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.
The team, accompanied by a member of Du’s family, was due to travel on Monday, and will handle arrangements for the remains, as well as conducting its own internal investigation, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Israel’s foreign ministry said its director general Yuval Rotem had spoken with deputy ambassador Dai Yuming to express his condolences. Local police are continuing to investigate at Du’s residence in a suburb of Herzliya, near Tel Aviv.
Details from the Chinese side have been scant. China’s foreign ministry provided a statement to AFP on Sunday which said the preliminary verdict was that Du, 57, had died unexpectedly for health reasons, and details awaited further confirmation. AFP also reported that Du’s wife and son were not with him in Tel Aviv.
“As far as I know, China’s ambassador to Israel Du Wei passed away in ambassador’s residence in Tel Aviv this morning for physical reasons. It happened abruptly,” said Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of state media tabloid Global Times in a tweet late on Sunday night.
Du was last seen in public on Tuesday in a video conference with an official from Israel’s foreign affairs ministry, according to the embassy website.
James Dorsey, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said Du’s untimely death should be seen as a personal, rather than a political, tragedy for the growing relationship between China and Israel, but he said it came at an important moment for the two countries because of rising US-China tensions.
Dorsey said Israel’s increasing hi-tech cooperation with China, as well as continuing US hostility to Iran – which has close ties with China – were potentially problematic for relations between the two countries.
“I’m not sure that the China-Israel relationship can be seen as independent of the Israel-US relationship. One could argue that the Chinese may be well advised to very quickly replace him soon,” Dorsey said. “Israel could find itself on the fault line of deepening US-China decoupling,” he added.
Israel’s ambassador to China in quarantine after ‘infected’ flight to Seoul
28 Feb 2020
Following a brief trip to Jerusalem on Wednesday – his first foreign visit since March – US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo renewed warnings about China-Israel ties in an interview with Israeli state-owned media outlet Kan News.
“We do not want the Chinese Communist Party to have access to Israeli infrastructure, Israeli communication systems, all of the things that put Israeli citizens at risk,” he said.
China’s embassy in Tel Aviv blasted Pompeo’s comments as “absurd” and “ill-intentioned”. However, the embassy statement was not written by Du, but by a spokesperson.
Du had only served in Israel since February. Just before his arrival, the Chinese embassy had to issue an apology after then-acting ambassador Dai denounced Israel’s tightened restrictions on Chinese visitors by comparing them to the Holocaust.
During his brief tenure, Du gave frequent interviews to local media, speaking mainly about China’s virus control measures, US-China tensions, and friendship between China and the Jewish people.
Du had worked as a career diplomat since entering China’s foreign service in 1989. Before his appointment in Tel Aviv, he served as China’s ambassador to Ukraine from 2016-2019.
People’s Liberation Army has officially recorded no infections but disease fears have delayed recruitment, training and operations
Analysts say Sars experience guided military’s prompt response, but combat effectiveness has been affected
Chinese military medical personnel arriving in Wuhan in February to assist with the coronavirus outbreak response to the February. Photo: Reuters
China’s military may have been spared any coronavirus infections, but the global health crisis has slowed the progress of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s plan to transform the People’s Liberation Army into a modern fighting force capable of long-range power-projecting operations, experts say.
According to China’s defence ministry, the world’s largest armed force – with about 2.3 million personnel – has had zero confirmed cases of Covid-19. In contrast, the US and Russian militaries, ranked second- and third-largest in the world, have reported more than 4,000 and 1,000 respectively.
But the PLA has been affected in other ways by the disease, which was first reported in Wuhan in December before going on to infect 3.9 million people around the world to date.
Safety concerns delayed its annual spring recruitment programme – it has been rescheduled for August – while the PLA Navy was forced to change its training arrangements, switching to classroom study of military theory and tactics, according to Xinhua.
“The PLA is still a conscription army and, given its large turnover of soldiers every year and the late recruitment and training plan this year, the coronavirus pandemic has already affected combat effectiveness,” said Adam Ni, director of the China Policy Centre, an independent, non-profit research organisation based in Canberra, Australia.
China’s military budget will still rise despite coronavirus, experts predict
3 May 2020
The navy’s operations, in particular, would have been affected, according to Charlie Lyons Jones, a researcher from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s defence and strategy programme.
“The Chinese navy, short of highly effective disease control measures, is unlikely to avoid similar outbreaks of the novel coronavirus on board its warships,” he said.
“Therefore, even if the PLA Navy currently has zero personnel infected by the novel coronavirus, its position as a navy that can operate effectively in a period of higher-than-normal tension remains precarious at best,” Jones said. He also questioned Beijing’s claims that the military was virus-free.
“The PLA played an important role in China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan … The idea that none of these personnel working on the front lines in Wuhan became infected by the novel coronavirus would be inconsistent with the experiences of countries from around the world,” he said.
More than 4,000 military medical workers were sent to Wuhan as part of China’s effort to contain the outbreak at ground zero – which included the rapid-built emergency field facility, the Huoshenshan hospital – and their efforts were highlighted in a documentary screened recently by state broadcaster CCTV.
China opens coronavirus hospital built in 10 days
At the time, rumours were rampant that the Chinese military had been affected by the coronavirus, fuelled by a report on February 17 by the official PLA Daily that some soldiers had been placed in quarantine and Yu Qiusong, captain of the Changzhou type 054A frigate, was isolating in a guest house. The news report did not mention why the personnel were in quarantine.
But analysts said that whether the official numbers were accurate, the PLA’s closed management, fast response and past experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) gave China’s military an advantage in keeping the coronavirus at bay.
Zhou Chenming, a Beijing-based military observer, said a key reason for the less serious hit to the PLA compared to other forces was its speed in recognising the severity of the situation.
“What’s more, the PLA has its own logistic support system that can help minimise its contact with the outside world, thus reducing the possibility of contracting the virus,” he said.
China’s long-range stealth bomber could make its debut this year
4 May 2020
According to Xinhua, the PLA’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention drew up an emergency response plan and mobilisation arrangements on January 20, the same day Xi issued an instruction to the public that the virus must be “resolutely contained”.
Timothy Heath, a senior international defence research analyst with the Rand Corporation, a US think tank, said China’s military had benefited from its less international role, compared to US forces.
“The US is a globally distributed force while the Chinese military largely operates on the mainland. The US thus faces challenges in containing the disease that the Chinese military does not have to face … and the US military has a large range of missions and tasks it carries out to counter threats to its allies and partners, as well as to US security. This complicates efforts by the US military to carry out disease control measures,” he said.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China announced on Wednesday that its parliament will open a key annual session on May 22, signalling that Beijing sees the country returning to normal after being reduced to a near-standstill for months by the COVID-19 epidemic.
During the gathering of the National People’s Congress in the capital, delegates will ratify major legislation, and the government will unveil economic targets, set defence spending projections and make personnel changes. The ruling Communist Party also typically announces signature policy initiatives.
The session was initially scheduled to start on March 5 but was postponed due to COVID-19, which has infected nearly 83,000 people and killed more than 4,600 on the mainland after emerging late last year in the central city of Wuhan.
As the epidemic has subsided, economic and social life gradually returned to normal, making it possible for the congress to convene, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the standing committee of the NPC, the legislature’s top decision-making body, as saying.
The committee also appointed Huang Runqiu as the new minister for ecology and environment, a post vacated when predecessor Li Ganjie became deputy Communist Party chief for Shandong province earlier this month, Xinhua reported.
Tang Yijun was also named as the new justice minister to replace Fu Zhenghua, who has reached the retirement age of 65 for ministers.
The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body to parliament, has proposed starting its annual session a day before the parliamentary session opens.
Analysts expect China to roll out additional fiscal stimulus in order to cushion the blow from COVID-19, which has developed in to a worldwide pandemic that some fear will trigger a severe global recession.
China’s economy contracted for the first time on record during the January-March period, when the government imposed severe travel and transport restriction to curb the spread of the epidemic.
Parliament is also expected to discuss the anti-government protests in Hong Kong, amid growing speculation that Beijing take steps to strengthen its grip on the city.
It is unclear how long parliament and its advisory body will meet for this time, and people familiar with the matter have told Reuters that this year’s annual sessions could be the shortest in decades due to COVID-19 concerns. Usually more than 5,000 delegates descend on Beijing from all over China for at least 10 days.
Beijing city plans to ease quarantine rules as early as Thursday, two sources familiar with the situation told Reuters, ahead of the key political meetings.
People arriving in the capital from other parts of China will no long have to be quarantined for two weeks unless they come from high-risk areas such as Heilongjiang in the north and some parts of Guangdong in the southeast, the sources said.
SEOUL/BEIJING (Reuters) – China has allowed 200 employees from South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) to enter the country to work on an expansion of the firm’s NAND memory chip factory, the company said on Wednesday.
The move came after China said on Tuesday that it was in talks with some countries to establish fast-track procedures to allow travel by business and technical personnel to ensure the smooth operation of global supply chains.
China said it has reached a consensus on such an arrangement with South Korea, without elaborating on the terms, including whether individuals entering China will be subject to quarantine.
China, where the virus first emerged late last year, blocked entry last month for nearly all foreigners in an effort to curb risks of coronavirus infections posed by travellers from overseas. After bringing the local spread under control with tough containment measures, it is trying to restart its economic engines after weeks of near paralysis.
A chartered China Air Ltd (601111.SS) plane flew in the Samsung Electronics employees on Wednesday, a company spokeswoman said.
Samsung said its employees will follow the local government’s policy upon arrival, without elaborating.
Shaanxi province, where Samsung’s NAND memory chip plant is located, requires people travelling from overseas to undergo a 14-day quarantine, according to South Korea’s foreign ministry.
“Samsung employees will not be exempted from the 14-day quarantine rule imposed by the Shaanxi province. They will get coronavirus tests at the airport upon arrival and will be transported to a local hotel designated by Chinese authorities,” an official at the Consulate General of South Korea in Xi’an told Reuters.
Samsung Electronics in December increased investment at its chip factory in China by $8 billion to boost production of NAND flash memory chips.
Fans greeted the team as they arrived in Wuhan via train
Chinese Super League team Wuhan Zall made an emotional homecoming after being unable to return for three months because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Players had initially stayed at their winter training camp in Spain when the virus peaked in Wuhan in January.
After a prolonged transit in Germany, they landed in Shenzhen on 16 March and underwent three weeks’ quarantine.
They were greeted by fans when they arrived in Wuhan by train on Saturday evening.
“After more than three months of wandering, the homesick Wuhan Zall team members finally set foot in their hometown,” the team said on the Twitter-like Weibo.
Fans, dressed in the team’s orange colours, sang and gave the players flowers as they arrived home for the first time in 104 days.
Players will now spend time with their families before training resumes.
The team had first left Wuhan in early January to start preparing for the Super League season.
By the time they arrived in Malaga, residents in Wuhan were living under strict lockdown measures, and there were no planes or trains in or out of the capital.
Coach Jose Gonzalez told Spanish media at the time that the players “are not walking viruses, they are athletes” and asked for them not to be demonised.
The Chinese Super League was set to begin on 22 February but it has been postponed.
Faced with a backlash from the West over its handling of the early stages of the pandemic, Beijing has been quietly gaining ground in Asia
Teams of experts and donations of medical supplies have been largely welcomed by China’s neighbours
Despite facing some criticism from the West, China’s Asian neighbours have welcomed its medical expertise and vital supplies. Photo: Xinhua
While China’s campaign to mend its international image in the wake of its handling of the coronavirus health crisis has been met with scepticism and even a backlash from the US and its Western allies, Beijing has been quietly gaining ground in Asia.
Teams of experts have been sent to Cambodia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Pakistan and soon to Malaysia, to share their knowledge from the pandemic’s ground zero in central China.
China has also held a series of online “special meetings” with its Asian neighbours, most recently on Tuesday when Premier Li Keqiang discussed his country’s experiences in combating the disease and rebooting a stalled economy with the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), Japan and South Korea.
Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang speaks to Asean Plus Three leaders during a virtual summit on Tuesday. Photo: AP
Many Western politicians have publicly questioned Beijing’s role and its subsequent handling of the crisis but Asian leaders – including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – have been reluctant to blame the Chinese government, while also facing criticism at home for not closing their borders with China soon enough to prevent the spread of the virus.
An official from one Asian country said attention had shifted from the early stages of the outbreak – when disgruntled voices among the public were at their loudest – as people watched the virus continue its deadly spread through their homes and across the world.
“Now everybody just wants to get past the quarantine,” he said. “China has been very helpful to us. It’s also closer to us so it’s easier to get shipments from them. The [medical] supplies keep coming, which is what we need right now.”
The official said also that while the teams of experts sent by Beijing were mainly there to observe and offer advice, the gesture was still appreciated.
Another Asian official said the tardy response by Western governments in handling the outbreak had given China an advantage, despite its initial lack of transparency over the outbreak.
“The West is not doing a better job on this,” he said, adding that his government had taken cues from Beijing on the use of propaganda in shaping public opinion and boosting patriotic sentiment in a time of crisis.
“Because it happened in China first, it has given us time to observe what works in China and adopt [these measures] for our country,” the official said.
Experts in the region said that Beijing’s intensifying campaign of “mask diplomacy” to reverse the damage to its reputation had met with less resistance in Asia.
Why China’s ‘mask diplomacy’ is raising concern in the West
29 Mar 2020
“Over the past two months or so, China, after getting the Covid-19 outbreak under control, has been using a very concerted effort to reshape the narrative, to pre-empt the narrative that China is liable for this global pandemic, that China has to compensate other countries,” said Richard Heydarian, a Manila-based academic and former policy adviser to the Philippine government.
“It doesn’t help that the US is in lockdown with its domestic crisis and that we have someone like President Trump who is more interested in playing the blame game rather than acting like a global leader,” he said.
Shahriman Lockman, a senior analyst with the foreign policy and security studies programme at Malaysia’s Institute of Strategic and International Studies, said that as the US had withdrawn into its own affairs as it struggled to contain the pandemic, China had found Southeast Asia a fertile ground for cultivating an image of itself as a provider.
China’s first-quarter GDP shrinks for the first time since 1976 as coronavirus cripples economy
Beijing’s highly publicised delegations tasking medical equipment and supplies had burnished that reputation, he said, adding that the Chinese government had also “quite successfully shaped general Southeast Asian perceptions of its handling of the pandemic, despite growing evidence that it could have acted more swiftly at the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan”.
“Its capacity and will to build hospitals from scratch and put hundreds of millions of people on lockdown are being compared to the more indecisive and chaotic responses seen in the West, especially in Britain and the United States,” he said.
Coronavirus droplets may travel further than personal distancing guidelines
16 Apr 2020
Lockman said Southeast Asian countries had also been careful to avoid getting caught in the middle of the deteriorating relationship between Beijing and Washington as the two powers pointed fingers at each other over the origins of the new coronavirus.
“The squabble between China and the United States about the pandemic is precisely what Asean governments would go to great lengths to avoid because it is seen as an expression of Sino-US rivalry,” he said.
“Furthermore, the immense Chinese market is seen as providing an irreplaceable route towards Southeast Asia’s post-pandemic economic recovery.”
Aaron Connelly, a research fellow in Southeast Asian political change and foreign policy with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, said Asian countries’ dependence on China had made them slow to blame China for the pandemic.
“Anecdotally, it seems to me that most Southeast Asian political and business elites have given Beijing a pass on the initial cover-up of Covid-19, and high marks for the domestic lockdown that followed,” he said.
“This may be motivated reasoning, because these elites are so dependent on Chinese trade and investment, and see little benefit in criticising China.”
China and Vietnam ‘likely to clash again’ as they build maritime militias
12 Apr 2020
The cooperation with its neighbours as they grapple with the coronavirus had not slowed China’s military and research activities in the disputed areas of the South China Sea – a point of contention that would continue to cloud relations in the region, experts said.
Earlier this month an encounter in the South China Sea with a Chinese coastguard vessel led to the sinking of a fishing boat from Vietnam, which this year assumed chairmanship of Asean.
And in a move that could spark fresh regional concerns, shipping data on Thursday showed a controversial Chinese government survey ship, the Haiyang Dizhi 8, had moved closer to Malaysia’s exclusive economic zone.
The survey ship was embroiled in a months-long stand-off last year with Vietnamese vessels within Hanoi’s exclusive economic zone and was spotted again on Tuesday 158km (98 miles) off the Vietnamese coast.
Young people starting out in the jobs market face a hit to their prospects that could endure years after the Covid-19-induced downturn has run its course
A generation of angry youth raises the spectre of political instability
Freelance filmmaker Anita Reza Zein had grown used to jam-packed production schedules requiring her to put in long hours and run on little sleep. Until Covid-19 struck.
Today, the talented Indonesian is suddenly free. With five projects on hold and many more potentially cancelled, she now spends her time working on a personal project, doing research for her work and occasionally going for a ride on a bicycle.
“I feel calm and patient although I’m jobless. Maybe because it’s still the third week [of social distancing] and I still have enough savings from my previous work,” said the 26-year-old, who is from Yogyakarta. “But I imagine life will become tougher in the next few months if the situation gets worse.”
Like her, millions of youths are now part of a job market in Southeast Asia that has been ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. They are the unlucky cohort of 2020 whose fortunes have changed so drastically, so quickly.
Freelance filmmaker Anita Reza Zein now spends most of her time at home as her projects have all been frozen due to the spread of Covid-19. Photo: Anita Reza Zein
Just three months ago, many eager graduates were about to partake in a strong economy and possibly land decent pay cheques.
Today, job offers are being withdrawn and hiring halted, leading to a spike in regional youth unemployment in the short term. In the long term, the effects on the Covid-19 cohort could lead to wider social and political problems.
JOB MARKETS SHUT
The virus’ impact on economies and the job market in the region has been swift and devastating. Borders have been slammed shut, workers ordered to stay at home, and thousands of companies closed every week.
The biggest problem is the lack of certainty about how long this will last – the longer the governments keep their countries on lockdown, the worse the economic impact.
In Indonesia, for example, the virus has caused almost 2.8 million people to lose their jobs, according to the Manpower Ministry and the Workers Social Security Agency. Likewise, in Malaysia, an estimated 2.4 million people are expected to lose their jobs, going by data from the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER).
is bracing itself for a 5.3 per cent contraction in GDP for the full year, the worst since the Asian financial crisis in 1997.
“We think about seven million jobs have been lost already, and the figure will hit 10 million if the outbreak drags on for two to three more months,” said Kalin Sarasin, council member and head of the Thai Chamber of Commerce.
Lockdown for 34 million people in capital Jakarta as Indonesia fights surge in coronavirus deaths
For young jobseekers, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic could hurt even more, with companies unwilling to open up new jobs for them.
“My clients who were open to fresh graduates previously have realigned searches [for candidates] who have at least one year of experience, as it’s a lot faster for someone with experience to scale up quickly and contribute,” said Joanne Pek, a recruiter at Cornerstone Global Partners’ Singapore office.
For many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) such as Singapore-based restaurant chain The Soup Spoon, saving jobs – rather than recruiting – is the priority.
“We don’t want to let anyone go during this period, so we’re focused on protecting jobs,” said co-founder and director Benedict Leow, who employs some 250 workers.
THE COVID-19 COHORT
The looming economic downturn could have distinct consequences for the Class of 2020 that will outlast the economic downturn itself.
For one thing, the paucity of jobs could result in the Covid-19 cohort becoming a “lost generation” of sorts, said Achim Schmillen, a senior economist at the World Bank Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice.
“Research from around the globe shows that graduating in a recession can have significant and long-lasting impacts that can affect the entire career. In particular, it can lead to large initial earnings losses which only slowly recede over time,” he said.
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Economics professor Jeff Borland of the University of Melbourne said that international studies showed that what happened to people when they first entered the labour market would affect them for the rest of their working lives.
“Many international studies have shown that trying to move into employment during a major economic downturn cuts the probability of employment and future earnings for a decade or more.
“Why this occurs is less well-established. Reasons suggested include being forced to take lower-quality jobs, losing skills and losing psychological well-being,” he said in a piece published on The Conversation website.
Malaysia sets up Covid-19 test zones in the capital to hunt for ‘hidden’ coronavirus cases
This could create “lasting scarring” on the graduates this year, said labour economist Walter Theseira.
“If their careers start badly, it would affect their earnings for a number of years because they would lack the same experience as peers who started in a more secure position,” the associate professor of economics at Singapore University of Social Sciences said.
Shrinking salaries and the downsizing of companies mean that graduates might have to seek out professions outside their areas of study to survive, said Grace Lee Hooi Yean, head of the Economics Department at Monash University, Malaysia.
She said youth unemployment in the country, which stands at 11.67 per cent, could rise sharply.
“This looming crisis could trap a generation of educated and capable youth in a limbo of unmet expectations and lasting vulnerability if the graduates are not ready to face reality and adapt to the new challenges,” she said.
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This is fast becoming the reality for final-year medical student Rebecca K. Somasundaram, who has been left without a job due to the pandemic.
After being offered a residency programme at a top specialist hospital in Kuala Lumpur, she was notified a month ago that her placement had been made void until further notice. This has thrown the 24-year-old’s plans into disarray as she was hoping to enter the workforce soon to pay off her student debts. Her plans to get married next year have also been put on hold temporarily.
“I am in constant talks with the hospital to see if there is any way I can join them soon but seeing how things are unfolding so quickly, I am slowly losing hope,” she said.
Over in Indonesia, the pandemic will trigger job losses on a national scale. To combat this, the government would need to introduce strong fiscal measures and beef up its social protection policies, said the country’s former minister of finance Muhamad Chatib Basri.
Many people on lower incomes tend to work in the extraction industry, such as mining and palm oil, and these are the first industries hit due to the global slowdown.
“The rich will be able to brave the storm, but the poor have no means to do so,” he said.
Singapore migrant workers under quarantine as coronavirus hits dormitories
SPECTRE OF 1997
With partial lockdowns imposed in the capital of Jakarta, more needs to be done to ensure that vulnerable citizens have access to food and financial support.
Without government intervention, economic woes could soon translate into political instability, a scenario last seen in the Asian financial crisis.
In 1997, waves of discontent sparked racial riots in Indonesia that toppled the country’s long-time strongman Suharto, while in Thailand a political crisis created the conditions for populist leader Thaksin Shinawatra to rise.
Rising discontent could have serious implications at the ballot boxes, warned Basri, who said young voters were a key voting bloc for President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
Coronavirus: food security, Asia’s next battle in a post-Covid world
6 Apr 2020
In last year’s general elections, Jokowi proved a hit among the lower-educated youth who had benefited from the creation of largely unskilled jobs during his tenure.
“With more young people expected to become unemployed in the coming months, things will only get worse from here,” said Basri, who added that the country’s youth unemployment stood at almost 20 per cent in 2018.
Indonesia, which has 268 million people and is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, had 133 million workers as of last August, according to official data.
Close to 10 per cent or about 12.27 million are university graduates but among this group, about 5.67 per cent or some 730,000 were unemployed. This was higher than the country’s overall unemployment rate at that time, which was 5.28 per cent.
‘Ghosts’ deployed to scare Indonesians into staying home to slow spread of the coronavirus
GETTING IT RIGHT
Economists say, however, that all is not lost. Much will depend on policy and how governments focus on battling the virus on the public health and economic fronts. They point to Singapore, which has launched a robust response to the crisis.
On April 6, the Singapore government announced its third budget in two months to help companies and households tide over the crisis. In all, Singapore’s total stimulus package, which aims to save jobs and keep funds flowing to companies, will cost the government a massive S$59.9 billion (US$42 billion).
The Singapore government was also preparing for a labour market that would be reluctant to hire fresh graduates on a full-time basis, said Theseira.
“There are plans to implement large-scale subsidised traineeships, which may be more palatable to companies which are worried about taking on permanent headcount this year,” he noted. “As the economic situation improves, they can be converted to permanent positions.”
The next coronavirus: how a biotech boom is boosting Asian defences
4 Mar 2020
While jobs were being created for fresh graduates, many would still have to temper their expectations, such as taking jobs with lower starting pay, said DBS Bank economist Irvin Seah.
“There are still some jobs to go around. There are still some companies that may need workers. But they will need to be realistic,” he said.
For instance, despite the downturn, Singapore telco Singtel expects to recruit over 300 fresh graduates for various permanent positions this year, according to Aileen Tan, the company’s Group Chief Human Resources Officer. Many of the new hires will be in new growth areas such as the Internet of Things, analytics and cloud.
The Singtel Comcentre building in Singapore. Photo: Roy Issa
Other companies that continue to hire include those in tech across the region, including e-commerce giant Shopee, food-delivery service Foodpanda and Amazon.
In Australia, Borland suggested helping young people to remain plugged into the labour market through government-funded paid internships, or even offering them loans to go for further studies and prevent a spell of unemployment.
For now, while some young jobseekers are taking a wait-and-see approach, the reality is hitting hard for others.
Final-year National University of Singapore student H.P. Tan had all but secured a job at a public relations firm last month, after three rounds of interviews.
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences undergraduate was rejected via an email from the agency, which said that they could no longer hire after Covid-19 started to drastically cut business.
“When I got that rejection, it was a turning point. I didn’t think I would be directly impacted,” said the 23-year-old.
“I also applied to a few other agencies but the response has been slow, so I am now freaking out at the possibility of not being able to find a job after graduation.”
Indian defence officials have reported a coronavirus outbreak at a key naval base in the western city of Mumbai.
Twenty-one personnel have tested positive for Covid-19 at INS Angre, which is the seat of the force’s western command, the navy said in a statement on Saturday.
It added that there are no infections aboard any ships or submarines.
India has 11,906 active infections and 480 deaths, according to the latest data from the ministry of health.
The Navy said that they had tested a number of personnel who had come into contact with a soldier who had tested positive earlier this month. Many of those who had tested positive for the virus, the statement added, were asymptomatic.
All 21 personnel live in the same residential block, which has been declared a containment zone and has been placed under lockdown.
In a video message to personnel last week, Navy Chief Admiral Karambir Singh stressed the importance of keeping ships and submarines free of the virus.
“The coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented and it has never been seen before. Its impact has been extraordinary across the globe, including India,” he said.
The navy has been playing an active role in India’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak.
It has set up isolation facilities to treat patients at one of its premier hospital units and is also running quarantine camps.
The outbreak aboard the Indian naval base follows reports of outbreaks aboard vessels belonging to other nations.
More than 500 sailors on the USS Roosevelt have tested positive for the virus and one of them died earlier this week. And nearly a third of the sailors serving with France’s aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle – 668 out of nearly 2,000 – have been infected with coronavirus.
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China ordered on Saturday that anyone in Wuhan working in certain service-related jobs must take a coronavirus test if they want to leave the city.
The order comes after the central city, where the coronavirus emerged late last year, lifted a 70-day lockdown that all but ended the epidemic there.
People in Wuhan work in nursing, education, security and other sectors with high exposure to the public must take a nucleic acid test before leaving, the National Health Commission said in an order.
The government of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is capital, will pay for the tests, the commission said.
Since the city relaxed its lockdown restrictions people who arrived in there before Chinese New Year, when the virus was peaking in China, are allowed to go back to their homes.
People working in other sectors aiming to leave Wuhan are encouraged to take voluntary tests before going.
Within seven days of arrival at their destinations, people who can present test results showing they do not carry the virus, as well as a clean bill of health on a health app, can go back to work.
Everyone else will have to spend 14 days in quarantine before returning to work.
Authorities have worked with the China’s tech giants to devise a colour-based health code system, retrieved via mobile app, that uses geolocation data and self-reported information to indicate one’s health status.
Wuhan will speed up its efforts to investigate asymptomatic coronavirus cases and confirm the presence of antibodies in people, which might suggest immunity, the commission said.
Wuhan, which accounts for 60% of infections in China and 84% of the death toll as of Saturday, has been testing inhabitants aggressively throughout the virus’ breakout and many companies had already been asking workers from the city to undergo tests before resuming work.
Wuhan revised up its death toll from the coronavirus by 1,290 on Friday, taking the city’s toll to 3,869, because of incorrect reporting, delays and omissions, especially in the chaotic early stages of the outbreak, authorities said.
China national death toll is 4,632 from 82,719 cases.
SUIFENHE, China (Reuters) – China’s northeastern border with Russia has become a frontline in the fight against a resurgence of the coronavirus epidemic as new daily cases rose to the highest in nearly six weeks – with more than 90% involving people coming from abroad.
Having largely stamped out domestic transmission of the disease, China has been slowly easing curbs on movement as it tries to get its economy back on track, but there are fears that a rise in imported cases could spark a second wave of COVID-19.
A total of 108 new coronavirus cases were reported in mainland China on Sunday, up from 99 a day earlier, marking the highest daily tally since March 5.
Imported cases accounted for a record 98. Half involved Chinese nationals returning from Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, home to the city of Vladivostok, who re-entered China through border crossings in Heilongjiang province.
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“Our little town here, we thought it was the safest place,” said a resident of the border city of Suifenhe, who only gave his surname as Zhu.
“Some Chinese citizens – they want to come back, but it’s not very sensible, what are you doing coming here for?”
The border is closed, except to Chinese nationals, and the land route through the city had become one of few options available for people trying to return home after Russia stopped flights to China except for those evacuating people.
Streets in Suifenhe were virtually empty on Sunday evening due to restrictions of movement and gatherings announced last week, when authorities took preventative measures similar to those imposed in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the pandemic ripping round the world first emerged late last year.
The total number of confirmed cases in mainland China now stands at 82,160 as of Sunday, and at the peak of the first wave of the epidemic on Feb 12 there were over 15,000 new cases.
Though the number of daily infections across China has dropped sharply from that peak, China has seen the daily toll creep higher after hitting a trough on March 12 because of the rise in imported cases.
Chinese cities near the Russian frontier are tightening border controls and imposing stricter quarantines in response.
Suifenhe and Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, are now mandating 28 days of quarantine as well as nucleic acid and antibody tests for all arrivals from abroad.
In Shanghai, authorities found that 60 people who arrived on Aeroflot flight SU208 from Moscow on April 10 have the coronavirus, Zheng Jin, a spokeswoman for the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, told a press conference on Monday.
Residents in Suifenhe said a lot of people had left the city fearing contagion, but others put their trust in authorities’ containment measures.
“I don’t need to worry,” Zhao Wei, another Suifenhe resident, told Reuters. “If there’s a local transmission, I would, but there’s not a single one. They’re all from the border, but they’ve all been sent to quarantine.”
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