Posts tagged ‘current-events’

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25/09/2013

Social media not a game changer in 2014 elections

Reuters: “Political parties in India are relying more on social media ahead of the 2014 election as a way of increasing voter support, even though politicians in general do not expect such efforts to significantly influence election results.

Parties are trying to ride the digital wave by conducting workshops to teach leaders and foot soldiers how to improve engagement on websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The country of 1.2 billion people had around 165 million Internet users as of March, the third-largest in the world, according to data from India’s telecommunications regulator. But the number of social media users is likely to grow to about 80 million by mid-2014, a report released in February said.

For the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s main opposition party, social media is helping as an “accelerator” in conveying their messages to the public.

“I don’t call it a game changer, but an accelerator in this election … it’s definitely setting a narrative, it is influencing a lot of people,” Arvind Gupta, head of the BJP’s IT division, said in an interview.

via India Insight.

Posted in India alert, Leadership change, Politics, social media, Technology | Leave a Comment »

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23/09/2013

Wealthy Chinese seek US surrogates for second child or green card

SCMP: “Wealthy Chinese are hiring American women to serve as surrogates for their children, creating a small but growing business in $120,000 “designer” American babies for China’s elite.

surrogate.jpg

Surrogacy agencies in China and the United States are catering to wealthy Chinese who want a baby outside the country’s restrictive family planning policies, who are unable to conceive themselves, or who are seeking US citizenship for their children.

Emigration as a family is another draw – US citizens may apply for Green Cards for their parents when they turn 21.

While there is no data on the total number of Chinese who have sought or used US surrogates, agencies in both countries say demand has risen rapidly in the last two years.

Tony Jiang and his three children at his house in Shanghai. Photo: Reuters

US fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies are creating Chinese-language websites and hiring Mandarin speakers.

Boston-based Circle Surrogacy has handled half a dozen Chinese surrogacy cases over the last five years, said president John Weltman.

“I would be surprised if you called me back in four months and that number hadn’t doubled,” he said. “That’s the level of interest we’ve seen this year from China and the very serious conversations we’ve had with people who I think will be joining us in the next three or four months.”

The agency, which handles about 140 surrogacy cases a year, 65 per cent of them for clients outside the United States, is opening an office in California to better serve clients from Asia which has easier flight connections with the West Coast. Weltman said he hopes to hire a representative in Shanghai next year.

The increased interest from Chinese parents has created some cultural tensions.

US agency staff who ask that surrogates and intended parents develop a personal relationship have been surprised by potential Chinese clients who treat surrogacy as a strictly commercial transaction.

In China, where surrogacy is illegal, some clients keep the fact that their baby was born to a surrogate a secret, going so far as to fake a pregnancy, agents say.

Chinese interest in obtaining US citizenship is not new. The 14th Amendment to the US constitution gives anyone born in the United States the right to citizenship.

You can basically make a designer baby nowadays JENNIFER GARCIA

A growing number of pregnant Chinese women travel to America to obtain US citizenship for their children by delivering there, often staying in special homes designed to cater to their needs.

While the numbers are unclear, giving birth in America is now so commonplace that it was the subject of a hit romantic comedy movie, Finding Mr Right, released in China in March.

Overall, the number of Chinese visitors to the United States nearly doubled in recent years, from 1 million in 2010 to 1.8 million last year, US immigration statistics show.

Weltman said that prospective Chinese clients almost always want to choose US citizenship for their babies, while other agencies pointed to a desire to have children educated in the United States.

Some wealthy Chinese say they want a bolt-hole overseas because they fear they will the targets of public or government anger if there were more social unrest in China. There is also a perception that their wealth will be better protected in countries with a stronger rule of law.

At least one Chinese agent promotes surrogacy as a cheaper alternative to America’s EB-5 visa, which requires a minimum investment in a job creating business of $500,000.

While the basic surrogacy package Chinese agencies offer costs between $120,000 and $200,000, “if you add in plane tickets and other expenses, for only $300,000, you get two children and the entire family can emigrate to the US,” said a Shanghai-based agent.

That cost still means the surrogacy alternative is available only to the wealthiest Chinese.”

via Wealthy Chinese seek US surrogates for second child or green card | South China Morning Post.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/11/28/china-considers-easing-family-planning-rules/

Posted in China alert, Economics, One-child policy | Leave a Comment »

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01/08/2013

Telangana Effect: Protests Brewing for Gorkhaland

As we thought (see –   https://chindia-alert.org/2013/07/31/divide-uttar-pradesh-into-four-states-mayawati-says/ ), one permissible split leads to others’ great expectations.

WSJ: “Protesters in Darjeeling, a tea-producing mountainous town in West Bengal in northern India, have stepped up calls for their own separate state of Gorkhaland, promising strikes and protests until their demands are met, after New Delhi gave the green-light to create Telangana state out of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, in the south of the country.

The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha [Gorkha People’s Liberation Campaign], a political party spearheading a movement for the creation of Gorkhaland state, has called for a complete shutdown in the popular Himalayan town starting Saturday after protests brought life there to a standstill earlier this week.

“Now that Delhi is creating Telangana, Gorkhaland should be considered too. We have no option  but to intensify our movement,” Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s general secretary, Rooshan Giri, told India Real Time Thursday.

Mr. Giri said his party had advised tourists and students of boarding schools to leave the town as protests were planned over the next few days that will restrict movement of public transport and trucks carrying food grains to Darjeeling from Siliguri, a commercial center in the northern part of West Bengal, about 40 miles south of Darjeeling.

“There’s no way out. We will not stop until our demand is met,” Mr. Giri said.”

via Telangana Effect: Protests Brewing for Gorkhaland – India Real Time – WSJ.

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

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29/05/2013

When blue becomes the new white

FT: “My maid and her husband, a driver, have scrimped and saved and crammed themselves into a tiny flat in Shanghai for decades with one goal in mind: to give their only son a crack at the “Chinese dream”.

Newly graduated Chinese students gather for a convocation ceremony at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei in east China's Anhui province

Now those decades of deprivation have reached their climax as the cherished child of these hard-working people graduates from university and takes his first job: as a construction worker. And he counts himself lucky to have a job.

Small wonder that Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has recently been out gladhanding graduates who are facing one of the toughest job markets since the Communist party stopped giving them careers by fiat. For, like obesity and diabetes, a glut of unemployed graduates seems to be one of the unintended side-effects of economic development in China.

Sound familiar? Many readers of the Financial Times will know what it is like to have an unemployed graduate in the family – or to have been one themselves. Maybe job shortages are just part of the human condition, one that now affects the Chinese like the rest of humanity. (When I graduated from university in 1980, media jobs were so thin on the ground that I ended up teaching at a university in Ghana that had no books, few lights and little running water – landing a job without a flushing toilet was presumably not part of my parents’ university plan for me.)

Mr Xi pointed out on his jobs-fair visit that – like all the other flaws of capitalism – the scourge of graduate unemployment these days is global. But it would be hard to find people who have suffered more to take their place among the ranks of the white-collar unemployed than the Chinese.

This week alone, millions of students across the country will be skipping sleep, baths and online war games to study, while millions of parents take up to a year off work to cook, clean and nag them round the clock. Millions will pass next week’s dreaded college entrance exam (or gaokao) – only to end up unemployed or wearing a hard hat.

Increasing numbers are wondering if it’s all worth it, and are coming up with alternatives that range from the tragic to the downright postmodern. A Chinese newspaper reported this month that a fed-up teenager in central China hired a hit man to kill his father and older sister because – he said – they put too much pressure on him to study. And after this year’s three-day May Day public holiday, a 15-year-old boy in eastern China jumped to his death because he did not finish his holiday homework. Another teen in the same town rose at 4am to finish homework but was found hanging from the staircase before he got to school.

The overwork doesn’t stop with gaokao: just this month Chinese newspapers reported that two twenty-somethings in southern China dropped dead after taking on too much overtime – and such stories are not uncommon. Xinhua, the state news agency, said this week that 40 college graduates were found sharing one 130-square-metre room in Beijing while looking for jobs – living like the construction workers that they may be lucky to become.

So more and more students are opting instead for that most un-Chinese of solutions: time off the treadmill – or what the rest of the world knows as a “gap year”. Li Shangcong, a top student at his high school and vice-president of the student union, decided to skip gaokao altogether and cycle to the Cannes Film Festival – via Siberia. He never made it to France, having been deported by Russian immigration for an expired visa.

When his parents spluttered about the need to make something of himself, he said what teenagers around the world have been known to say in such circumstances: that he is attending the university of life and they should get off his back. He is currently on another trip to Russia.

Shi Zheying at least had her father onside: she skipped the high school entrance exam to “travel 10,000 miles rather than read 10,000 books first” – with her dad. The phrase immediately became popular among China’s “netizens”. Her grandparents, themselves teachers, were force-tutoring her at night, refusing to accept examination results that placed her as low as 16th in her class. After she decided to quit school, she was placed fifth.

China is not the land of “turn on, tune in, drop out” quite yet. But it’s a far cry from a world where terminal overwork is the only option.”

via When blue becomes the new white – FT.com.

Posted in China alert, Economics, graduate, unemployment | 1 Comment »

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07/03/2013

* Could Mao Zedong’s great grandchildren be making long march to US universities?

SCMP: “Could Harvard be on the cards for the great grandchildren of China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong?

bo_pek10_27983265.jpg

Granted, they are currently still 10 and five years old. But their father, PLA major general Mao Xinyu, said he would be open to the possibility of his children studying abroad. Mao Xinyu is one of the founding leader’s four grandchildren, and the only one fathered by a son.

“We won’t stop them from studying overseas providing they are willing and capable,” Mao Xinyu said of his son, 10, and daughter, 5, on People’s Weibo, a state-owned microblogging service similar to the more popular Sina Weibo.

Mao Xinyu, a military researcher and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, was in Beijing this week to attend the annual parliamentary meetings, where he is a media favourite – known for his off-the-wall comments and comical behaviour.

His remark about his children is the latest to draw the attention of journalists, who every year chase down the chubby major general in hopes for a good quote. Once in 2010, he was followed around  Tiananmen Square for so long that he forgot where his car was parked. Disoriented, he left reporters with only one word about the parliamentary sessions: “Good.”

via Could Mao Zedong’s great grandchildren be making long march to US universities? | South China Morning Post.

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21/01/2013

* Women voters in India want to stand up and be counted

It’s about time!

Reuters: “Several years ago, a dinner-table conversation about state elections in Himachal Pradesh veered towards a candidate who gave away pressure cookers to woo women voters. Of course, bribing voters is illegal, but I remember wondering whether all I wanted as a woman was a pressure cooker.

The Delhi rape case and the molestation of a young girl in Guwahati in Assam last year have underscored the place that women often occupy in Indian society. These incidents have made me wonder to what extent our country’s political parties will focus on gender inequality as they look forward to the 2014 general elections. How will they vie for the women’s vote?

Until now, political parties and their largely male leadership focussed on the ‘aam aadmi’, or the common man, a phrase which subsumes women. Politicians and other public figures don’t make much hay of gender inequality and many of the attitudes toward women that hurt a large portion of our society — and when they do, they’re often lacking. The best attitude that politicians often apply to women is a patronising one. Instead of focusing on women’s empowerment through education and awareness, politicians distribute saris, cookers and sanitary napkins.

There is some attempt to change that. The Congress party’s weekend “Chintan Shivir“, or brainstorming session, in Jaipur put a special focus on women.

“Discrimination against the girl child and atrocities against women are a blot on our collective conscience,” party chief Sonia Gandhi said while opening the gathering. “Gender issues are fundamental and should be of concern to all of us.””

via India Insight.

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Posted in Gender issues, India alert, Politics | 1 Comment »

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30/12/2012

* How India treats its women

BBC News: “People have called her Braveheart, Fearless and India’s Daughter, among other things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery.

An Indian schoolgirl holds a placard during a prayer ceremony to mourn the death of a 23-year-old gang rape victim, at a school in Ahmadabad, India, Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012.

When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital, Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its women so badly?

Female foetuses are aborted and baby girls killed after birth, leading to an an appallingly skewed sex ratio. Many of those who survive face discrimination, prejudice, violence and neglect all their lives, as single or married women.

TrustLaw, a news service run by Thomson Reuters, has ranked India as the worst country in which to be a woman. This in the country where the leader of the ruling party, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, at least three chief ministers, and a number of sports and business icons are women. It is also a country where a generation of newly empowered young women are going out to work in larger numbers than ever before.

But crimes against women are rising too.

With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, rape registered a 9.2% rise over the previous year. More than half (54.7%) of the victims were aged between 18 and 30. Most disturbingly, according to police records, the offenders were known to their victims in more than 94% of the cases. Neighbours accounted for a third of the offenders, while parents and other relatives were also involved. Delhi accounted for over 17% of the total number of rape cases in the country.

And it is not rape alone. Police records from 2011 show kidnappings and abductions of women were up 19.4%, women being killed in disputes over dowry payments by 2.7%, torture by 5.4%, molestation by 5.8% and trafficking by an alarming 122% over the previous year.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has estimated that more than 100m women are “missing” worldwide – women who would have been around had they received similar healthcare, medicine and nutrition as men.

New research by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates that in India, more than 2m women are missing in a given year.

The economists found that roughly 12% of the missing women disappear at birth, 25% die in childhood, 18% at the reproductive ages, and 45% at older ages.

They found that women died more from “injuries” in a given year than while giving birth – injuries, they say, “appear to be indicator of violence against women”.

Deaths from fire-related incidents, they say, is a major cause – each year more than 100,000 women are killed by fires in India. The researchers say many cases could be linked to demands over a dowry leading to women being set on fire. Research also found a large number of women died of heart diseases.

These findings point to life-long neglect of women in India. It also proves that a strong preference for sons over daughters – leading to sex selective abortions – is just part of the story.

Clearly, many Indian women face threats to life at every stage – violence, inadequate healthcare, inequality, neglect, bad diet, lack of attention to personal health and well-being.

Analysts say deep-rooted changes in social attitudes are needed to make India’s women more accepted and secure. There is deeply entrenched patriarchy and widespread misogyny in vast swathes of the country, especially in the north. And the state has been found wanting in its protection of women.

Angry citizens believe that politicians, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, are being disingenuous when they promise to toughen laws and speed up the prosecution of rapists and perpetrators of crime against women.

How else, they ask, can political parties in the last five years have fielded candidates for state elections that included 27 candidates who declared they had been charged with rape?

How, they say, can politicians be believed when there are six elected state legislators who have charges of rape against them?

But the renewed protests in Delhi after the woman’s death hold out some hope. Has her death come as an inflexion point in India’s history, which will force the government to enact tougher laws and people to begin seriously thinking about the neglect of women?

It’s early days yet, but one hopes these are the first stirrings of change.”

via BBC News – How India treats its women.

Posted in Gender imbalance, India alert, Inequalities, Social & cultural, Women's rights | 3 Comments »

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22/04/2012

* Time to Start Thinking by Edward Luce

Time to Start Thinking is a book destined to spark debate among liberals and conservatives alike. Drawing on his decades of exceptional journalism and his connections in Washington and around the world, Luce advances a carefully constructed and controversial argument that America is losing its position at the top of the world’s pecking order. He supports this argument with his interviews with key players in politics and business, from U.S. senators, senior White House officials, Fortune 100 chief executives, and many others, including Bill Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen.

Luce’s central thesis is that America is sleepwalking into economic and geopolitical decline. In a tightly argued book, Luce turns his attention to a number of critical issues set to determine America’s future: the changing structure of the U.S. economy, the continued polarization of American politics, the debilitating effect of the “permanent election campaign,” the challenges involved in the overhaul of the country’s public education system, the desperate situation facing America’s middle class, and the health of American innovation in technology and business.

His conclusion investigates America’s dwindling options in a world where the pace is increasingly being set elsewhere. Luce turns particular attention to Washington—he identifies the city’s insidious lobbying culture, the politicians’ constant need to fund raise, and the lack of bipartisanship as key stumbling blocks to an effectively functioning political system.

As distressing as it is important, Time to Start Thinking presents an America in economic, social, and political crisis. Those unwilling to face up to this reality may be tempted to blindly trust in American exceptionalism—but Luce argues that it is American pragmatism that will be the key to securing America’s future, if it is to be secured.

via Time to Start Thinking by Edward Luce.

Related article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/books/review/time-to-start-thinking-by-edward-luce.html?pagewanted=all

From my limited understanding of Americans, I suspect that more non-Americans than Americans will bother to read this book. Which will be a great shame.

Posted in Chindia Alert, Economics, GeoPolitics | Leave a Comment »

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