continuously updated blog about China & India
You will be living in their world, very soon
Beware the Waking Dragon
This photo is from the current 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Obviously it was taken during one of the breaks. No one would dare talk or yawn if a VIP speaker was on the podium. But note, everyone is drinking Chinese tea; not water, not beer, or Coca Cola. Does that explain why the Chinese leadership are relatively relaxed and calm and so effective?
Close on the heels of a survey regarding happiness, comes this more serious survey. The new leadership should heed the results:
WSJ: “With China’s once-a-decade leadership transition set to get underway on Thursday, pundits and scholars around the globe are speculating about what Beijing’s new top brass will — or won’t — do to tackle the country’s many problems. But what change are Chinese people themselves expecting to see?
If an online survey conducted by the state-run China Youth Daily newspaper is anything to go by, the answer is one that recalls the ideological roots, if not the recent reality, of China’s ruling party: income redistribution.
Of 11,405 Chinese Internet users polled by the Social Survey Center of China Youth Daily last week, 66.6% said they thought the country was likely to pursue reforms related to income distribution in the future, the newspaper reported on Tuesday (in Chinese). Second on the list were reforms aimed at curbing corruption (57.8%), followed by reforms of the economic system (53.5%) in third.
The results exceeded 100% because respondents were allowed to choose multiple options. Nearly half of respondents were born in the 1980s, with 17.7% born in the 1990s and the rest born in the 1970s, the newspaper said, adding that most of those who took part in the poll earned less than 5000 yuan ($800) per month.”
via State Media Survey: It’s the Wealth Gap, Stupid. – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/11/05/china-authorities-pushing-happiness-amid-rising-discontent/
It was the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan that started the notion of a Gross Happiness Index. UK’s Premier Cameron had a brief stab at tit. And now the world’s most populous country is having ago. Maybe it will be taken seriously in due course!
SCMP: “With dissatisfaction growing over corruption, inequality, food safety and numerous other social problems, mainland authorities are shifting their focus from economics to emotions.
Simply put, they want everyone to be happy.
From Beijing to Ningxia, local, provincial and regional leaders have been setting up “happiness indexes” or otherwise tailoring programmes, projects and policies to increase people’s satisfaction with their lives, as well as, of course, with the government.
Eighteen provinces and more than 100 cities have jumped on the happiness bandwagon in recent years, according to a report in Beijing News last week.
The campaign has helped the Communist Party set the stage for its 18th national congress, which opens this week amid increased incidents of social unrest.
While most analysts welcome the increased focus on people’s welfare, some caution that happiness is hard to measure and suggest the party would be better off advancing concrete policies for social change.
The public has been less forgiving, mercilessly ridiculing the policy on the internet.
“Without a constitutional government and democracy, a ‘Happy China’ will only be a fable,” said Professor Hu Xingdou, who is a commentator at the Beijing University of Technology.
“There are so many things that the authorities could do to improve the public’s satisfaction, such as protecting civil rights, building a democratic country, fighting corruption, stopping illegal land grabs and cutting taxes.”
Reform-minded Guangdong party secretary Wang Yang became perhaps the most prominent – and widely mocked – proponent of the public satisfaction drive last year when he outlined his proposal for a “Happy Guangdong” province.
As part of the plan, Wang allocated 423 billion yuan (HK$521 billion) for projects to improve people’s livelihood. He said he would attempt to reduce the province’s gross domestic product growth from a breakneck 12.5 per cent to a more manageable level of 8 per cent.
To measure his success, Wang set up an index of individual economic indicators, including employment, income, education, health care, crime, housing, infrastructure, social security and the environment.
But Wang was hardly the first to try out such a scheme. His now-disgraced rival, former Chongqing boss Bo Xilai, also pledged to slow the local growth rate after his city was named the mainland’s happiest in 2010.
In Beijing, local propaganda authorities even aired a seven-episode television series in August offering advice to those who are unhappy.
In it, a professor with a psychology degree from Harvard University instructed people on how to find their inner peace, rather than find fault with the government.
Jiangyin city, Jiangsu province, had one of the earliest satisfaction drives. The local government set up its happiness index in 2007, promising to improve the city’s employment, income, public safety and heath care, as well as reducing pollution.
The programme has been a rousing success, if you believe the government’s survey. Within three years, Jiangyin found that 95.87 per cent of its residents felt happy.
Professor Xu Guangjian, of Renmin University’s School of Public Administration and Policy, said he had not seen a single regional government that had been able to convincingly survey the public’s level of happiness. “The factors behind unhappiness are obvious,” he said.
Surveys conducted by Guangdong’s newspapers and government think tanks suggest the main source of most people’s gripes is the government, with many pointing to failures in job creation, social welfare, medical services, housing, pollution, food safety and soaring prices.
And there may be a new source of public dissatisfaction: satisfaction drives.
“It’s very difficult to measure happiness and there’s a subtle growing dislike of the authorities’ overwhelming happiness campaigns,” said Professor Xing Zhanjun, of the Centre for Quality of Life and Public Policy at Shandong University. “The public is starting to mock the word these days.”
Nonetheless, central government authorities have been eager to extend the policy. Many local governments picked up the satisfaction agenda after Premier Wen Jiabao made happiness and human dignity central elements of his 2010 work report.
In the run-up to the party congress, China Central Television (CCTV) has been running a series of segments for it which it conducted 3,500 man-on-the-street interviews in an attempt to measure the mainland’s “gross national happiness”.
Many have dismissed the series as superficial. CCTV reporters simply ask people whether they are happy and an overwhelming majority answer “yes”.
But the segments have not been without their enlightening moments, such as when a reporter pulled one interviewee out of a queue. “I am unhappy because when I answered your question, I lost my place in the queue,” the person said.
Professor Steve Tsang Yui-sang, director of the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute, said Beijing, if it were truly serious about reform, would appoint independent research institutes to survey main obstacles to happiness.
“It can cost as little as several hundred thousand yuan and would be much cheaper than CCTV’s street survey with some 70 camera crews,” Tsang said.”
via China authorities pushing happiness amid rising discontent | South China Morning Post.
BBC: “English has been the dominant global language for a century, but is it the language of the future? If Mandarin Chinese is to challenge English globally, then it first has to conquer its own backyard, South East Asia.
In Malaysia’s southernmost city of Johor Bahru, the desire to speak good English has driven some children to make a remarkable two-hour journey to school every day.
Nine-year-old Aw Yee Han hops on a yellow mini van at 04:30. His passport is tucked inside a small pouch hung around his neck.
This makes it easier for him to show it to immigration officials when he reaches the Malaysian border.
His school is located on the other side, in Singapore, where unlike in Malaysia, English is the main language.
It’s not your typical school run, but his mother, Shirley Chua thinks it’s worth it.
“Science and maths are all written in English so it’s essential for my son to be fluent in the language,” she says.
Continue reading the main story
Robert Lane Greene
Author of You Are What You Speak
The assumption that Mandarin will grow with China’s economic rise may be flawed. Consider Japan which, after spectacular post-war economic growth, became the world’s second-biggest economy. The Japanese language saw no comparable rise in power and prestige.
The same may prove true of Mandarin. The character-based writing system requires years of hard work for even native speakers to learn, and poses a formidable obstacle to foreigners. In Asia, where China’s influence is thousands of years old, this may pose less of a problem. But in the West, even dedicated students labour for years before they can confidently read a text of normal difficulty on a random topic.
Finally, many languages in Asia, Africa and the Amazon use “tones” (rising, falling, flat or dipping pitch contours) to distinguish different words. For speakers of tonal languages (like Vietnamese) learning the tones of Mandarin poses no particular difficulty. But speakers of non-tonal languages struggle to learn tones in adulthood – just ask any adult Mandarin-learner for their funniest story about using a word with the wrong tone.
An estimated 15,000 students from southern Johor state make the same bus journey across the border every day. It may seem like a drastic measure, but some parents don’t trust the education system in Malaysia – they worry that the value of English is declining in the country.
Since independence from the British in 1957, the country has phased out schools that teach in English. By the early 1980s, most students were learning in the national language of Malay.
As a result, analysts say Malaysian graduates became less employable in the IT sector.
“We’ve seen a drastic reduction in the standard of English in our country, not just among the students but I think among the teachers as well,” says political commentator Ong Kian Ming.
Those who believe that English is important for their children’s future either send their kids to expensive private schools or to Singapore, where the government has been credited as being far-sighted for adopting the language of its former colonial master.
Nearly three-quarters of the population in Singapore are ethnic Chinese but English is one of the national languages and very widely-spoken.
Many believe that this has helped the city state earn the title of being the easiest place to do business, by the World Bank.
Continue reading the main story
Lost in translation
Up to 7,000 different languages are estimated to be spoken around the world
Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French are world’s most widely spoken languages, according to UNESCO
Languages are grouped into families that share a common ancestry
English is related to German and Dutch, and all are part of Indo-European family of languages
Also includes French, Spanish and Italian, which come from Latin
2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia, while Europe has 260
Source: BBC Languages
Read more about languages of the world
However, the dominance of English is now being challenged by the rise of China in Singapore.
The Singapore Chinese Chamber Institute of Business has added Chinese classes for business use in recent years.
Students are being taught in Mandarin rather than the Hokkien dialect spoken by the older Chinese immigrants.
These courses have proved popular, ever since the government began providing subsidies for Singaporeans to learn Chinese in 2009 during the global financial crisis.
“The government pushed to provide them with an opportunity to upgrade themselves so as to prepare themselves for the economic upturn,” says chamber spokesperson Alwyn Chia.
Some businesses are already desperate for Chinese speakers.
Lee Han Shih, who runs a multimedia company, says English is becoming less important to him financially because he is taking western clients to do business in China.
“So obviously you need to learn English but you also need to know Chinese,” says Mr Lee.
As China’s economic power grows, Mr Lee believes that Mandarin will overtake English. In fact, he has already been seeing hints of this.
“The decline of the English language probably follows the decline of the US dollar.
“If the renminbi is becoming the next reserve currency then you have to learn Chinese.”
More and more, he says, places like Brazil and China are doing business in the renminbi, not the US dollar, so there is less of a need to use English.”
via BBC News – Is English or Mandarin the language of the future?.
Reform and improvements keep coming. Is it because of the decennial leadership change or is it due to genuine concern for the people; or maybe it’s a bit of both.
Reuters: “China adopted a law on Friday to protect for the first time the rights of the mentally ill after years of accusations that psychiatric hospitals are used to lock up people against their will and silence dissidents.
Human rights advocates called the hard-fought for law, which has been debated for more than two decades, significant, even though they say it still falls short of international standards as it allows for involuntary commitment without judicial review.
The law will “curb abuses regarding compulsory mental health treatment and protect citizens from undergoing unnecessary treatment or illegal hospitalization”, the Xinhua state news agency said.
“We welcome it because having a law is better than not having one,” Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, told Reuters.
“The most important thing that this law does is it will allow civil society to step in to monitor and press for improvement in the management of mental health in China, including … pushing for greater transparency and progressive curtailment of police rights.”
Activists have long argued that authorities force people they consider troublemakers into psychiatric hospitals without providing any evidence of their supposed crimes.
The tactic has been used to silence dissidents, whistle-blowers and petitioners. More recently, it has been used by people against relatives during family disputes.
State media has reported on people being locked up in psychiatric hospitals against their will.
Chen Guoming, a former gold store owner, was forced into an asylum in 2011 by his wife and locked up for 56 days after refusing to lend money to his wife’s family, Xinhua said.
The new law bans mental health examinations of a citizen against his or her own will, Xinhua said.”
via China adopts mental health law to curb forced treatment | Reuters.
See also: https://chindia-alert.org/prognosis/chinese-challenges/
We hope that this is a genuine trend and not just a passing fad. If it catches on, not only in restaurants but at home, the pressure on meat sources will be substantially reduced. It will also mean healthier Chinese with reduced call for medical services.
China Daily: “A new eating trend is popping up on the doorstep of the Peking duck, and it has nothing to do with meat, but plenty to do with a generation of young, rich, health-conscious consumers. Sarah Marsh and Thomas Hale restaurant-hop in Beijing to find out more.
An array of colorful and carefully put together dishes is brought to the table. All of the traditional Beijing favorites are there, including a round tray filled with pancakes and strips of cucumber served with a hoisin dipping sauce. However, instead of Peking duck completing the dish, diners are served something quite different. They are instead presented with beancurd skin, milk curds and toon tree shoots. It might sound unusual but vegetarian food like this is taking over China’s capital. A growing number of restaurant-goers now opt for vegetarian dishes over meat.
The dish imitating Beijing’s world-renowned Peking duck is served at the Gingko Tree in Sanlitun, a restaurant that opened on Oct 5, 2011.
According to its owner, 32-year-old Wang Rui, when it first opened, the restaurant welcomed 20 visitors daily, but this number has now increased 500 percent to approximately 100.
This is no one-off. Wang explains that more non-meat eateries are opening up all the time.
“The trend started about seven years ago as the Chinese gradually became more aware of the health benefits. Lots of new vegetarian restaurants sprung up between 2002 and 2006,” Wang says.
About 15 years ago there were one or two vegetarian cafes but now there are nearly 100 and competition is fierce.
Many vegetarian restaurants promote organic food, a growing phenomenon in China. The Seattle Times reported that overall Chinese organic exports have rocketed from $300,000 in 1995 to about $500 million in 2008. Both vegetarianism and organic foods are associated with healthy eating in China.”
If only corruption can be solved so easily with technology.
Times of India: “With United Progressive Alliance(UPA) facing allegations of corruption, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday said his government wants to use new technology to curb dishonesty and bring transparency in governance.
Speaking at the launch of Aadhar-enabled Service Delivery system, he said the unique identity numbers will help 1.5 crore students get scholarships, two crore elderly get old age pensions, three crore to avail health insurance and five crore people get the benefits of MNREGA.
The scheme is aimed at directly transferring cash to beneficiaries under social schemes such as MNREGA and pension.
“By giving benefits directly to the needy, complaints of dishonesty and delay will reduce,” Singh said at a function where he handed over Aadhar number ’21 crore’ to a villager here.
“Our government wants to use new technology in a big way to curb dishonesty and bring transparency in governance. Aadhar is an important step in this direction,” he said.
In the past two years, he said, the government has enrolled 24 crore people for Aadhar and “we expect to give Aadhar cards to around 60 crore by 2014”.
Addressing the function, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi said the Aadhar scheme gives identity to the common man and is a tool to claim benefits.
Using the Aadhar card, she said, the common man can claim his rights anywhere in the country.
“The Aadhar card will help the government in ensuring that subsidy reaches its intended beneficiaries directly and the poor will not have to run from pillar to post to claim their rights,” she said.”
via Govt wants to use technology to curb dishonesty: PM – The Times of India.
As usual, The Economist has encapsulated India’s dilemma superbly. India is at a crossroads between a welfare oriented approach that has not really worked for 60+ years and a growth driven approach that has been of great service to China for the past two decades. But are Indians ready to make a paradigm shift? Only future history will tell.
The Economist: “When India won independence 65 years ago, its leaders had a vision for the country’s future. In part, their dream was admirable and rare for Asia: liberal democracy. Thanks to them, Indians mostly enjoy the freedom to protest, speak up, vote, travel and pray however and wherever they want to; and those liberties have ensured that elected civilians, not generals, spies, religious leaders or self-selecting partymen, are in charge. If only their counterparts in China, Russia, Pakistan and beyond could say the same.
But the economic part of the vision was a failure. Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the independence movement, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, left the country with a reverence for poverty, a belief in self-reliance and an overweening state that together condemned the country to a dismal 3-4% increase in annual GDP—known as the “Hindu rate of growth”—for the best part of half a century.
But reforms have not gone far enough (see our special report). Indian policy still discourages foreign investment and discriminates in favour of small, inefficient firms and against large, efficient ones. The state controls too much of the economy and subsidies distort prices. The damage is felt in both the private and the public sectors. Although India’s service industries employ millions of skilled people, the country has failed to create the vast manufacturing base that in China has drawn unskilled workers into the productive economy. Corruption in the public sector acts as a drag on business, while the state fails to fulfil basic functions in health and education. Many more people are therefore condemned to poverty in India than in China, and their prospects are deteriorating with India’s economic outlook. Growth is falling and inflation and the government’s deficit are rising.
Modest changes, big fuss
To ease the immediate problems and to raise the country’s growth rate, more reforms are needed. Labour laws that help make Indian workers as costly to employers as much better-paid Chinese ones need to be scrapped. Foreign-investment rules need to be loosened to raise standards in finance, higher education and infrastructure. The state’s role in power, coal, railways and air travel needs to shrink. Archaic, British-era rules on buying land need to be changed.
Among economists, there is a widespread consensus about the necessary policy measures. Among politicians, there is great resistance to them. Look at the storm that erupted over welcome but modest reformist tinkering earlier this month. Mr Singh’s government lost its biggest coalition ally for daring to lift the price of subsidised diesel and to let in foreign supermarkets, under tight conditions.
Democracy, some say, is the problem, because governments that risk being tipped out of power are especially unwilling to impose pain on their people. That’s not so. Plenty of democracies—from Brazil through Sweden to Poland—have pushed through difficult reforms. The fault lies, rather, with India’s political elite. If the country’s voters are not sold on the idea of reform, it is because its politicians have presented it to them as unpleasant medicine necessary to fend off economic illness rather than as a means of fulfilling a dream.
Another time, another place
In many ways, India looks strikingly like America in the late 19th century. It is huge, diverse, secular (though its people are religious), materialistic, largely tolerant and proudly democratic. Its constitution balances the central government’s authority with considerable state-level powers. Rapid social change is coming with urban growth, more education and the rise of big companies. Robber barons with immense riches and poor taste may be shamed into becoming legitimate political donors, philanthropists and promoters of education. As the country’s wealth grows, so does its influence abroad.
For India to fulfil its promise, it needs its own version of America’s dream. It must commit itself not just to political and civic freedoms, but also to the economic liberalism that will allow it to build a productive, competitive and open economy, and give every Indian a greater chance of prosperity. That does not mean shrinking government everywhere, but it does mean that the state should pull out of sectors it has no business to be in. And where it is needed—to organise investment in infrastructure, for instance, and to regulate markets—it needs to become more open in its dealings.
India’s politicians need to espouse this vision and articulate it to the voters. Mr Singh has done his best; but he turned 80 on September 26th, and is anyway a bureaucrat at heart, not a leader. The remnants of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, to whom many Indians still naturally turn, are providing no leadership either— maybe because they do not have it in them, maybe because they have too much at stake to abandon the old, failed vision. Sonia Gandhi, Nehru’s grand-daughter-in-law and Congress’s shadowy president, shows enthusiasm for welfare schemes, usually named after a relative, but not for job-creating reforms. If her son Rahul, the heir apparent to lead Congress, understands the need for a dynamic economy, there’s no way of knowing it, for he never says anything much.
These people are hindering India’s progress, not helping it. It is time to shake off the past and dump them. The country needs politicians who see the direction it should take, understand the difficult steps required, and can persuade their countrymen that the journey is worthwhile. If it finds such leaders, there is no limit to how far India might go.”
From: http://www.economist.com/node/21563720
Once again we see China’s central government trying to do the right thing, but thwarted by both selfish interests of unethical and unscrupulous business people, often with local authorities turning a blind eye to malpractices as any remedial action may reduce local economic gains.
China Daily: “Report shows eating healthily is a major concern for Chinese people
Food safety is a top concern for Chinese shoppers, especially regarding such produce as vegetables, meat, seafood, grain, cooking oils and dairy goods, according to a report from Ipsos.
It shows Chinese people are very concerned about the quality of what they eat, especially those who are older (aged 31 to 50) and those who earn a higher monthly salary (12,000 yuan a year and above – more than $1,900).
Most people are highly aware of various channels through which they can obtain information on food safety, especially with incidents regarding clenbuterol in meat (showing awareness rates as high as 94 percent), melamine in baby milk formulas (92 percent), swill-cooked “gutter” oil (85 percent) and tainted steamed buns (80 percent).
Food experts
Public concern about food safety results in food experts and third-party institutes being listened to in greater numbers and in more detail.
As a result, the Ipsos report shows that shoppers’ trust in experts and authorities has reached 83 percent. A total of 89 percent of the respondents have shown an interest in participating in science activities organized by such experts.
However, people do not always form an accurate picture. When there is negative news about one brand, trust in all brands in that or similar sectors tends to be affected. As many as 70 percent of the respondents said they would doubt not only the brand in question but also similar brands when news of a safety issue emerges.
“Food safety incidents that have occurred in China attracted a lot of attention but the general public still has a very limited knowledge base on the issue. In the United States and European countries, there have been fully fledged food manufacturing practice and response measures toward safety issues,” said Jennifer Tsai, managing director of Innovation and Forecasting at Ipsos Marketing in Greater China.
“Therefore, the consumers in those countries are less likely to become over-panicked and form serious doubts about all brands.”
Tsai added that an independent third-party body should be set up to provide information about manufacturers’ processes in raw material selection, production and distribution. The government should also have a role to play in this. However, this might require several years and the public still needs to learn more about food safety.”
via The consuming challenge of food safety |Economy |chinadaily.com.cn.
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 