Showing all posts tagged: china

Is This a Pandemic Being Born? - By Laurie Garrett | Foreign Policy

H7N9 Flu in China is starting to look scary.

Timeline of Events

Feb. 19

Feb. 27

March 4

March 9

  • First female patient, 35, from Anhui province became ill with H7N9 (Telegraph).

March 10

  • Initial report of over 900 dead pigs in Shanghai’s Huangpu River as of Saturday, March 9 (China Daily)

March 11

  • Count of dead pigs in rivers near Shanghai reaches nearly 3,000 (Business Insider).
  • Laboratory tests find porcine circovirus (PCV) in one water sample from Huangpu River (Xinhua News)

March 13

  • Officials say the number of pig carcasses in Huangpu River has risen to 6,000 (BBC).

March 14

  • Workers continued to haul dead hogs from a river in the Shanghai suburbs Thursday, where the pig body count now exceeds 6,600, according to the municipal government (USA Today).
  • Farm in Zhejiang province confesses to dumping pig carcasses into river (Bloomberg)

March 20

  • The number of dead pigs discovered in Chinese rivers around Shanghai has risen to almost 14,000 (BBC).

March 22

  • 50 pigs wash up onshore in Changsha, Hunan province; ~1,000 dead ducks are also discovered (NTDon China via YouTube)
  • Number of dead pigs found in Shanghai river rises to 16,000 (Independent)

March 25

  • China pulls 1,000 dead ducks from Sichuan river (BBC).
  • Government officials say that 1,000+ rotten duck carcasses pose no threat to human and livestock along river banks (Xinhua News).

March 26

  • Dumping of thousands of dead pigs linked with Chinese crackdown on pork black market (Business Insider)
  • More than 1,000 dead ducks, in 60 woven plastic bags, are found in Sichuan province (China Daily, Time).

March 31

  • The government’s National Health and Family Planning Commission said over the weekend that two men, aged 87 and 27, died in Shanghai in early March after being infected with H7N9 avian influenza (AFP).

April 1

  • Widespread reporting about two human deaths and one severe casualty of a “lesser-known bird flu virus” (USA Today, AP).
  • Dr. Michael O’Leary, World Health Organization, says that there is no evidence to show that a type of bird flu which has killed two Chinese men can be transmitted between people (Reuters).

April 2

  • Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples of pig carcasses pulled from Huangpu River and found no flu viruses (Shanghai Daily).

Indebted Dragon - Lynette Ong via Foreign Affairs

China’s leaders have never really done anything about the big infrastructure overhang of the chinese economy, and now a market ‘correction’ could send shock waves across the world.

From the article:

For four decades, the Chinese economy has grown by between seven and ten percent each year. It is the envy of the world, despite its relatively sluggish recent performance. Visitors to Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities are quickly awed by impressive skyscrapers, glittering shopping malls, new highways, and high-speed rail lines, all of which leave the impression that China is a developed economy — or at least well on its way to becoming one. Even in some smaller cities in inland provinces, government buildings make those in Washington and Brussels appear meager. In an area of Anhui Province that is officially designated an “impoverished county,” the government office block looks exactly like the White House, only newer and whiter.

Underwriting the impressive facade, however, is an incredibly risky strategy. Governments borrow money using land as collateral and repay the interest on their loans using funds they earn from selling or leasing the same land. All this means that the Chinese economy depends on a buoyant real estate market to keep grinding. If housing and land prices fall dramatically, a fiscal or banking crisis would likely soon follow. Meanwhile, local officials’ hunger for land has displaced millions of farmers, leading to 120,000 land-related protests each year.

[…]

Even before it pops, China’s real estate bubble is causing social harm. An inevitable effect of state-led urbanization is that farmers are forced to vacate their land. Close to 300,000 peasants are removed from their villages every year to make room for the construction of airports, highways, and buildings. Since 1980, more than 60 million peasants, roughly the population of the United Kingdom, have been moved.

The displaced are not usually consulted before relocation. Governments frequently force them to leave by suspending the supply of utilities, such as electricity, to their homes. Increasingly, local governments are even hiring or colluding with gangsters to intimidate villagers who refuse to move. Tellingly, in some villages, these mobsters are known as the “second government.”

Compensation to farmers who do move is often inadequate, because negotiations over the value of their land take place without them. The opacity allows authorities to line their own pockets with funds meant for farmers. It is no surprise, then, that in a recent Landesa survey of nearly 1,800 rural households across 17 provinces, about 20 percent of the displaced (which made up 43 percent of the survey’s sample) had not received any compensation. Of those who had received remuneration, 53.4 percent reported that they were “very dissatisfied” or “dissatisfied” with it, compared with 25 percent who were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied.” When asked why, 80 percent complained of inadequate compensation, 47 percent said it was determined without their input, 38.4 percent said payment was insufficient to maintain their previous standard of living, 28.6 percent said they were unable to find nonagricultural income after having their land taken away, and 25 percent reported that compensation had been intercepted by local officials.

Why We Will Be Blindsided In Asia

Minxin Pei says that the prevailing discourse about China — it’s growth prospects, its economy and strength — is wrong. 

Everything You Think You Know About China Is Wrong - By Minxin Pei via Foreign Policy

The United States should reassess the basic premises of its China policy and seriously consider an alternative strategy, one based on the assumption of declining Chinese strength and rising probability of an unexpected democratic transition in the coming two decades. Should such a change come, the geopolitical landscape of Asia would transform beyond recognition. The North Korean regime would collapse almost overnight, and the Korean Peninsula would be reunified. A regional wave of democratic transitions would topple the communist regimes in Vietnam and Laos. The biggest and most important unknown, however, is about China itself: Can a weak or weakening country of 1.3 billion manage a peaceful transition to democracy?

And when lined up with other likely elements of 21st century Asia, like declining water resources in exactly those countries, the collapse of ‘communism’ (state capitalism, really) won’t lead to Western-style 20th century democracy. It’s headed for a post-normal decline, and fast.

Egypt Plays The China Card

Hohammed Morsi will be visiting China next week, in an effort to disentangle his country from US influence:

Egypt’s outreach to China and Iran is troubling for U.S. policy - David Schenker and Christina Lin via LATimes.com

Concerned about the effect of Egypt’s new policy of intentionally downgrading — and potentially even severing — ties with its peace partner Israel, Morsi appears to be engaged in hedging. Much like post-revolution Iran, China could be a willing partner for an Islamist Egypt.

China has not fared particularly well in the so-called Arab Spring. In addition to losing billions of dollars in energy sector investments in Libya, Beijing’s ongoing support for the Bashar Assad regime’s ruthless repression of the popular uprising has engendered the animosity of millions of Syrians. Beijing’s vetoes of United Nations Security Council resolutions against Syria has made burning Chinese flags a popular pastime among the anti-Assad opposition, and when the regime is finally dispatched, the Middle Kingdom’s economic and political interests in Syria will suffer.

Although an Islamist Egypt beset by insecurity and a failing economy might seem of little value to the Chinese, upgraded ties with the troubled nation would provide China with a foothold on the Mediterranean, and include, hypothetically, a port. Morsi’s Egypt might also be amenable to offering Chinese warships priority access to the Suez Canal, as the U.S. has traditionally been afforded. This privilege would be particularly appealing to China, which increasingly sees a need to protect its investments in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

[…]

The benefits for China of improved ties with Egypt are clear. But Morsi also sees advantages in diversifying Egypt’s sources of assistance. At the most basic level, China’s foreign policy is based solely on perceived national interest alone, and as such, unlike the United States, Beijing will have no qualms about Morsi’s increasing limitations on press freedoms, restrictions on freedom of speech, constraints on women’s rights or the ill treatment of minorities. At the same time, China is flush with cash, and Egypt will again be ripe for foreign investment when and if security is reestablished.

Egypt needs money, and China will provide more of it in serious investments than the US has, and without the need to play nice with Israel. However, this is a seriously destabilizing move from the perspective of the US, especially given China’s increasingly bellicose moves in Asia, and their land grab in Africa.

Boy Meets Girl, In Different Countries

Mary Ann O’Donnell has been living in China a long time, and she relates various versions of the Boy-Meets-Girl trope by country:

mini-series plot recap (by country and episode length) « Shenzhen Noted

US American = boy meets girl, boy and girl have sex, a murder brings them closer together (or one of them may be the victim) in one made for television movie;

Japanese = boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, a suicide brings them closer together (or one or both commit suicide) in 12 episodes;

Korean = boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, inherited and usually unsuspected history between their parents brings them closer together (or results in them being separated for years that each stoically endures) in 16 or 20 episodes;

Taiwanese = boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, their mothers begin a battle that brings them closer together (or forces one or both of them to choose between their lover and their mother) in 30 to 40 episodes;

Mainland = boy meets girl, boy and girl are attracted to each other, they soon realize that together they can rule the country more justly (or together they can’t seize power because corruption is just too endemic) in 80 episodes.

Britain = boy meets girl, boy and girl are attracted to each other, but war tears them apart, until the boy is a gauze-covered manikin and dies (or social class differences keep them apart until they independently emigrate to Australia and re-encounter each other there) in 3 episodes

The Ministry of Public Security must clean out foreign trash, arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls. Behead the snakeheads, the unemployed Americans and Europeans who come to China to make money, traffic in people and mislead the public by encouraging them to emigrate.

- Yang Rui, cited by Andrew Jacobs in Chinese Nationalism as Leadership Change Looms via NYTimes.com

A surge of nationalism, just as the Chinese economy starts to cool.

China’s Once-Hot Economy Is Turning Cold - Keith Bradsher via NYTimes.com

China’s economy is rapidly cooling, partly as a result of the European economic mess and continued slowing growth everywhere else. But the housing and development overhang there could precipitate a real crisis:

Keith Bradsher via NYTimes.com

The most striking feature of the slowdown is that it extends beyond the coastal provinces, which depend on exports and are closely linked to the global economy, to the country’s far more insular interior, including cities like Xi’an here in northwestern China.

China’s unexpected economic difficulties are starting to unnerve investors in world markets, especially commodity markets, as China is the world’s largest consumer of most raw materials and the second-largest consumer of oil.

A deepening slowdown would ripple across the world economy. Until now, China’s economy barreled ahead mostly unhindered as the main engine of global growth, even as Europe struggled with its government debt crisis and the United States limped along with a crippled housing market.

Government indexes show real estate prices are falling in more than half of the country’s top 70 urban markets, Xi’an among them. Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services and Moody’s each issued reports on Thursday warning that many of China’s real estate developers face a severe cash squeeze as apartment sales slow to a crawl. The developers still owe heavy interest payments on bank loans.

“Weak property developers in China are likely to face a test of their survival this year,” S.& P. said.

China’s economy was 8.1 percent larger in the first quarter of this year than a year earlier, but virtually all of that growth took place last year. The economy barely grew in the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter of 2011, and the second quarter of this year is likely to show even less growth from the preceding quarter, said Diana Choyleva, a China economist in the Hong Kong office of Lombard Street Research.

The World Bank also warned on Wednesday of a slowdown.

“Clearly the economy is much, much weaker than most people thought until recently,” Ms. Choyleva said. “They have a real mess on their hands.”

Shadowboxing With China

More suspicion and distrust between China and the US, sparked by the Chen Guangcheng affair, leading to more discussion about military tensions. The US and China are increasingly looking like the two toughest kids in school, who will inevitably square off.

Unease Mounting, China and U.S. to Open Military Talks - Jane Perlez via NYTimes.com

The Chinese have acquired or are developing a variety of weapons and technologies that would enable them to put into practice the doctrine of “anti-access, area denial,” Mr. Harold said. The basic idea is to block American access to strategic waterways, particularly the seas off China’s coast.

Among the weapons to advance the doctrine are ultraquiet submarines and advanced surface vessels equipped with antiship cruise missiles, Mr. Harold said. China is also testing ballistic missiles that can strike an aircraft carrier, he said.

In addition, China has built an advanced cyberprogram designed to disable a potential enemy’s command-and-control capabilities, Mr. Harold said.

In response to the Chinese doctrine, Pentagon planners are devising a military fighting concept called the “air-sea battle strategy” that would ensure that the American military could deploy over great distances to defend United States allies and interests.

“I wouldn’t characterize the situation as an arms race, but competitive military modernization through hardware and, more important, in doctrine,” Mr. Harold said.

We seem to be hewing closely to the realpolitik of the Clausewitz maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Both the US and China appear committed to a military standoff, and a escalation of force and tactics that may be a dress rehearsal for a not-too-distant war. Clausewitz define war as ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’, and that is what both countries are contemplating in the China Sea.

Every regime labeled a “rogue state” or “state of concern” by the United States—Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, Uzbekistan, Myanmar and North Korea—receives active Chinese military, economic and diplomatic support.

Surge of the ‘Second World’ - Parag Khanna via The National Interest

As U.S. power wanes over the next decade or so, the United States will find itself increasingly challenged in discharging these hegemonic tasks. This could have profound implications for international politics. The erosion of Pax Britannica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an important cause of World War I. During the interwar years, no great power exercised geopolitical or economic leadership, and this proved to be a major cause of the Great Depression and its consequences, including the fragmentation of the international economy into regional trade blocs and the beggar-thy-neighbor economic nationalism that spilled over into the geopolitical rivalries of the 1930s. This, in turn, contributed greatly to World War II. The unwinding of Pax Americana could have similar consequences. Since no great power, including China, is likely to supplant the United States as a true global hegemon, the world could see a serious fragmentation of power. This could spawn pockets of instability around the world and even general global instability.

The United States has a legacy commitment to global stability, and that poses a particular challenge to the waning hegemon as it seeks to fulfill its commitment with dwindling resources. The fundamental challenge for the United States as it faces the future is closing the “Lippmann gap,” named for journalist Walter Lippmann. This means bringing America’s commitments into balance with the resources available to support them while creating a surplus of power in reserve. To do this, the country will need to establish new strategic priorities and accept the inevitability that some commitments will need to be reduced because it no longer can afford them.

These national imperatives will force the United States to craft some kind of foreign-policy approach that falls under the rubric of “offshore balancing”—directing American power and influence toward maintaining a balance of power in key strategic regions of the world. This concept—first articulated by this writer in a 1997 article in the journal International Security—has gained increasing attention over the past decade or so as other prominent geopolitical scholars, including John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Robert Pape, Barry Posen and Andrew Bacevich, have embraced this approach.

Although there are shades of difference among proponents of offshore balancing in terms of how they define the strategy, all of their formulations share core concepts in common. First, it assumes the United States will have to reduce its presence in some regions and develop commitment priorities. Europe and the Middle East are viewed as less important than they once were, with East Asia rising in strategic concern. Second, as the United States scales back its military presence abroad, other states need to step up to the challenge of maintaining stability in key regions. Offshore balancing, thus, is a strategy of devolving security responsibilities to others. Its goal is burden shifting, not burden sharing. Only when the United States makes clear that it will do less—in Europe, for example—will others do more to foster stability in their own regions.

Third, the concept relies on naval and air power while eschewing land power as much as possible. This is designed to maximize America’s comparative strategic advantages—standoff, precision-strike weapons; command-and-control capabilities; and superiority in intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance. After all, fighting land wars in Eurasia is not what the United States does best. Fourth, the concept avoids Wilsonian crusades in foreign policy, “nation-building” initiatives and imperial impulses. Not only does Washington have a long record of failure in such adventures, but they are also expensive. In an age of domestic austerity, the United States cannot afford the luxury of participating in overseas engagements that contribute little to its security and can actually pose added security problems. Finally, offshore balancing would reduce the heavy American geopolitical footprint caused by U.S. boots on the ground in the Middle East—the backlash effect of which is to fuel Islamic extremism. An over-the-horizon U.S. military posture in the region thus would reduce the terrorist threat while still safeguarding the flow of Persian Gulf oil.

The End of Pax Americana: How Western Decline Became Inevitable - Christopher Layne via The Atlantic

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