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A push to connect Pacific nations highlights a submarine struggle for dominance over the world’s technology infrastructure
The ambitions of Chinese tech giants like Huawei, which have laid thousands of kilometres of cable, are of increasing concern to Washington
The ambitions of Chinese tech giants like Huawei, which have laid thousands of kilometres of cable, are of increasing concern to Washington. Photo: Reuters
While the US has been upping the pressure on its allies not to include equipment made by Chinese telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE in their 5G systems, Chinese companies have gained a foothold in some of the world’s most essential communications infrastructure – undersea internet cables.
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Almost all global data communications flow through cables under the ocean – just one per cent travels by satellite – and Chinese companies have quietly been eroding US, European and Japanese dominance over the backbone of the internet, the undersea cable market. Now, they have trained their sights on connecting one of the most virtually remote parts of the globe, the Pacific Island countries.
Of the 378 cables currently operating worldwide, 23 are under the Pacific. But many of these cables run right by Pacific Island nations on their paths between hubs in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Singapore.
An electric submarine cable and optical fibre. File photo
Despite the volume of data flowing under the Pacific Ocean, just half a million of the 11 million people living in Pacific Island countries and Papua New Guinea – less than five per cent – have access to a wired internet connection and only 1.5 million to a mobile connection, according to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for the Asia Pacific (UNESCAP), compared with 53 per cent of people in Thailand and 60 per cent in the Philippines.
More than US$4 billion worth of cables are to come into service by 2021, continuing a trend in which US$2 billion worth of cables have come online every year since 2016, and six of these cables will connect Pacific Island countries.
The push to connect Pacific Island nations to the latest generation of internet infrastructure has received extra scrutiny from the US and its allies like Australia
over the involvement of Chinese tech companies.
Choose Beijing over Taipei, Solomon Islands task force recommends
13 Sep 2019
SECURITY CONCERNS
While the US has moved to block Huawei from supplying equipment to its allies’ 5G networks, experts say Chinese tech companies could contest the US, EU and
long-standing dominance over global data traffic through investments in subsea cables.
Chinese tech giants like Huawei have entire divisions devoted to undersea connectivity that have laid thousands of kilometres of cable, and Chinese state telecommunication companies such as China Unicom have access to many of the existing trans-Pacific cables.
But a panel led by the US Department of Justice has held up a nearly complete trans-Pacific cable project over concerns about its Chinese investor, Beijing-based Dr Peng Telecom & Media Group.
The project, the Pacific Light Cable Network, could be the first cable rejected by the panel on the grounds of national security – despite being backed by American tech giants Google and Facebook – setting a precedent for a tougher US stance on Chinese involvement in subsea cables.
Chinese tech giants like Huawei have entire divisions devoted to undersea connectivity that have laid thousands of kilometres of cable. Photo: AP
Craige Sloots, director of sales at Southern Cross Cable Network, which operates the largest existing sets of trans-Pacific cables, said for any new cable, regulators were likely to scrutinise the ownership of the companies involved and the maker of the project’s equipment.
These two factors, said Sloots, “pragmatically limit some of the providers you can use if you want to connect through the US”.
Experts say that Hong Kong, where the stalled Pacific Light Cable would land, was previously considered a more secure shore landing point than mainland China. But people close to the project say the recent unrest in the city has made this distinction less relevant, according to The Wall Street Journal.
If these nations want to be part of the international economy, they need reliable communications: Bruce Howe, University of Hawaii
Similar concerns caused a proposed Huawei-backed cable linking Vanuatu with Papua New Guinea to be called off last year after Australia stepped in to fund its own cable instead.
Just months after the government-owned Solomon Islands Submarine Cable Company agreed to the project with Huawei in mid-2017, Canberra put up US$67 million to connect Sydney with the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea with cables laid under the Coral Sea by Nokia’s Alcatel Submarine Networks.
Simon Fletcher, CEO of Vanuatu company Interchange, which had been planning another cable in the neighbourhood connecting Vanuatu with the Solomon Islands, said the Coral Sea project undercut the viability for small private businesses to operate in the fledgling market, where services had historically been provided by international organisations like development banks. His company’s cable has been on pause since the announcement of the Coral Sea project, though Fletcher said it would go forward next year.
US-China battle for dominance extends across Pacific, above and below the sea
22 Jul 2019
VIRTUALLY REMOTE
For years, as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore became global hubs of high-speed internet data traffic, the cables criss-crossing the ocean floor passed by just off the shores of Pacific Island countries en route between hubs on either side of the ocean.
Tiziana Bonapace, director of UNESCAP’s information technology and disaster risk-reduction division, said the Pacific Islands remain one of the most disconnected areas in the world, where “a vast proportion of the population has no access to the internet”.
Over the past five years, international organisations like UNESCAP, the Asia Development Bank and the World Bank have been pushing for better connectivity in the region. The World Bank’s Pacific Regional Connectivity Programme has invested more than US$90 million into broadband infrastructure for Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Samoa and Tuvalu.
Internet cables in the Pacific Ocean.
But the business case had never been good, said Bonapace.
“A cable has to travel thousands of kilometres just to connect a population smaller than one of Asia’s megacities,” she said. “As everything we do is somehow connected to the internet, the prospects for the Pacific to become virtually more remote are even higher.”
Even nations which are connected have tenuous infrastructure. In January, Tonga experienced a total internet blackout for two weeks after damage to its single cable. Most parts of the world were linked by multiple cables to prevent this type of outage, said Bruce Howe, professor of ocean and resources engineering at University of Hawaii.
“If these nations want to be part of the international economy, they need reliable communications,” Howe said.
Is Chinese support for Pacific nations shaping their stance on West Papua?
26 Aug 2019
DRAWING NEW LINES
In Papua New Guinea, where mobile internet currently reaches less than a third of the population, a partnership between local telecoms company GoPNG and the Export-Import Bank of China funded the new Huawei-built Kumul Domestic cable system, which came online this year.
The Southern Cross Next system, owned by Spark, Verizon, Singtel Optus and Telstra – the same group of shareholders which operates the massive 30,500km (19,000 mile) set of twin cables connecting the US with Australia and New Zealand known as Southern Cross – is planned to come online in 2022, and will connect directly to Fiji, Samoa, Kiribati and Tokelau.
Chinese telecoms company China Unicom counts the existing Southern Cross cables among its network capabilities – meaning it is likely to have access to the cable through a leasing agreement with one of the other companies that uses the cable, according to Canberra think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
An undersea fibre optic cable. Photo: AFP
China Unicom and China Telecom also list the Asia America Gateway Cable System as one of their network capabilities, according to ASPI. The 20,000km (12,400-mile) cable came online in 2009 and connects the US, Guam, Hong Kong, Brunei, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand.
It is owned by a consortium of carriers including AT&T, Telekom Malaysia, Telstra and Spark.
A cable backed by Google and the Australian Academic and Research Network connecting Japan and Australia through Guam is to come online early next year.
China: the real reason Australia’s pumping cash into the Pacific?
28 Jul 2018
WHAT’S NEXT
Natasha Beschorner, senior digital development specialist at the World Bank, said that while there were challenges ahead in terms of broadband access and affordability, increased connectivity was starting to bring new opportunities to the Pacific.
“Digital technologies can contribute to economic diversification, income generation and service delivery in the Pacific,” Beschorner said. “E-commerce and financial technologies are emerging and governments are considering how to roll out selected services online.”
Experts say the industry has recently seen a switch from cables being mostly funded by telecommunication carriers to being funded by content providers, like Google and Facebook. Members of the private cable industry say content companies can afford to invest in cable infrastructure to ensure the supply chain for their customers, but that the competition puts the squeeze on the research-and-development budgets of other types of companies.
Sloots at Southern Cross predicted that the nations which connected directly to the massive next-generation cable – Samoa, Kiribati and Tokelau – would be able to function as connecting points for intra-Pacific cables.
“There’s a blossoming effect in capability once certain islands are connected,” Sloots said.
There is also the push to locate an exchange point within the Pacific so that internet data no longer has to travel to a hub in Tokyo or Los Angeles and back to Pacific nations when processing – a move that could ultimately lower the cost of broadband internet service for consumers in the Pacific.
Perhaps the most effective outcome could be for Pacific nations to cut the cord and receive their internet by satellite.
The Asian Development Bank has agreed to give a US$50 million loan to Singapore’s Kacific Broadband Satellites International to provide up to two billion people across the Asia-Pacific region with affordable satellite-based internet.
The project is to be launched into orbit by SpaceX next week and aims to begin providing service by early next year.
As US financial support expires in 2023, Beijing could ‘loosen the screws’ on regional alliance with lucrative development deals
Independence vote in Micronesia’s Chuuk state in March could raise the stakes, potentially allowing China access to strategically vital waters
President of the Federated States of Micronesia David Panuelo shakes hands with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Photo: Xinhua
In China earlier this month, David Panuelo, the president of the Federated States of Micronesia, climbed the Badaling section of the Great Wall. And, according to Huang Zheng, Beijing’s ambassador to the Pacific nation, the countries’ “great friendship rose to even greater heights” during Panuelo’s visit.
Chinese investment in Micronesia reached similarly lofty levels in conjunction with Panuelo’s trip, which marked three decades of diplomatic ties and included meetings with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Beijing has committed US$72 million in economic development deals, almost as much as its total investment of the previous three decades.
Micronesia is one of three Pacific nations with agreements with Washington, known as the Compact of Free Association (COFA), which allows their citizens to live and work in the US. In exchange, Micronesia, neighbouring Palau and the Marshall Islands grant the US exclusive military and defence access to their territorial waters – more than 2 million square miles of the Pacific that have been an essential element of Washington’s power projection in the region since World War II.
Much of China’s funding has been directed to Micronesia’s Chuuk state, which will in March vote in an independence referendum.
Although Chuuk is home to fewer than 50,000 people, its waters include one of the region’s deepest and most strategically appealing lagoons, creating extra incentive for Beijing and potential concern for Washington as the two countries
With a population of just 113,000 people, Micronesia relies on remittances sent home by citizens working in the US as well as the financial support from Washington under COFA. That assistance is scheduled to expire in 2023, creating uncertainty about the future of the relationship and making Chinese investment even more influential.
“Panuelo’s visit to China is a perfect example of how [the Chinese side] just needs to do a little to get a lot,” said Derek Grossman, senior analyst at Rand Corporation, a Washington think tank. “US$100 million is not very much for them and they can essentially loosen the screws [on COFA] with that.”
Micronesian President David Panuelo (second on left) and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (right) during their talks in Beijing. Photo: EPA-EFE
The value of Micronesia’s bilateral trade with China has increased by nearly 30 per cent annually for the past five years, according to Micronesia’s Foreign Ministry. In 2017, the island nation signed onto President Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative which aims to build a vast network of strategic investment, trade routes and infrastructure projects across more than 150 countries.
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In recent years Chinese funding in Micronesia has built office and residential complexes for government officials, a showpiece new convention centre in the capital city Palikir, transport infrastructure and student exchanges, according to a recent report by Rand.
Jian Zhang, associate professor at UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said Beijing’s investment reflected a decision to cultivate broader, deeper ties.
Micronesian President David Panuelo during his meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing. Photo: EPA-EFE
“China’s interest in building the relationship with Micronesia is not just about its diplomatic rivalry with Taiwan or economic interests,” he said. “It has elevated the relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership which encompasses all areas.”
During his recent visit, Panuelo described China as Micronesia’s top economic partner and the US as its top security partner. Pompeo’s visit to Micronesia highlights US anxiety about rising Chinese influence in Pacific 5 Aug 2019
Gerard Finin, professor of regional planning at Cornell University, who previously worked with the US Department of State in the Pacific, said: “China’s leadership consistently accords large ocean states the full protocol that is expected when a head of state visits.
“In contrast, Washington has only had a limited number of meetings and never hosted an official state visit to Washington for the leader of a Pacific Island nation,” said Finin.
US President Donald Trump in May hosted the leaders of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands together at the White House. When Mike Pompeo visited Micronesia
in August, he became the only sitting US secretary of state to have done so.
Pompeo said negotiations to update COFA had begun but no details have been made public. Micronesia has assembled a team to conduct the negotiations but the US has not, the Honolulu Civil Beat website reported.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Micronesia in August. Photo: AFP
Breakaway vote could raise the stakes
Panuelo’s team met Micronesian students studying in China and representatives of state-owned China Railway Construction Corporation, which will build the roads in Chuuk, funded in part by US$50 million from Beijing. Construction of the Chuuk government complex was also funded by Beijing and the state’s governor joined Panuelo for his visit.
Should Chuuk vote to separate from Micronesia in March, it could also mean breaking from COFA, jeopardising the US work privileges of thousands of Chuukese and opening the state’s waters to other partners, particularly China.
Chuuk is home to one of the deepest lagoons in the Pacific, a geographic rarity of particular value in strategic military operations and submarine navigation.
US Coast Guard looks to bolster Pacific allegiances as Chinese clout grows
22 Oct 2019
Zhang said Beijing would explore any opportunity to build a port with potential military capability.
“China has a long-term need to gain a strategic foothold in the region,” Zhang said. “That is a key part of the Belt and Road Initiative. At the general level it’s an economic initiative but an important aspect of the maritime Silk Road is to develop a network of strategically located port facilities.”
Sabino Asor, chair of the public education committee for the Chuuk Political Status Commission, told Civil Beat seceding from Micronesia would be the best option for Chuuk’s future.
“There is no encouraging prospect if Chuuk remains within the Federation,” he said.
However, Patrick Buchan, at Washington think tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said Chuuk’s dependence on remittances from the US made breaking from COFA unlikely.
China courts Pacific island states in pursuit of ‘foothold’ as US risks losing influence
8 Aug 2019
In the meantime, uncertainty over COFA negotiations persists, although there is a chance it will be renewed with few changes.
“There is circulation with people easily coming and going that provides a level of understanding and friendship that does not exist between too many other countries,” Finin said.
However, China’s most attractive feature may be its willingness to at least discuss the most pressing concern of Pacific Island nations: climate change.
“When the Trump administration talks about how it doesn’t believe in climate change, or can’t even say the words – that is really offensive for Pacific nations,” Grossman said. “China knows that, and is taking full advantage of it.”
Summit between Chinese, South Korean and Japanese leaders could yield results for future of Korean peninsula, analyst says
North Korea has promised an unwelcome “Christmas present” if the US does not show the “right attitude” for talks. Photo: KCNA
Chinese President Xi Jinping has again stressed the need for tensions on the Korean peninsula to be resolved through dialogue, as the deadline looms in North Korea’s threat to give the United States an unwelcome “Christmas gift”
.
With just over a week to go until Pyongyang’s year-end deadline for Washington to change what it says a policy of hostility, Xi held separate talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Beijing on Monday.
Moon and Abe will also join Chinese Premier Li Keqiang for a trilateral summit in Chengdu, Sichuan province, on Tuesday.
The first trilateral leadership talks took place in 2008, but were not held in 2013 and 2014, or in 2016 and 2017.
Xi said China and South Korea “both insist on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula, and advocate solving problems through dialogue and consultation”, state news agency Xinhua reported on Monday.
“China supports South Korea in continuing to improve its relationship with
and injecting impetus for the Korean peninsula peace talks,” the report said.
Moon said the suspension of talks between the US and North Korea and heightened tensions along the peninsula “are not beneficial to both our countries and North Korea”, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.
Moon also said that China had played an “important role” in efforts for the denuclearise the peninsula, the report said.
North Korea has signalled impatience over the stalled talks with the US, and the fading hopes for an end to Washington’s economic sanctions.
In April, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said that he would “wait” until the end of the year to decide whether the US had the “right attitude” to allow a resumption of negotiations, but no signs of further talks have emerged.
Then earlier this month Pyongyang warned that Washington would receive a “Christmas gift”, and US actions would determine whether the present would be good or bad.
In an apparent sign of frustration with the US, North Korean news agency KCNA reported on Sunday that Kim held a meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea to “bolster the overall armed forces of the country” to deal with the “the fast-changing situation”.
The US imposed crippling sanctions on North Korea’s economy in 2017, though many countries, including China, South Korea and Japan, have also tightened measures against the North.
South Korea and Japan both scaled back people-to-people links in 2016, China banned coal exports to the North in 2017. Earlier this year, Trump thanked China and Russia for maintaining sanctions against Pyongyang.
As diplomats make last-ditch attempts to stop renewed confrontation, US special envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun shuttled around the region last week, meeting senior officials in China, South Korea and Japan. Biegun urged North Korea to return to negotiations, and said the US “does not have a deadline” for talks.
China and Russia also proposed last week that the United Nations Security Council
Xi’s meeting with Moon also comes as Beijing tries to mend ties with Seoul to prevent neighbouring nations from getting closer to Washington.
Relations between China and South Korea deteriorated in 2017 after Seoul deployed a US-led missile defence system known as THAAD, which Beijing deemed as a security threat to its own territory.
On Monday, both Xi and Moon said in their meeting that they looked forward to improving relations between their countries.
“We have been friends and partners that have continued close cooperation,” Xi said. “We have a wide range of common understandings in various fields, including on further developing bilateral relations, facilitating regional peace, stability and prosperity, and defending multilateralism and a free trade system.”
Sun Xingjie, a North Korea specialist at Jilin University, said the US signal was “very clear” in Beigun’s comments.
“They still want to continue discussions,” he said.
Sun also said the talks in Chengdu on Tuesday would likely play an important role in the future of resolving problems on the Korean peninsula.
“After returning to the platform these last couple years, I believe this will become an important, normalised place for discussions. Whatever problems they run into, the platform should continue to move forward,” Sun said.
has further bolstered its defence links with the United States with plans to build an F-16 fighter jet maintenance centre, as the Taipei government continues to resist Beijing’s objective of unification.
The self-ruled island’s Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC) and US defence contractor Lockheed Martin signed a strategic partnership agreement on Tuesday that aimed to promote the establishment of an F-16 fighter jet maintenance centre in Taiwan, to be completed by 2023.
It is the latest of several significant agreements with the US during Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump approved a US$2.2 billion arms sale on July 8 that included 108 American-made M1A2T Abrams tanks and 250 Stinger missiles.
He was quicker to approve F-16 sales than his predecessors, agreeing in August to sell the island 66 F-16V jets, which will mean Taiwan owns the most F-16s in the Asia-Pacific region.
Trump also approved, in September last year, a US$330 million deal to provide spare parts and other logistics for several types of the island’s military aircraft – less than a year after the US agreed to sell US$1.4 billion of missiles, torpedoes and an early warning system to Taiwan.
Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland by force if necessary.
‘Fighter jets trump battle tanks’ in Taiwan’s US arms priorities
Collin Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said the planned maintenance centre underlined how Taiwan-US military ties had become stronger under the more enthusiastic US administration of Trump and the Taiwanese presidency of
“The [F-16 fighter jet maintenance] centre, by improving the availability and readiness of the F-16 fleet, allows Taiwan to sustain its combat aviation, not only for daily operation but also for training,” Koh said.
“This does represent a step up. Taiwan is no longer just an end-user operating the American hardware, but will also be empowered to service it. It is designed to help Taiwan achieve better defence self-sufficiency, one of the key pledges by the Tsai administration.”
Tang Shaocheng, a senior researcher in international relations at Taiwan’s National Cheng-chi University, said the increasingly close relations between Taipei and Washington made dealing with the island more tricky for Beijing.
Beijing ‘interferes daily’ in Taiwan’s election, says Tsai Ing-wen
“The Tsai administration cares about what the US thinks but not what Beijing thinks, paving the way for ever-closer ties,” Tang said. “That definitely leaves less room for Beijing to get Taipei into its orbit, by using various economic measures.”
Beijing has suspended exchanges with Taipei and staged a series of war games around Taiwan to intimidate the island since Tsai, of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, became president in 2016 and refused to accept its one-China policy.
Beijing has also tried to isolate Taiwan internationally by poaching its diplomatic allies
since Tsai took office, has repeatedly warned Washington against seeking closer military ties with Taipei, and has protested against every arms deal the two have made.
The US acknowledges the Chinese claim that it has sovereignty over Taiwan, which split from the mainland in 1949 and is self-governing. However, the US regards the status of Taiwan as unsettled and supports the island with arms sales and other measures, such as by sending warships through the Taiwan Strait that separates the island from China.
The Battle of Triangle Hill is known in China as a victory against foreign aggressors
Film’s timing linked to deteriorating relations between Beijing and Washington on multiple fronts
A scene from the 1956 Chinese film Shang Gan Ling, about the Korean war Battle for Triangle Hill, subject of a new film which is about to go into production in China. Photo: Handout
One of the bloodiest battles of the Korean war is the subject of a film that will soon start production in China, in a move which is being linked to surging Chinese nationalism amid poor relations between Beijing and Washington.
The film, based on the Battle of Triangle Hill – also known as the Shang Gan Ling campaign in China – was given the green light by state regulator the China Film Administration in July, but was not reported by Chinese official media until last week.
Hou Jianwei, one of China’s best known war novelists, has been signed on as screenwriter for the film, to be produced by Ao Bo Film Zhejiang which confirmed on microblogging platform Weibo that production was already in “active preparation”.
“More than 100,000 people from the People’s Voluntary Army and forces from the US and South Korea took part in the 43-day fighting, and over 2.4 million shells of ammunition were fired. The battle was unprecedentedly fierce and 40,000 lives were lost,” the film company said in its most recent Weibo post.
“With a multitude of heroes, our army built up an impenetrable barrier in the East.”
China invokes Korean war talks as reason not to bow to US in trade dispute
News of the film has coincided with mounting confrontations between Beijing and Washington on multiple fronts ranging from trade and technology, to Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Korean war-themed productions have long been a taboo subject for China’s heavily censored film industry, partly because of Beijing’s complicated relations with the US and North Korea.
But the 1950-53 war, in which China and North Korea battled Western forces led by the US, has increasingly become a tool to rally public opinion behind Beijing’s ongoing trade war with the US. Study Times, a Central Party School publication, for example, has directly likened the trade war to the end of the Korean conflict, saying China was determined to oppose US bullying as trade negotiations entered their 17th month.
While Beijing has never given an official account of its decision to join the Korean war, it is often portrayed as a necessary intervention to shield China from US aggression.
The Battle of Triangle Hill has often been presented in China’s official media as a victory by the “volunteers” of the People’s Liberation Army over foreign aggressors.
News of the production has raised avid discussion on Chinese social media, with many seeing the new film as part of China’s efforts to reinforce surging Chinese nationalism in the face of growing pressure from the West.
“Isn’t the approval [to make the film] a strong signal to the West that we are now a strong power?” one Weibo microblogger wrote.
Comic crusader Priya, a gang-rape survivor who earlier campaigned against rape and acid attack, is back in a new avatar. This time she is fighting the trafficking of girls and women for sex.
The “modern-day female superhero” was first launched in December 2014, exactly two years after the horrific gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, to focus attention on the problems of gender and sexual violence in India.
In the latest edition – Priya and the Lost Girls – she takes on the powerful sex-trafficker Rahu, the evil demon who runs an underworld brothel city where he has entrapped many women, including Priya’s sister Lakshmi.
Indian-American actor and writer Dipti Mehta, who wrote the script of the comic, draws on ancient Indian mythology to create larger-than-life fantastical characters and delivers a powerful feminist statement.
The story of Lost Girls begins when the protagonist returns home to find that there are no girls in her village.
She then mounts her flying tiger Sahas (Hindi for courage) and arrives in Rahu’s den. It’s a city ruled by greed, jealousy and lust, where women exist only to serve and please men – and those who resist are turned into stone.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
Priya is threatened and attacked, a woman who works for Rahu tries to lure her into the sex trade saying: “If you work for us, you’d serve only five to six men and not 20”, but in the end, good wins over evil and she manages to vanquish Rahu and liberate her sister and all the other trafficked girls.
But victory still eludes her. The families of rescued girls refuse to take them back. The survivors are treated like “lepers”, facing stigma, scorn and ridicule.
But Priya and the other girls stand up to confront patriarchy, says Ms Mehta, “just as women have broken their silence to talk about MeToo”, the campaign against sexual harassment and abuse that started in Hollywood in October 2107 and later spread to many other parts of the world.
“I was very clear from the start that Lost Girls can’t be just another comic book where good guy wins and evil dies, it had to be much more than that,” Ms Mehta says.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
Ram Devineni, the Indian-American creator of the comic series, told the BBC that he had decided to focus on sex trafficking in this edition after visiting Sonagachi, India’s largest red-light area in the eastern city of Kolkata, where he met several women engaged in sex work.
“Half of them told me they had been tricked into coming there and, once there, they were forced into the sex trade. The other half said they’d agreed to do this for a living because they were dirt poor and they had no alternative.
“Often there were two to three women sharing a small dingy room, many of them had young children who lived with them, and some of them said their children slept in the same bed where they serviced clients.
Mr Devineni says that from his conversations with them, he realised that many of the women there could leave, but chose not to.
“Most believed in the idea of sacrifice, for the sake of their families, their children. The shackles that hold them back are mostly emotional and psychological coercion.”
Some of their stories, he says, have found their way into the Lost Girls, which will be launched digitally on Monday to coincide with the start of United Nation’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTIAccording to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, human trafficking is the second largest organised criminal business in the world after the arms trade. It is even ahead of the drugs trade.
“It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry,” anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta told the BBC on the phone from New York.
Ms Gupta, who supports trafficked girls and women in India through her charity Apne Aap Women Worldwide, says there are 100 million people trapped in human trafficking globally, of which 27 million are in India alone, and most of the trafficking is in girls and young women.
India, Bangladesh and Nepal, she says, make up “the epicentre” of global sex trafficking.
Ms Gupta, who collaborated on Priya and the Lost Girls, says she plans to take the comic to schools and colleges in India and the US to use it as a talking tool, “as a conversation starter on what is a very difficult topic”.
The only way to fight trafficking, she believes, is to “de-normalise” sex trade – and cinema, art and pop culture are tools that can help do that.
The comic is made to appeal to young people. After its launch, it can be downloaded for free anywhere in the world; it also has “augmented reality features”, which means people can see special animation and movies by scanning the artwork with their smartphones.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
“People often make flippant comments to say that prostitution is the oldest occupation in the world, but they don’t realise that trafficking is not some poor woman getting money in exchange for having sex with a man. It is the extreme exploitation of most vulnerable girls,” Ms Gupta says.
To stop this “commodification” of girls, she adds, we need to create revulsion in men’s minds about sex trade – and it’s best to catch them young.
“We must work with young boys and teenagers, 13 to 14 year olds, through storytelling and pop culture. They learn about sex from porn sites which portray sex workers as happy hookers, and no-one sees the girl behind her.
“I want to demolish that myth of the happy hooker. I want to ensure that people see the girl behind her.”
Artwork by Syd Fini and Neda Kazemifar
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Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption A worker applying a capping layer to a landfill site in Hangzhou
China’s largest dump is already full – 25 years ahead of schedule.
The Jiangcungou landfill in Shaanxi Province, which is the size of around 100 football fields, was designed to take 2,500 tonnes of rubbish per day.
But instead it received 10,000 tonnes of waste per day – the most of any landfill site in China.
China is one of the world’s biggest polluters, and has been struggling for years with the rubbish its 1.4 billion citizens generate.
How big is the landfill site?
The Jiangcungou landfill in Xi’an city was built in 1994 and was designed to last until 2044.
The landfill serves over 8 million citizens. It spans an area of almost 700,000 square metres, with a depth of 150 metres and a storage capacity of more than 34 million cubic metres.
Until recently, Xi’an was one of the few cities in China that solely relied on landfill to dispose of household waste – leading to capacity being reached early.
Earlier this month, a new incineration plant was opened, and at least four more are expected to open by 2020. Together, they are expected to be able to process 12,750 tonnes of rubbish per day.
The move is part of a national plan to reduce the number of landfills, and instead use other waste disposal methods like incineration.
The landfill site in Xi’an will eventually become an “ecological park”.
The country had 654 landfill sites and 286 incineration plants.
It is not clear what China’s recycling rate is, as no figures have been released. China plans to recycle 35% of waste in major cities by the end of 2020, according to one government report.
This July, sorting and recycling rubbish was made mandatory in Shanghai – leading to “a sense of panic” among some residents.
Chinese academics and young scientists join global scientific elite to explore frontiers of research
International joint laboratory announced at Shanghai forum
More than three dozen Nobel Prize winners for science were among the gathering in Shanghai for the second annual forum of the World Laureates Association. Photo: Xinhua
Shanghai hosted one of the largest gatherings of Nobel laureates in the world last week, with 44 Nobel Prize-winning scientists in the city for a government-sponsored forum with the lofty goal of discussing science and technology for the “common destiny of mankind”.
The four-day forum, which brought together young Chinese scientists and the cream of the international scientific crop, was a signal of China’s ambitions for its own researchers to take their place at the forefront of development and bring home their own prizes.
Experts agreed the event – the second in an annual “World Laureates Forum” – was hardly a public relations stunt, but a testament to China’s deep-seated, steadfast desire to learn from the world’s top scientists and join them, and their home countries, as leaders on the frontier of science and produce regular home-grown contenders for top prizes.
“The Nobel Prize is the holy grail for China, and it is still quite elusive for Chinese indigenous scientists to be awarded this prestigious recognition,” said Chengxin Pan, an associate professor of international relations at Australia’s Deakin University. “You could say China has a Nobel Prize complex.”
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Becoming a leader in the sciences was more than just an issue of driving economic expansion through technology and innovation, it was a matter of national preservation with deep roots in Chinese history, Pan said.
“China sees the lack of power, lack of scientific achievements and modern technology as largely responsible for the backwardness and humiliation it suffered during much of the 19th century and early 20th century,” he said.
“They need to make up for lagging behind by engaging with the top leading scientists in the world, wherever they are from.”
To that end, celebrated theoretical physicists, organic chemists, neuroscientists and biologists joined Chinese academics and youth scientists for the conference organised by the Shanghai city government and an association of top global scientists known as the World Laureates Association.
Among them were 2019 Nobel Prize for physics laureates Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, as well as winners of other top prizes including the Wolf Prize, Lasker Award, and Fields Medal for mathematics. Discussions included the latest breakthroughs in disease prevention and drug development, sustainability and new energy, aerospace and black holes, as well as what drives their scientific curiosity.
Swiss professor Michel Mayor, astrophysicist and director of the Geneva Observatory, was one of the co-winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics and among the attendees at the forum in Shanghai. Photo: EPA-EFE
The event, which culminated with the announcement of an international joint research laboratory for the world’s top scientists, to be established in Shanghai, was lauded by President Xi Jinping in an open letter to the attendees.
“China attaches great importance to the development of the frontier fields of science and technology,” Xi said, stressing China’s willingness to “work with all countries of the world” to “address the challenges of our age”.
The high calibre meeting was a rare opportunity for China to broadcast its message of commitment to scientific advancement, at a time when the reputation of its universities, academics and hi-tech companies have been taking a broad hit as part of a blowback from the US-China trade and tech wars, as well as suspicion among Western countries of China’s geopolitical aims.
In the past year, a number of major global Chinese tech companies, including Huawei and Hikvision, have been blacklisted in the US, while US tech giants like Google and Apple noticeably skipped out on China’s annual state-run World Internet Conference last month. Academic ties between Chinese and Western universities have also been called into question over suspicions of espionage, fraud, and intellectual property theft.
“China is saying we are still open for business and, at this juncture, we more warmly welcome foreign scientists and collaboration between countries in science and technology,” said Zhu Tian, an economics professor at the Chinese Europe International Business School in Shanghai.
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The past decade has seen China advance rapidly in the sciences. A surge in government funding, along with successive top level strategies to build up science and tech – including the Made in China 2025 innovation blueprint – and a significant uptick in international collaborations, have propelled the nation on to the global scientific stage.
Recent developments, like the first successful landing of a probe on the far side of the moon earlier this year, the dominance of the 5G network technology created by China’s Huawei, and the opening of the world’s largest radio telescope in Guizhou in 2017, have also raised the country’s profile in emerging tech and science.
But, so far, China’s rising visibility as a scientific powerhouse has been largely driven by scale. A June report by the journal Nature found researchers affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences contributed the greatest number of “high-quality natural sciences research” to international journals compared with their peers at other institutions, while last month the journal found the top four “fastest rising” new universities for research output were all from mainland China.
“To some in the outside world, China is already a powerhouse in innovation … but in terms of the quality of innovations or scientific research, China still lags behind developed countries like the US, UK or Switzerland,” Zhu said.
Despite “making the fastest progress among all countries”, and significant leaps as a developing nation, “China is not at the frontier of technology or science yet,” he said, which is why international engagement, like the recent summit, is key to China’s growth.
“In order to catch up you have to know what is the frontier, you have to learn from those who are at the frontier.”
It is a point further underlined by the numerous blog posts and widely circulated articles in Chinese media about China’s meagre Nobel track record. Apart from one celebrated exception – 2015 Nobel laureate for medicine Tu Youyou – Chinese-born scientists who have won the prize did so for their work in overseas laboratories, or after changing citizenship.
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Tu was the People’s Republic of China’s first Nobel Prize winner in the sciences and the country’s first woman to win the prize in any category.
Among China’s other Nobel laureates in the sciences are 1957 physics prizewinners Li Zhengdao and Yang Chen-ning, who won their award while in the US, having left China before the Communist Party takeover in 1949. Both later became US citizens. In 2017,
relinquishing his US citizenship to become a Chinese citizen.
China has worked hard to reverse the damage of brain drain, for example with its flagship “Thousand Talents” programme, a high-profile, state-backed recruitment drive set up in 2008 to attract overseas Chinese students and academics back to China with generous funding.
But reaching the frontiers of science, and making Nobel-worthy advancements, will also require China to do some reshuffling of its domestic priorities, which have been heavy on producing innovations in applied sciences and tech, but lighter on the basics – like physics, chemistry, and biology – whose mysteries are probed by the leading labs around the developed world.
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“China in the past has been known as a place for incremental innovation, and not the place where really radical innovation and big breakthroughs have come from, but they don’t want to be tinkering at the margins, they want to be a major innovation powerhouse,” said Andrew Kennedy, an associate professor in the policy and governance programme at the Australian National University.
To change this, China has begun to raise investment in basic sciences, Kennedy said, pointing to National Bureau of Statistics figures which indicate an average spending increase of more than 20 per cent each year between 1995 to 2016. Even so, spending at the end of that period – some US$11.9 billion at market rates – still lagged well below the figure cited for the US in 2015, which rang up US$83.5 billion, he said.
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The gathering of science laureates itself was further indication of that shift to place more emphasis on basic sciences, the kinds of disciplines the laureates lead, and could be a major boost to that agenda, according to Naubahar Sharif, associate professor of social science and public policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“This [event] is a rocket-propelled, massive injection of scientific power into one place, and China has ambitions to gear up their own scientists to this level,” Sharif said, “and I’m sure the local Chinese scientists have been prepped to take advantage of it.”
While China has work to do in pushing back on criticism of questionable practices in intellectual property transfer, or the extent to which they share their own advances with others, collaboration with leading scientists is a crucial part of China’s “long-haul” vision in the sciences, Sharif said.
“If you rub shoulders with the most prestigious scientists of your era, your local scientists will learn something, and there’s going to be knowledge exchange and making linkages and a start to partnerships,” he said.
“This is the way that getting to that frontier can be achieved.”
Kremlin says project highlights the growing closeness between the two countries
Military observers argue cooperation between the two sides helps provide counterbalance to American military might
Vladimir Putin disclosed the project at a forum in Sochi. Photo: Sputnik/AFP
Russia is helping China to build an early warning system to counter missile attacks, Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.
Speaking at an international affairs conference in the resort town of Sochi, he said Moscow was helping China increase its missile defence capability, Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik reported.
“This is a very serious endeavour that will fundamentally and radically increase the defence capability of the People’s Republic of China because only the United States and Russia have such a system at present,” the Russian leader said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to say when the system would be operational, but told reporters on a conference call that the move highlighted Russia’s close ties with China.
“Russia has special relations with China of advanced partnership … including the most sensitive [areas] linked to military-technical cooperation and security and defence capabilities,” Peskov said.
Macau-based military observer Antony Wong Dong said Putin’s remarks indicated that military cooperation between Beijing and Moscow may have evolved from the previous “model alliance” to a “real alliance” with the US as their common target.
“Such changes will likely further fuel the strategic arms race, which is already evident from the missile tests [that we have witnessed] and the recent military parade,” said Wong in a reference to the grand parade held in Beijing on Tuesday when China celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes China’s defence minister Wei Fenghe (right) to a base in Orenburg at the start of a joint exercise. Photo: Handout
Hong Kong-based military analyst Song Zhongping said the system would help Beijing and Moscow set up a joint early ballistic missile network to counter “American global hegemony”.
“If the US wants to attack China [with its ICBMs], their missiles are likely to be launched from the Arctic, and that will be covered by Russia’s early warning system, and that means Moscow will have the capability to alert Beijing,” said Song who added that the Chinese military could provide reciprocal help to Russia.
Beijing-based military expert Zhou Chenming said Putin’s remarks served as a veiled warning to US President Donald Trump who has taken the unilateral step of withdrawing from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a cold war-era pact signed between the US and Russia in 1987.
“Joint cooperation will help both Russia and China to save costs because early warning ballistic missile systems are very expensive,” Zhou said,
However, he said Moscow was unlikely to share its most advanced technologies with China.
“For example, Russia’s missile defence system just covers Moscow and St Petersburg, so China’s network will properly just cover Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei province, the Yangtze River Delta area, the Greater Bay Area in South China, as well as a number of key cities in the centre.”
Putin also told the forum that the two countries would continue to work together on space exploration.
Last month, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation announced that Moscow and Beijing have developed a plan for cooperation between military departments for next year and 2021.
Last month 1,600 members of the Chinese military arrived at a Russian training base in the Orenburg oblast for a large-scale joint training exercise.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump set to meet on the sidelines of the Apec summit in Chile next month, a source says
The two state leaders are expected to sign an interim trade deal ‘if everything goes smoothly’
Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump have met twice already over the course of the 16-month trade war. Photo: AP
Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump are tentatively expected to meet on November 17 with the aim of signing an interim trade deal, a source briefed on the arrangements told the South China Morning Post.
The two leaders are expected to come face-to-face immediately after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Santiago, Chile, with a trade truce signed “if everything goes smoothly”, said the person, who declined to be identified.
Trade envoys from Beijing and Washington are still finalising the text for the two leaders to sign, but both sides have expressed optimism that Trump’s so-called phase one trade deal can be completed in time for the meeting.
Trump said on Monday that negotiations on the interim deal were running “ahead of schedule”.
“We are looking probably to be ahead of schedule to sign a very big portion of the China deal, and we’ll call it phase one but it’s a very big portion,” Trump said. “That would take care of the farmers. It would take care of some of the other things. It will also take care of a lot of the banking needs.
“So we’re about, I would say, a little bit ahead of schedule, maybe a lot ahead of schedule,” the president said, adding the deal would “probably” be signed.
Top trade negotiators for the two countries – US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He – spoke by telephone last Friday. The Office of the US Trade Representative released a statement after the call saying that the two sides “made headway on specific issues” and “are close to finalising some sections of the agreement”.
China’s official Xinhua News Agency said on Saturday negotiators have “agreed to properly resolve core concerns of each other” and had “basically completed technical discussions about parts of the text”. In particular, China would lift the current ban on US poultry imports and recognise the American public health certification system for meat product imports, Xinhua said.
The top trade envoys are expected to hold another conference call in the near future.
China’s Vice-Premier Liu He between US trade representative Robert Lighthizer (left) and US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin during trade negotiations in Washington this month. Photo: Reuters
Taoran Notes, an account on Chinese social media platform WeChat run by the official Economic Daily newspaper, wrote over the weekend that Beijing and Washington had moved a step closer to agreement on a “temporary deal”.
“According to past experiences and practises, the negotiation will enter the stage of translation and legal review after the technical completion of the text,” the account said.
Geng Shuang, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said that technical negotiations about part of the deal were finished but deputy-level talks were ongoing. “China hopes both sides can find a trade solution based upon mutual respect and benefits,” Geng said at a regular press conference on Tuesday.
If it goes ahead as planned, the summit between Trump and Xi in Chile next month would be the third time the two leaders have sat down to talk about ending the nearly 16-month-long trade war.
Last December, the two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in the Argentinian capital Buenos Aires and agreed to a three-month tariff truce to allow time for the countries’ trade envoys to work out a comprehensive deal. But the talks collapsed in early May with the US blaming China for reneging on promises it made in negotiations, while China blamed the US for attempting to infringe on its economic sovereignty.
The pair met again in late June in the Japanese city of Osaka, where they agreed to restart trade negotiations.
A minor ceasefire was reached in October when Beijing promised to buy US$40 billion to US$50 billion worth of American agricultural products in exchange for Washington postponing indefinitely a tariff increase on US$250 billion of Chinese goods to 30 per cent from 25 per cent on October 15.
Analysts expect fresh 15 per cent duties on about US$160 billion of Chinese imports – including popular products like smartphones and consumer electronics – that are due to go into effect mid-December will also be postponed if a deal is signed, though this has not been officially confirmed.
The interim deal is also expected to contain a provision on intellectual property protection, a key US demand. China has taken steps to improve IP protection, including setting up a system to punish and compensate instances of infringement, and improve settlement disputes. But how well these measures will be implemented remains in question.
China and the US would also agree to avoid allowing currency devaluations to gain trade advantages, codifying a commitment both countries made as part of a G20 agreement several years ago. A currency agreement – similar to provisions in the yet-to-be-ratified US-Mexico-Canada Agreement – could pave the way for the US to remove its designation of China as a “currency manipulator”.
The deal may include a new dispute resolution mechanism to ensure both sides live up to commitments. The system, which will give both sides equal standing, would replace a contentious US-proposed enforcement mechanism that was a key reason for trade talks breaking down in May after China felt the demands too intrusive and one-sided. It is unclear how effective the proposal would be, but the US has insisted since talks began that a similar mechanism be implemented to ensure China did not backslide on promises as it had in the past.
In addition to large purchases of farm products, the interim agreement may contain commitments by China to buy US-built aircraft and energy products, particularly liquefied natural gas.
China will also agree to lift foreign ownership limits on Chinese financial firms under the deal, changes which are already underway.
However, the interim deal will not address broader US complaints about China’s economic model, particularly allegations that foreign firms are treated unfairly and heavy government subsidies favour some domestic industries. Nor will it contain any break for telecommunications equipment maker Huawei and other Chinese tech companies that were blacklisted by the US on national security concerns.
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