Posts tagged ‘Europe’

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07/11/2016

Theresa May Says U.K. May Improve Visa System for Indians – India Real Time – WSJ

British Prime Minister Theresa May on Monday said the U.K. may make improvements to its visa system for Indians, as she sought to lay the foundations for a future trade deal once Britain leaves the European Union.

On a two-day trip to India focused on trade, Mrs. May, speaking alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said the partnership between the U.K. and India was natural, since the countries have shared values and culture. But a key sticking point in U.K.-India relations has been Britain’s reluctance to loosen restrictions for Indians wanting to work or study in the U.K., and this will likely be a difficult point to settle in any free-trade negotiations.

“The U.K. will consider further improvements to our visa offer if at the same time we can step up the speed and volume of returns of Indians with no right to remain in the U.K.,” she said.

Mrs. May is unlikely to implement any changes that would result in big increases of Indians entering the U.K. She has said the June vote to leave the EU was underpinned by frustrations about rising levels of immigration and has pledged to reduce numbers.The U.K. is seeking to go beyond its traditional trading partners in Europe as it prepares to leave the European Union. While it can’t finalize trade deals while still a member of the EU, Britain is in preliminary discussions on trade with countries including Australia and India, the world’s fastest-growing major economy. Any deal is likely to take years to complete.

Source: Theresa May Says U.K. May Improve Visa System for Indians – India Real Time – WSJ

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06/10/2016

Why HSBC Says India is Better Than China or the U.S. for Expats – India Real Time – WSJ

While India may be known for its oppressive pollution, poverty and bureaucracy, it’s a better place to be sent to work than China or even the United States according to a recent survey.

An HSBC report that tried to break down what it’s like to be an expatriate in different countries this week surprisingly ranked India ahead of the world’s two biggest economies.

In its HSBC Expat Explorer 2016 report based on an online survey of 27,000 expats this year, the bank ranked India 26th out of 45 countries. While that is on the bottom half of the rankings, the U.S. did worse at 30th as did China at 34th.

How is that possible?

One factor was the Indian economy. Even though it is decades behind China and the U.S. it is still the fastest growing major economy in the world right now. That means globe-trotting executives and entrepreneurs don’t feel like they have been relegated to the backwaters when they work in India.

“More than half (51%) of expats in India believe the country is a good place for them to progress their career, compared with 42% across Asia-Pacific,” said the report, which ranked India 10th for “entrepreneurship,” better than China which got the 16th rank. India was also rated by expats as “a good place to start a business,” about 7% more than China in the region.

“Expats in India are also able to save more, with 44% saying that living there has accelerated their progress towards making longterm savings and investments, compared with 39% across the region,” said the report.

More important for the rankings this year though was family and friends.

The expats who responded to the HSBC survey gave India much higher marks in terms of ease of integrating with the locals as well as cost of raising children.

Of course the report also showed how India continues to underperform in many areas including quality of life and safety.India’s overall ranking slipped this year. Last year it was 17th out of 39 countries just below the U.S. but still better than China.

“The slight drop in India’s ranking is due to a range of factors, for example, expat parents in India have reported that the country is more expensive to bring up a child than last year,” said the bank when asked about India’s lower ranking this year.

Why did India, China and the U.S. perform worse than last year? That’s because they faced new competition from 6 other countries which were not a part of last year’s survey, including Norway and Austria which were ranked 6th and 7th in 2016.

On the top of the rankings this year was Singapore, New Zealand and Canada.

Source: Why HSBC Says India is Better Than China or the U.S. for Expats – India Real Time – WSJ

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23/09/2016

Shacking up | The Economist

WHEN Da Lin moved in with his girlfriend two years ago, his mother tried to stop them: she feared that their living together unmarried would sully his girlfriend’s reputation and, by association, his too. She will be happy only after they finally marry next year (his family is buying the apartment, hers the car).

That generational clash is replicated in thousands of families across China: cohabitation without marriage was long anathema and officially illegal until 2001. Today it is commonplace.China’s social mores are changing astonishingly quickly. Before 1980 around 1% of couples lived together outside wedlock, but of those who wed between 2010 and 2012, more than 40% had done so, according to data from the 2010 and 2012 China Family Panel Studies, a vast household survey (see chart). Some reckon even that is an underestimate. A recent study by the China Association of Marriage and Family, an official body, found that nearly 60% of those born after 1985 moved in with their partner before tying the knot, which would put the cohabitation rate for young people on a par with that of America.

The number of unmarried couples living together is growing for many of the same reasons it has elsewhere: rising individualism, greater empowerment of women, the deferral of marriage and a decline in traditional taboos on pre-marital sex. Greater wealth helps—more couples can afford to live apart from their parents. Yet Chinese cohabitation has distinctive characteristics. In rich countries, living together is most common among poorer couples, but in China youngsters are more likely to move in together if they are highly educated and live in wealthy cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Shacking up is seen as a sign of “innovative behaviour”, say Yu Xie of Princeton University and Yu Jia of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Elsewhere rising cohabitation represents the fraying of marriage: many couples never bother to wed. In China, however, cohabitation is almost always a prelude to marriage—as for Da Lin and his girlfriend—rather than an alternative to it. Marriage is still near-universal, although the skewed sex ratio resulting from China’s one-child policy and a cultural preference for boys has resulted in a surplus of poor rural men who will remain unhappily single. Some highly educated women in cities forgo marriage too.In some Western countries those who live together for an extended period enjoy some of the same legal rights and obligations as married couples. In China cohabitation carries no legal weight. And it is very hard for a child born out of wedlock to acquire a hukou, or residency permit, which provides access to health care, education or other public services.In the 1980s virginity was considered a woman’s chief asset and few couples dared to date openly, let alone live together. Now China is in the midst of a sexual revolution—some 70% of people have sex before marriage, according to a study conducted in 2012. Many young Chinese, however, still have conservative ideas about how their elders should behave: although cohabitation is also on the rise among the elderly, many of them avoid remarrying because their adult children oppose it.

Source: Shacking up | The Economist

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05/09/2016

Britain, India to look at ways to retain strong trade ties after Brexit | Reuters

British Prime Minister Theresa May and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed on Monday to look at ways to retain strong trading links after Britain leaves the European Union, a British official said.

“The Indians said they wanted to look at how we could continue to have a strong trading relationship and there was agreement that as we prepare to leave the EU, we should be exploring what that looks like,” the official said.

“Prime Minister Modi said that we had always been an important partner for India and nothing about leaving the European Union would change that.”

The two leaders were meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

Source: Britain, India to look at ways to retain strong trade ties after Brexit | Reuters

Posted in Economics, India alert | 1 Comment »

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04/08/2016

Rude Chinese banned from going on holiday | The Times & The Sunday Times

“Uncivilised” Chinese tourists who commit such crimes against etiquette as asking foreigners for selfies, throwing nut shells around or defacing historical sites may find themselves stuck at home because their names are on a travellers’ blacklist.

Authorities in China have been cracking down hard on individuals who sully the country’s name abroad by acting rudely or violently, and the national tourism administration introduced a blacklist for the worst offenders last year.

A draft regulation released this week will, if passed, allow government agencies and tour companies to share blacklists and bar trouble-makers from future trips.

As well as travel companies, government organisations such as customs control, quarantine and border protection bodies would potentially be able to access the blacklist and take measures against those on it.

So far the blacklist contains only 19 names. The administration said that behaviour that could lead to a tourist being blacklisted included “damaging public facilities or historical relics, ignoring social customs at tourism destinations and becoming involved with gambling or prostitution”.

The regulation draft, which is in its public comment phase, stated: “Punishments can be imposed by travel agencies or other related agencies or organisations based on the record.

”Some analysts questioned how effective implementation of the rule could be. Liu Simin, of the China Society for Futures Studies research group, said: “If tourism authorities want to restrict blacklisted tourists from travelling overseas, they can do this only through travel agencies. If travellers plan their own trips and skip the agencies, they’re out of reach.

”The introduction of the blacklist came after President Xi told Chinese tourists in 2014 to clean up their act when abroad to help to dispel negative stereotypes about them.

Talking in a light-hearted fashion, he said: “Do not litter water bottles everywhere. Do not damage coral reefs. Eat less instant noodles and more local seafood.

”The year before the president’s comments, Chinese tourists spent more than £14.5 billion on holidays abroad — more than any other country.

Badly behaved Chinese tourists have continued to make headlines since the introduction of the blacklist.

Last week a Chinese woman was arrested for common assault after throwing orange juice at a flight attendant on a flight from Dubai to Hong Kong. She is understood to have been angry because meals for her children had not been prepared by airline staff in advance.

Source: Rude Chinese banned from going on holiday | World | The Times & The Sunday Times

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27/06/2016

China city shuts down waste burning plant over protests | Reuters

A city in central China is shutting down a waste incineration project, it said, after thousands of people protested against the plant over fears it will damage the environment and residents’ health.

Photos posted on social media, which could not be verified by Reuters, showed dozens of riot police marching in the city of Xiantao, located in Hubei province in central China.

About 10,000 people protested in Xiantao on Sunday, the state-backed Global Times reported, citing a local resident, even after the local government said it planned to suspend the project on Sunday morning.

Another resident told Reuters by phone on Monday that the protests continued, and several protesters were injured in clashes with riot police.

“There are hundreds of police here because of the demonstrations,” said the resident, who declined to give his name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The city government called on residents to refrain from taking “extreme actions” and spreading rumors in a statement on its official microblog.

Tens of thousands of “mass incidents” – the usual euphemism for protests – happen in China each year, spurred by grievances over issues such as corruption, pollution and illegal land grabs, unnerving the stability-obsessed ruling Communist Party.

Last June, thousands of people protested in Jinshan, about 60 km (37 miles) from China’s commercial hub of Shanghai, against plans to build a chemical plant in the district.

A Xiantao official said that the planned plant’s emissions of dioxin, a toxic compound, would have been in line with European Union standards, state media reported.

Source: China city shuts down waste burning plant over protests | Reuters

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25/05/2016

China to replace direct coal combustion with electricity in new plan | Reuters

China will reduce the amount of coal burned directly in industrial furnaces and residential heating systems in order to tackle a major source of smog, the country’s energy regulator said on Wednesday.

The National Energy Administration (NEA) said in a joint announcement with other government bodies that around 700 million to 800 million tonnes of coal is burned directly in China every year, much of it in the countryside, where access to electricity is limited.

Directly burned coal amounts to about 20 percent of China’s total coal consumption volume, much higher than the 5 percent rate in Europe and the United States.

China will aim to replace direct burning with electricity, including renewable power as well as ultra-low emission coal-fired generators, the NEA said.

China currently relies on coal for around 64 percent of its total primary energy needs and for three-quarters of its total power generation. Emissions from the direct combustion of coal are around five times higher than those from coal-fired power plants, which are subject to strict anti-pollution regulations.

During the 2016-2020 period, China plans to raise electricity’s share of the country’s overall energy mix to 27 percent, up about 1.5 percentage points from now and raising total power consumption by around 450 billion kilowatt-hours a year, the NEA said.

Experts have estimated that China will need an additional 600 GW of coal-fired power capacity over the 2015-2030 period in order to replace direct coal combustion.

Source: China to replace direct coal combustion with electricity in new plan | Reuters

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16/02/2016

First train from China to Iran stimulates Silk Road revival – Xinhua | English.news.cn

First cargo train from China to Iran arrived in Tehran on Monday, indicating a milestone in reviving the “Silk Road,” which has opened a new chapter of win-win cooperation between China and Iran.

English: the Silk Road in Central Asia

English: the Silk Road in Central Asia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

silk road

The train, also referred to as Silk Road train, has passed through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to Iran, travelling a distance of 10,399 kilometers. It had left Yiwu city in east China’s Zhejiang Province on January 28.

This train was carrying dozens of cargo containers, according to the deputy of Iran’s Road and Urbanism Minister, Mohsen Pour-Aqaei, who made a welcome speech after the arrival of the cargo train at Tehran Train Station on Monday.

As known to all, ancient Silk Road trade route had served as an important bridge for East-West trade and brought a close link between the Chinese and Persian civilizations.

The “Belt and Road” initiative was raised by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, which refers to the New Silk Road Economic Belt, linking China with Europe through Central and Western Asia, and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, connecting China with Southeast Asian countries, Africa and Europe.

“To revive the Silk Road Economic Belt, the launch of the train is an important move, since about 700 kilometers of trip has been done per day,” said Pour-Aqaei, who was present at the welcome ceremony of the train in Tehran’s Railway Station.

“Compared to the sea voyage of the cargo ships from China’s Shanghai city to Iran’s Bandar Abbas port city, the travel time of the train was 30 days shorter,” he said.

Pour-Aqaei, also the Managing Director of Iran’s Railway Company, added that according to the plan, there would be one such a trip from China to Iran every month.

The travel of cargo train from China to Iran is part of a Chinese initiative to revive the ancient Silk Road used by the traders to commute between Europe and East Asia.

Tehran will not be the final destination of these kinds of trains from China, the Iranian deputy minister said, adding that in the future, the train will reach Europe.

This will benefit Iran as the transit course for the cargo trains from the east Asia to Europe, he said.

Chinese ambassador to Iran Pang Sen told Xinhua that as one of the cooperation projects after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Iran, the cargo train is playing a important role to promote construction of the “Belt and Road” initiative.

Meanwhile, the railway line from Yiwu to Tehran provides the two countries an express and efficient cargo trade transportation method, Pang said, adding that the countries along the railway line will furthur upgrade rail technology with the aim to make its transportation ability faster and better.

Source: First train from China to Iran stimulates Silk Road revival – Xinhua | English.news.cn

Posted in China alert, Economics, GeoPolitics, Trade | 1 Comment »

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10/12/2015

Why Delhi Doesn’t Have a Beijing-Style Response to Pollution – China Real Time Report – WSJ

The cities of Delhi and Beijing share a dubious honor as the world’s most-polluted capitals. But their response to dangerous levels of air pollution separates them.

Earlier this week, Beijing for the first time issued a red-alert for pollution, triggered when authorities forecast air-quality levels above 300 for at least three consecutive days.

On China’s government index, a measure of overall air quality, the maximum reading of 500, is described by the government as “severely polluted.” The Chinese administration immediately sent cars off the roads, shut factories and urged schools to close.

In Delhi, where air was similarly dirty, life went on as normal. The starkly different responses prompted some in the Indian capital to question why their government wasn’t taking Beijing-style measures to combat the smog. For sure, plans are underway in India to tackle the capital’s filthy air.

On Friday, Delhi’s government announced it would impose restrictions on the number of cars on its roads from Jan.1. Residents in the Indian city can look up air-pollution data on the website of The System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research, known as Safar, which uses data collected at 10 locations in the city. On that index, air quality in the city regularly hits “very poor” conditions when levels of PM 2.5 — insidious particles in the air including dirt, soot, smoke and liquid droplets — spike.

These tiny particles are thought to be particularly dangerous because they can lodge deeply in the lungs and cause inflammation, infection and lead to diseases including cancer. Readings on the Safar monitor are calibrated from “good” to “severe.” The Delhi Pollution Control Committee also publishes raw pollution data but doesn’t give qualitative readings alongside.

The U.S. Embassy, which measures pollution on monitors at its compound in the capital and around the country, warns the very young and elderly to remain indoors whenever air quality becomes what it calls hazardous. But none of the readings currently trigger alerts, or responsive action, by Delhi’s government. That’s because India is a democracy, said Ashwani Kumar, chairman of the Delhi Pollution Control Committee, an arm of the state government.

China, of course, is a one-party state. The idea that alerts should tell people to stay indoors when smog hits was  “absurd,” Mr. Kumar added, and people “should decide for themselves what to do with the pollution information.” However, he said the Delhi Pollution Control Committee does plan to introduce an app so that information is available to residents with smartphones. Less than 10% of Indians own a smartphone. It also proposes to install around 70 big screens in strategic locations around the city advising residents what they can do to reduce pollution, Mr. Kumar added. The idea of an environmental alert system is not alien to India.

Source: Why Delhi Doesn’t Have a Beijing-Style Response to Pollution – China Real Time Report – WSJ

Posted in air pollution, Economics, Environment, greenhouse gas, India alert | 5 Comments »

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15/10/2015

Fossils found in Chinese cave rewrite history of human migration out of Africa | South China Morning Post

A trove of 47 fossil human teeth from a cave in southern China is rewriting the history of the early migration of our species out of Africa, indicating they trekked into Asia far earlier than previously known and much earlier than into Europe.

Forty-seven human teeth found in the Fuyan Cave in Hunan Province in China. Photo: Reuters

Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of teeth between 80,000 and 120,000 years old that they say provide the earliest evidence of fully modern humans outside Africa.

The teeth from the Fuyan Cave site in Hunan Province‘s Daoxian County place our species in southern China 30,000 to 70,000 years earlier than in the eastern Mediterranean or Europe. The majority of the scientific community thought that Homo sapiens was not present in Asia before 50,000 years agoPAELEO-ANTHROPOLOGIST WU LIU

“Until now, the majority of the scientific community thought that Homo sapiens was not present in Asia before 50,000 years ago,” said paeleo-anthropologist Wu Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences‘ Institute of Vertebrate Paeleontology and Paeleo-anthropology.

Our species first appeared in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, then spread to other parts of the world, but the timing and location of these migrations has been unclear.

University College London paeleo-anthropologist María Martinón-Torres said our species made it to southern China tens of thousands of years before colonising Europe perhaps because of the entrenched presence of our hardy cousins, the Neanderthals, in Europe and the harsh, cold European climate.

Source: Fossils found in Chinese cave rewrite history of human migration out of Africa | South China Morning Post

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