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anonymous

Shaping New Regional Governance in East Asia: A Common Vision for Mutual Benefit and Co... - 0 views

www.koreatimes.co.kr/...120_49963.html

east Asia security economy Official Development Assistance (ODA)

shared by anonymous on 18 Sep 09 - Cached
  • anonymous on 18 Sep 09
     
    Shaping New Regional Governance in East Asia: A Common Vision for Mutual Benefit and Common Prosperity
  • Christoph Zed on 19 Sep 09
     
    `A peaceful solution to the Korean problem will be a starting point for common prosperity and mutual benefit in East Asia, where security matters such as the North Korean nuclear issue have long intermingled,'' a news release said. ``Experts in their respective fields will engage in in-depth discussions and deepen mutual understanding, exploring ways to promote peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula as well as in East Asia.'' Anyone knows how John Howard get's to be there? Has he become an adviser of some sort? Would be interesting to see what his take on these things is, and what/who's agenda he presents?
Christoph Zed

Can India's economy overtake China? - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8273464.stm

markets india china economy globalisation

shared by Christoph Zed on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Can the lumbering elephant overtake the hyperactive dragon?
  • In 2010, the Indian economy may grow faster than that of China.
  • China and India, accounting for roughly 40% of the 6.5bn plus people on Planet Earth, are not merely the two fastest growing major economies in the world at present, but are among the few countries that have continued to expand at a time when the economies of most countries have contracted
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Economists argue that one reason why India's economy can grow faster than that of China in the near future is simply on account of what statisticians describe as a "base effect"
  • China's economy is roughly three and a half times bigger than that of India - Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measured in US dollars in 2008 for the two countries stood at $4.2 trillion and $1.2 trillion respectively.
  • Two years ago, China overtook the US as India's largest trading partner.
  • World Bank in its Global Development Finance 2009 report projected that in 2010, the rate of growth of India's economy at 8% would be faster than that of China, expected to be 7.7%
  • developing countries could "become a key driving force" in reviving the world's economy
  • it was no longer improbable that India could grow faster than China or that South Asia would expand at a faster pace than East and South-East Asia
glen donnar

Gerd Nonneman: Delicate relationship where national interests and morality often confli... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ty-often-conflict-1753013.html

policy intercultural communication east-west

shared by glen donnar on 22 Jul 09 - Cached
  • London's and Riyadh's policies towards each other have been driven primarily by pragmatic considerations of political and economic advantage. Certainly religious and political issues of conviction, matters of pride and intercultural communication have, on occasion, come to the fore – such as King Faisal's decision to impose an oil boycott, the furore in 1980 over the documentary Death Of A Princes
  • s, or the often ill-informed British media commentary about the nature of Saudi politics. On their own, such issues tend not to reorient policy very significantly or for very long. Yet they do have the potential to complicate relations even when neither government wants them to.
Tony Sullivan

Background Briefing - 5 July 2009 - Cairo, a divided city - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...2613439.htm

globalisation Egypt

shared by Tony Sullivan on 05 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Cairo
  • Mr Berry: When you walk in the gate it's nice. It gives you the impression that maybe you have a place in Australia maybe, maybe it feels like you in Australia, maybe somebody else, OK, maybe in Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else in the world, maybe in Italy, maybe somebody has the same feeling like Oh, this looks somewhere in Rome, somewhere in Greece
    • Tony Sullivan
      Tony Sullivan on 05 Aug 09
       
      Describes 'gated communities' for the affluent, being established in desert areas beyond the border of Cairo city.
  • Mr Berry: Golf, it's a very prestigious thing.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Not everyone back in Cairo is happy about the obsession with golf courses. Professor of Landscape and Architecture at Cairo University, Mohammad Refaat says they are a status symbol and the game doesn't come naturally to Egyptians
  • Mohammad Refaat: The first golf course that was created in these new developments was in Katameya Heights. It started - why is that? Because we started to have the Japanese in Egypt. The Japanese, they love golf, and we have several firms with Japanese managers, so it became a luxury to provide the service for them. But I believe that we're never going to be golfers as Egyptians, and I don't know, it's irritating now, because whenever you go, whenever you get a project, even in my private office, they say, 'Ah, the golf', and then we start doing the compound. The main idea of the golf from the owners' point of view is that to provide value for the people so that he can start to sell.
  • Mohammad Refaat: The thing is that I feel that we are Westernising ourselves. The thing is that due to the effect of the media, everybody wants to live in a Dallas, or in a Falconcrest or one of these things that we used to see when we're kids.
  • And they did not understand the Egyptian culture. If I speak about myself, I'd rather live in what we call the hara, or the alley, the old alley that we have, you know, when you have people all living in one street, of having all the services in the street, what we call the philosophy of the extended family. This is very, very Egyptian.
  • Anwar Sadat
  • opened up the country to the world, and very significantly, for the first time, all Egyptians could travel overseas.
  • Egyptians from all classes went abroad to get jobs in Gulf countries. They came back with money and with an appetite for things like shopping and luxury living. Some also brought back new ideas about Islam. It was more conservative and fundamentalist.
  • teachers, engineers, medical doctors, peasants, the large peasant migration
  • get passports, go and work in Jordan, in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, come back. Some of them also in Saudi Arabia perhaps never ever encountering women, right? And coming back with new notions of segregation, of headscarf, of Islamisation
  • Hagar Cohen: In Cairo today more and more women are segregated and wear the burqa, which is the full head and body cover. But everyone likes the shopping, and the new and glitzy malls are full of people in all kinds of dress
  • It can be uncomfortable now for women in western clothes, who don't wear scarves, because conservative men and women clearly show their distaste. This mix between consumerism and a very religious lifestyle is sometimes known as 'petro Islam'
  • Mona Abaza: They have different notions and variations of Islamic ideologies. There is a difference between a 16-year-old kid who is out of a family of 10 living in a slum, and a schoolteacher who lives long years in Saudi Arabia comes back, very much influenced by what I call the petro Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabian consumerists, very much into conservative accommodationist kind of religion, enjoying a shopping mall but at the same time dressing in Islamic code for instance. So marrying certain forms of consumer culture, but giving it a flavour that can look Egyptian, so that you convince yourself that you are different.
    • Tony Sullivan
      Tony Sullivan on 05 Aug 09
       
      Also discussed in relation to Salafism, a quietist social current encouraged by Saudi Araba, in 'The fever under the surface', The Economist 25 July 2009, p11-12, part of a special report on the Middle East.
  • the gated communities inside. the more upmarket, the faster they're selling, and they have names like Beverley Hills, Hyde Park and Dreamland.
  • Another kind of cultural reference for all of this is old Egyptian movies from like the 1950s you know, black-and-white films, where the setting was very, very often the Pasha's villa, which always had a very grand staircase, and a very grand entrance. This is the sort of lifestyle that Egyptians haven't had access to since the 1950s because of the crowding and so on and so forth. So now it's sort of become a lifestyle option for wealthy Egyptians that wasn't really there. So you can now have your own Pasha's villa.
  • Hagar Cohen: Dina Hussanein says she isn't comfortable living in a place with a name like 'Beverly Hills'. Dina Hassanein: That's a very sad thing, because we have a remarkable history and civilisation and yet, you know, we can't think of any Arabic word of our own that we could use to name the places. So I can tell you, Beverly Hills Egypt is nothing like Beverly Hills California
  • Hagar Cohen: Dina Hassanein is a modern woman. She lives on her own, and has a fiancé who lives nearby. She is very beautiful and smartly dressed in Western clothes. She has a job which involves interaction with all sorts of people
  • Hagar Cohen: Dina Hassanein and other residents have to rely on Old Cairo for almost everything, including shops, restaurants, and health services. There are also no local street markets, little shops or stalls, or workshops. In some places, the rules even forbid them. Big supermarket chains can be found easily, but you have to drive to get to them
  • Said Sadek: And you have rulers who believe in gated communities. Mubarak himself, lives in Sharem el Sheik or Borg el Arab, isolated, always isolated. The ruling elite in Egypt are isolated. And so you can tell by this political orientation of the elite that this is what they want, an isolated community because they cannot meet the demands of the masses. There are 40% of Egyptians below poverty line, earning less than $2 a day. And so this abject poverty amidst people who have a lot of money, may drive people to be envious
  • Very poor quality housing found in slums and shanty towns is expanding in Cairo
  • r Cohen: What in terms of sewage and garbage services? Are they available? Manal Tibe: We are talking about no water, so don't talk about sewage and garbage
  • Hagar Cohen: Manal Tibe says that the government isn't doing anything to improve conditions in slums, but has been very generous to private developers of gated communities. The desert land is subsidised by the government as well as the price of fuel, electricity and water. And that makes expenses in gated communities very low.
  • Manal Tibe: More hatefulness from poor to rich people and also to the government. Now, poor people that they want revenge, and this is being interpreted in some crimes against rich people.
  • Hagar Cohen: Dina Hassanein is missing city life, but at the same time she says that she doesn't fit in there any more
  • Dina Hassanein: It's not that I don't want to live there, it's just that our realities are very different, the places that we go are very different. If I were to walk into a slum I might get torn apart. You can't just walk in wearing normal clothes like we do into a place like that. I can barely walk down the streets without getting harassed actually, because it's a much more conservative society, so it's just different, it's almost impossible for these worlds to intermingle.
  • Hagar Cohen: These two very different worlds are on display inside some of Cairo's shopping malls. Western music there is piped through just as it is in any Australian city. This shopping mall is in the suburb of Giza. It's one of the most exclusive ones in Cairo. There's a care there serving Caesar salads and cappuccinos. Just across the road is the Giza Zoo, which is a popular hanging out venue for poorer families
  • This shopping mall
  • It's only a few days before Christmas when we're here, and in this Muslim country, it's ironic that Christian carols are playing throughout the atrium. Mona Abaza: It's a mix of definitely well-to-do Egyptians, and lots of expatriates, foreigners coming. You can see the Christmas decoration. During Ramadan they make Ramadan decorations, tents and Islamic style, and in Christmas they put Christmas decorations
  • Mona Abaza: There is this idea that the old downtown city is now slowly being depopulated by its, let us say, middle class. It used to be a very important commercial centre. It is now losing out this significance, because the centres have been now little by little moving out. So the idea is to get out of the city, because as if it's the inside is rotten, and it's very interesting how the poor can easily look at the lifestyles of the rich. Now this is evidently a bit of a problem for the rich, so that is why they opted for the American Dream, which is getting out and walling off.
  • Mona Abaza: If you look at it just visually, the problem is slums. One can easily say that the view is that as if the whole of Cairo is consisting of slums. Now the past 20 years, the neo liberal ideology of the government is to try and handle the problem of slums, and the way they handle it is as if it's an evil, a cancer that has to be drastically eliminated, with violence, because they consider and they believe that in slums, that we have the breeding of terrorist ideology, Islamist, poverty, violence etc. Now all this is quite often very over-exaggerated. I mean it's a form of discriminating the poor, that's clear. But you have the issue also of the city now experiencing a new form of cleaning up geared towards of course the encouraging of tourism and sites of consumption. So the cityscape is taking place as a huge space for consumer culture and tourism
  • Hagar Cohen: The American University, where Professor Abaza lectures, has also moved out to the desert and is now based in a town called New Cairo. She says it's a bad move, because a whole generation of well-off young people will be isolated, away from historical Cairo or the old Egyptian culture
  • Mona Abaza: You might be astonished but my students, 18 years old, 19 years, have never for instance known anything about downtown, have never even gone to downtown.
  • You will find the American fast food and the Egyptian fast food, and Italian, Mexican. Upstairs there is a McDonald's and Kentucky
  • Towheid Wahab: There is a rule here in the University. There's no mosque, there's no church, there's no temple, there's no monastery. All the people here are equal to do their religion by their own
  • Max Roderbeck: There are good reasons why they want to move, because you get a nice amount of space, you can re-brand yourself with a new image of being something that looks very modern instead of something that's fitted into a shabby old neighbourhood. There's certainly a trend, I mean there are quite a lot of institutions that have moved out.
  • Max Roderbeck: The danger of Cairo being hollowed out is pretty real. And I mean, some of the things that a city needs to be vibrant, seem to be already been pulled out of the centre of Cairo. I've seen other places where downtown becomes either a hollow shell, or ends up just being a sort of transport hub, you know, a sort of junction of roads and things. And I think it's a very real danger with Cairo.
  • Hagar Cohen: Somehow, Cairo has always managed to function as a lively city, says Max Roderbeck, but this time around, things are different
  • These satellite towns were developed in this way because of the government's quick sale of the land to private hands. They wanted to make a return quickly, and big villas and golf courses were in demand. But they don't work as lively urban centres, says environmental architect, Abbas el Zafarany
  • Tony Sullivan on 05 Aug 09
     
    The complexities of globalisation evident in Egypt's largest city and its surrounds
Christoph Zed

BBC NEWS | Technology | Europe's net refuseniks revealed - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8184189.stm

internet usage europe online behaviour downloads

shared by Christoph Zed on 04 Aug 09 - Cached
  • more than one in four Europeans had never used a PC
  • People above the age of 65 and the unemployed were the least active online
  • Nearly 70% of people under the age of 24 use the internet every day, compared to the EU average of 43%. But this same group is reluctant to pay to download or use online content, such as music or video, with 33% saying that they would not pay anything at all.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • make access to digital content an easy and fair game
  • Christoph Zed on 04 Aug 09
     
    I wonder how the east-west divide impacts this, keeping the expansion to eastern European countries in the last few years in mind.
Christoph Zed

BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Madonna adoption saga on Fringe - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8185988.stm

africa malawi madonna culture identity orphan

shared by Christoph Zed on 06 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The 50-year-old star is portrayed in the play Mercy Madonna of Malawi by a black male actor in a blonde wig
  • It also attempts to depict how people in the African country viewed the case.
  • Without taking sides, it asks whether it is right for a child to be taken away from her culture if it means enjoying a life of privilege.
xinning ji

Eyeing off cultural difference | The Daily Telegraph - 0 views

www.dailytelegraph.com.au/...story-e6freuy9-1225761653092

shared by xinning ji on 17 Aug 09 - No Cached
  • the oriental "neglect'' of the mouth can lead to more mistakes in interpreting a person's emotion, said the study, describing how feelings can be ``lost in translation.''
    • xinning ji
      xinning ji on 17 Aug 09
       
      different culture makes people who have different behavious. it is obvious between West and East. people in Asia do nto have many facial expression and body language; they looks shy and strict. in contrast, Western people's facial expression always change when they talk to each other. In Asia, people would not like to express themselves to each other. in other words, they sometimes seems try to hide something, or sometime they do not like others, such as family members to worry about them. So, we usually tell each other good news and hide bad things. it is quite interesting to know different cultural values around the world, and also it is useful to understand various ways to communicate with people from all over the world.
  • Asian participants had difficulty recognising facial expressions of fear and disgust, mistakenly interpreting them as surprise and anger instead
    • xinning ji
      xinning ji on 17 Aug 09
       
      I do not think it is a mistake Asian participants made because different explanation or understanding is based on different cultral backgrounds from West and Aisa. so it is not wrong or right but cultural conflicts and differences.
fiona hou

BBC NEWS | Middle East | 'Racism' claims at Lebanon beach clubs - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8200001.stm

Lebanon migrant Human Rights

shared by fiona hou on 14 Aug 09 - Cached
  • fiona hou on 14 Aug 09
     
    The BBC's Andrew North reports on how migrant workers are allegedly being turned away from many of Beirut's thriving beach clubs.The Lebanese office of campaign group Human Rights Watch says a majority of beach clubs it surveyed are preventing many migrant workers from Asia and Africa from using their facilities.
jung moon

China's youth look to Seoul for inspiration - 0 views

www.chinadaily.com.cn/...content_509119_5.htm

korean wave chinese pop culture east asian pop culture

shared by jung moon on 27 Aug 09 - Cached
  • jung moon on 27 Aug 09
     
    Korean wave in China (this article is written in 2006 but it is still useful)
Shalini Raj

China's Communists Mark 60 Years in Power With Beijing Parade - Bloomberg.com - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...news

shared by Shalini Raj on 01 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Christoph Zed on 04 Oct 09
     
    The parade, in best old school communist tradition, is quite an interesting national display of power at this time. While it is predominantly aimed at the Chinese public (though not all, as access to the event was strictly controlled and limited) broadcast by national TV throughout the "Reich der Mitte" it is reinforcing the identity of a military super power, solid leadership and military state institutions, it also serves in a sense as a means of justification and proof for successful ideology to the ruling elite. And of course the display is aimed at the rest of the world, showing that China is a power to be reckoned with, not just economically but also in regards to it's military - just in case anyone has had any doubt. But is that a message the west needs to be reminded of? With the cold war over, and globalization making a path for cooperation and convergence of east and west in both in the economic and political arena, maybe the display is aimed at old friends eg. Russia and possible future "problems" (from a chinese point of view) such as Iran or N.Korea, who are working towards a stronger military recognition and/or are in strong competition with the market powers China has been able to built up eg: India, Japan.
jung moon

Korean families reunite for a few days - 3 views

news.theage.com.au/...-a-few-days-20090928-g8w3.html

shared by jung moon on 30 Sep 09 - Cached
  • jung moon on 30 Sep 09
     
    Even though South and North Koreans are 'Koreans', we cannot communicate each other because of many reasons.
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Nora Ibrahim on 04 Oct 09
     
    It is amazing isn't it.. so similar yet very different in many ways. Cultural differences due to the distance?
  • xuejiao lin on 05 Oct 09
     
    When I was in Liaoning University of China (it is located in the capital city named Shenyang in Liaoning Province, which adjoins North Koreans), I had a very good friend as my roommate who came from Pyongyang. She was quiet and polite all the time. Meanwhile she even did not like to see those called Roman porn films made by South Korean. She was really different from those many South Korean oversea students in China. Once a time, I asked her to tell me about the confliction between north and south in nowadays. She would say nothing but insisted that "finally, they(the south) will come to us(the north)". Unfortunitlly, she got disappeared at the beginning of the second half semester. Is she a spy?
  • jung moon on 07 Oct 09
     
    From Seoul to Pyongyang (capital city in North Korea) takes only 30 mins I heard. But these families (in the article) couldn't see each other over 50 years....
  • jermaine lee on 07 Oct 09
     
    I knew that South Koreans and North Koreans can't cross the border to visit each other, but i really don't know that they can't even send e-mails. It's such a pity that they don't know when they will see their relatives next time.
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 09
     
    It is reminiscent of families being split in East and West Germany. People would plan trips to Lake Balaton in Hungary to catch up. But that said they could send (censored) letters and make phone calls. If the North Korean Government are so kean to keep these families split up why are they allowing these meetings to take place? The cruelty of it all is hard to comprehend, seeing a loved one never to know if you will see them again.
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