 12 months since Japan’s yen and China’s yuan became directly convertible, and the yuan has gained some 20 percent against the yen since the beginning of the year.
The appreciation of the yuan and the depreciation of the yen may cast risks to China’s currency as it’s the only currency which lacks the elasticity of East Asian economies, wrote Liu Yuhui, a financial researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in an article published on Tuesday.
“It has been very difficult for us to guarantee orders from Japan these days because our price advantage disappeared,” said Yuan Hongtao, owner of a Hangzhou-based plastic production company, which exports some 40 percent of its products to Japan.
Analysts said that policymakers now have to figure out ways to help companies grow, as the renminbi is increasingly going global.
“While the benefits of direct convertibility between the renminbi and other currencies are obvious, including cutting the costs of exchange and reducing the risks brought by the fluctuation of the US dollar, it can also bring some risks to companies and regions in China whose growth is driven by foreign trade,” said Liu Yang, a foreign exchange analyst with Shanghai Gaofu Consultancy.
Currently, the yuan is directly convertible to the yen and the Australian dollar. New Zealand and China are in an early stage of negotiations for direct convertibility of each other’s currencies, according to a Reuters report on May 26.
“One important step to make the renmibi more internationalized is to use more yuan in direct investment overseas”, said Nathan Chow, vice-president and economist of group research with DBS Bank (Hong Kong) Ltd.
Chow said that only about 6 percent of China’s outbound direct investment uses renminbi, while 36 percent of foreign direct investment in China uses renminbi.
If regulations on ODI using renminbi are eased, a large amount of yuan will be released to overseas markets and help divert risks of the fluctuation of the US dollar, which is being used for foreign exchange reserves, said Chow.
He added that more big corporations may want to issue dim sum bonds — yuan-denominated bonds issued in Hong Kong — as the renminbi bond market grew significantly this year, driven by lower funding costs, improved macroeconomic conditions and the heightened expectations for yuan appreciation.
“Despite all these factors, market facilities for renminbi bonds still have a lot of catching up to do. Decision makers and financial institutions need to work closer with corporations, while continuing to improve the fundraising infrastructure in offshore renminbi centers such as Hong Kong and Singapore,” he said.
The yuan had appreciated 1.72 percent against the dollar since the beginning of the year, following a moderate gain of 1.03 percent throughout 2012.”
via Yuan may continue to appreciate |Economy |chinadaily.com.cn.
See also:
- https://chindia-alert.org/2013/03/11/yuan-flows-a-more-freely-as-china-relaxes-controls/
- http://chinawatch.washingtonpost.com/2013/02/yuan-going-strong-internationally-but-challenges-ahead.php
- http://thediplomat.com/pacific-money/2013/02/27/chinas-yuan-can-it-challenge-the-dollar/
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/01/21/in-some-trade-china-currency-replacing-dollar/
Related articles
- Taiwan and Hong Kong battle for renminbi deposits (wantchinatimes.com)
- HSBC, StanChart Offer Dim Sum Bonds in Singapore’s First Sales (bloomberg.com)
- Rising Yuan Boosts Demand for Dim-Sum Bonds (blogs.wsj.com)
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 