Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by woodlu

Contents contributed and discussions participated by woodlu

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
woodlu

A presidential pardon catches South Korea by surprise | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...atches-south-korea-by-surprise

politics culture policy

shared by woodlu on 19 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Ever since Park Geun-hye, a former president, was sent to prison for corruption and abuse of power in 2017 her supporters had been staging noisy protests in the middle of South Korea’s capital, calling for her release.
  • Even after mass rallies were banned in a bid to stem the spread of covid-19, lone protesters with megaphones or speakers mounted on vans continued to make the rounds of the square.
  • December 24th Moon Jae-in, Ms Park’s successor as president, announced he would pardon her and set her free on New Year’s Eve.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The protests, known as the candlelight movement, led to her being impeached as well as indicted for such offences as extorting bribes from conglomerates and pressing a university into admitting a close friend’s daughter.
  • he promised to honour the spirit of the movement and break with the old ways of the political establishment, including abandoning the custom of pardoning former presidents who had been convicted of corruption.
  • Ms Park’s deteriorating health and the approaching end of his term seem to have prompted Mr Moon to change his mind
  • His office said he hoped the decision would heal political divisions and help usher in an era of national unity, and asked those who opposed the pardon for their understanding, given Ms Park’s ailments.
  • Left-wing newspaper editorials and spokes people for organisations that led the protests against Ms Park accused him of betraying the candlelight movement.
  • His party, which was apparently not privy to the decision before it was announced, issued a terse statement noting that pardons were the president’s prerogative.
  • The conservative opposition welcomed the pardon. But it complained that Mr Moon had also released Lee Seok-ki, a pro-North Korean firebrand who was serving time for treason, and restored the civic rights of Han Myeong-sook, a former left-wing prime minister who served a two-year sentence for bribery from 2015 to 2017.
  • the political benefits for the outgoing president and his camp may well end up outweighing the costs of pardoning Ms Park.
  • Reports of the disgraced former president’s ill health are credible; she is likely to remain in hospital for several weeks before being sent home.
  • Had she died a prisoner on Mr Moon’s watch just a few weeks before the presidential election, the resulting outrage might well have tipped the scales against his party’s candidate.
  • South Korean presidents often find themselves being investigated for corruption after leaving office.
  • Lee Myung-bak, Ms Park’s predecessor, is in prison serving a long sentence for graft. Roh Moo-hyun, who preceded him, committed suicide shortly after leaving office, during a corruption probe into close aides and family members.
woodlu

The number of children in American hospitals with covid-19 is rising fast | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...s-with-covid-19-is-rising-fast

politics crisis pandemic

shared by woodlu on 18 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • These increases have been caused in part by the greater transmissibility of Omicron, which means more children are being infected with covid. But it is possible that the variant also poses a greater risk to youngster
  • The case-hospitalisation ratio in the last two weeks of December was 50% higher than in the two weeks before Omicron was first detected.
  • a near 50% increase in hospital admissions per 100,000 cases in children aged four or younger after the variant was first detected, and a 70% increase in unvaccinated children aged five to 11 (but a decrease in those over the age of 12).
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Differences in vaccination rates provide another potential explanation. In America, 63% of adults are fully vaccinated and 24% have had a booster shot.
  • Figures on hospitalisations tend to fluctuate over time even without the emergence of new variants, so the increases are far from definitive proof that Omicron is riskier for children.
  • Omicron reproduces higher in the respiratory tract than previous variants, causing milder symptoms in adults as the virus does less damage to the lungs, but worse ones in children, because their smaller airways can become blocked more easily.
  • Fewer children have had the jab.
  • only 18% of five- to 11-year-olds have been fully vaccinated
  • A report from Britain’s health-security agency suggests that, for children above the age of five, Omicron presents a lower risk of hospitalisation than Delta.
  • Other British data show that, although more infants are being admitted to hospital with covid, the number in intensive care, the percentage needing ventilation and the average length of their stay have fallen compared with previous waves.
  • The vast majority of children infected with covid experience mild illness and are far less likely than older folk to need hospital treatment.
woodlu

Ten years into Kim Jong Un's rule, North Korea is more North Korean than ever | The Eco... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21806770

politics economics crisis history

shared by woodlu on 13 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Less than a mile from the observatory, North Koreans can be seen tending to fields, driving lorries along the road to a small quarry and riding bicycles past a cluster of low-rise blocks of flats not far from the river bank.
  • If any of them took a moment to peer back the other way, they could see gaggles of South Korean school children trying to get a closer look at their village through the row of binoculars erected at the viewpoint.
  • ten years into the rule of Kim Jong Un, the North’s millennial dictator. The latest hope for opening and reform was dashed when Mr Kim and Donald Trump, then America’s president, failed to come to an agreement to exchange relief from sanctions for arms control at their final meeting in Vietnam in 2019.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • ever more of the few remaining links between North Korea and the outside world have been severed as Mr Kim has instituted one of the world’s strictest border closures in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • there are reports of severe food shortages and political purges, even as North Korea’s state media rebuff any diplomatic overtures from America or the South.
  • from a low level and mostly in the capital, where those with spare cash could enjoy new coffee shops, foreign restaurants and well-stocked supermarkets.
  • Others, such as this newspaper, doubted that Mr Kim would develop an appetite for serious reform but still assumed that he would not be able to resist pressure for change entirely.
  • He reformed laws governing agriculture and state-owned enterprises to allow a degree of private enterprise in the economy, invited outside experts to advise him on the establishment of new special economic zones, awarded official status to hundreds of informal markets and largely turned a blind eye to petty wheeling and dealing.
  • binge of “socialist construction”, filling Pyongyang with futuristic skyscrapers, water parks and a dolphinarium. He also set to work on new tourist infrastructure elsewhere in the country, notably at his summer retreat in Wonsan on the east coast. Trade with China picked up, driven largely by a new class of quasi-entrepreneurs operating from within state enterprises.
  • Some observers at the time expected the regime to collapse within weeks or months, to be followed by economic opening under Chinese supervision.
  • things visibly improved
  • suggesting both economic improvements in parts of North Korea beyond Pyongyang and a growing awareness of what life was like in the outside world. “In earlier years people would say they were fleeing to survive; now most say they fled for freedom,”
  • the boundaries of that “better life” have been gradually curtailed in the more recent years of Mr Kim’s reign.
  • The point of building a “prosperous state” was to make his rule more stable. It did not extend to allowing a proper market economy or granting more political freedoms to ordinary people.
  • accompanied by heightened repression inside the country, more control at the borders and the acceleration of the nuclear programme
  • Aid organisations have not had access for nearly two years, making it especially hard to discern what is going on in the country.
  • hints of increasing distress, with food running low and even the privileged in Pyongyang suffering shortages.
  • Mr Kim himself has admitted that the food situation is “tense” and urged his people to prepare for hardship.
  • increased penalties for smuggling and for watching foreign entertainment, such as South Korean dramas.
  • Mr Kim continues to rebuff offers of aid and even covid vaccines. Attempts by South Korea and America to revive a spirit of detente, for instance by negotiating a formal end to the Korean war, have gone unanswered.
woodlu

Joe Biden adopts a tough new tone with Russia | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21806675

politics economics crisis policy

shared by woodlu on 08 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Mr Biden warned his Russian counterpart, threatening retribution if Russian troops currently massing on Ukraine’s borders launched an invasion.
  • “He told President Putin directly that if Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures,”
  • “We would provide additional defensive material to the Ukrainians...And we would fortify our NATO allies on the eastern flank with additional capabilities in response to such an escalation.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Mr Sullivan did not spell out whether the sanctions would include the “nuclear option” of cutting Russia off from the Western financial networks, notably the SWIFT system of financial transfers
  • He did, though, raise the prospect of asking Germany to halt the opening of Nord Stream 2, a pipeline built to pump Russian gas to Europe.
  • Mr Putin says he wants a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, and that it will not be a base for Western weapons that can threaten Russia—even though neither prospect seems remotely likely.
  • in 2008 NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia (another ex-Soviet republic that has lost territory to Russian-backed separatists) “will become members of NATO” even though they were not included in the formal “membership action plan”.
  • “Countries should be able to freely choose who they associate with.” And yet, given the fragility of Ukraine’s government, the widespread corruption in the country and its unresolved conflict, membership of NATO seems a distant if not impossible goal
  • real problem for Mr Putin may be less Ukraine joining NATO than NATO helping Ukraine
  • Russian government is worried about NATO’s and Western countries’ growing role in arming and training Ukraine’s forces, to the point where they present a more capable opponent—not strong enough to resist a Russian invasion, but probably good enough to retake the breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine were they not protected by Russia.
  • Mr Putin wants America to recognise that Ukraine should rightfully be within his sphere of influence
  • “True sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”
  • In 2014 Mr Putin took over and annexed Crimea, and backed Russian-speaking separatists in the east of the country, crushing Ukrainian forces and creating the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Minsk agreements, intended to end the conflict, would have created a highly decentralised country and, in effect, given Russia a veto over its actions.
woodlu

As nuclear talks resume, Iran is rattled by protests over water | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21806553

economics policy history crisis

shared by woodlu on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • On November 29th diplomats gathered for yet more negotiations meant to salvage the nuclear deal that Iran signed with six world powers in 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
  • The JCPOA set limits on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of many international economic sanctions.
  • The JCPOA allows Iran to enrich uranium to 3.67% purity. It breached that limit in 2019 and is exceeding it to an ever greater degree
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It has also started turning gaseous uranium into solid metal, a key step in bomb-making. On December 1st the agency reported that Iran had begun installing advanced centrifuges and spinning uranium up to 20% at Fordow, a fortified site dug into a mountain where the JCPOA forbids any enrichment.
  • UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency reported in November that Iran had stockpiled more than 2,300kg of enriched uranium, 11 times the level permitted in the deal.
  • Earlier this year it enriched uranium up to 60%, a level that has no civilian use and is a whisker from weapons-grade.
  • Even if forbidden work is halted, Iran has gained valuable know-how that cannot be forgotten. American officials say time is short to restore the deal, but refuse to say what would constitute an irreparable step on Iran’s part.
  • America cannot provide such a guarantee—nor, for that matter, can the deal’s other signatories, including Iran itself.
  • Before this round of talks, Iran indicated it would not discuss its own violations, only America’s. It wants an apology for Mr Trump’s withdrawal, along with compensation and a promise that it will not happen again.
  • November 29th that Iran had at last agreed to discuss not only sanctions but also its own activities.
  • America, they argue, will preserve non-nuclear sanctions that hobble Iran’s economy. They would rather shun the West, pursue trade with China and focus on building a so-called “resistance economy” at home.
  • Farmers started the demonstration, angry about a long drought that has ruined their livelihoods. The government, they said, has done little to help.
  • Water shortages are common in Iran. The UN says that available water per person has dropped by 28% over the past three decades, to 1,675 cubic metres a year, a level it defines as “water stress”.
  • The drought is not directly linked to sanctions: it stems from decades of mismanagement, water-intensive farming and climate change.
  • Yet even a more attentive government would find it hard to fix such problems while under sanctions that limit access to both foreign technology and hard currency.
  • The rial has lost 86% of its value in the past five years. Though inflation eased last month, it is still running at 44% a year. Prices for staple foods like milk, bread and eggs are rising even faster.
  • In recent years there have been frequent protests over living conditions, despite a sometimes brutal crackdown by the authorities.
woodlu

Why the Omicron variant is not a punishment for vaccine inequity | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...unishment-for-vaccine-inequity

pandemic economics policy

shared by woodlu on 01 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The virus will inevitably go on to mutate and spread back into the rich world. The rich world should therefore supply vaccines to poor countries, lest they become breeding-grounds for dangerous new variants.
  • Only 23% of South Africans older than 12 are fully vaccinated.
  • Omicron branched off early in 2020, before Delta came on the scene
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The virus that became Omicron may have been contained in an isolated population that recently re-established contact with the outside world. It may have jumped into an animal and back out again.
  • Or, most likely, it lived for a long time in the body of someone who was immuno-compromised, where it had time to accumulate large collections of mutations, some of which are good at escaping antibodies, locking onto human cells and injecting the viral genome into them.
  • over the nobody safe/everyone safe maxim
  • as the disease continues to circulate, everyone on Earth will sooner or later be exposed to covid and not just once, but often. One thing you can be sure of is that, given enough time, covid will reach Omega.
  • That is because there will always be isolated populations
  • Vaccination may lower the frequency of these events. How much is unclear, but the EU has fully vaccinated 79% of over-12s and cases are nevertheless running at 2.5m a week.
  • a lot of virus is circulating in the EU—and mutating.
  • You can see why people latch on to the nobody safe/everyone safe idea. They want vaccines to be widely available, but they fear that calls for altruism will fall on deaf ears in rich countries. Hence they make the case for “vaccine equity” using an appeal to self-interest.
  • confused arguments can end up seeming manipulative and sanctimonious, weakening the very cause they are designed to support.
  • The best argument for why the rich world should share its vaccines is simpler and more powerful. Vaccines cost a few dollars. They save lives. They are becoming plentiful and will soon be in surplus. The rich world should supply them to the poor world because it is the right thing to do.
woodlu

Travel bans and the Omicron variant are hurting southern Africa | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21806542

politics pandemic economics policy

shared by woodlu on 30 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • It was local virologists and epidemiologists who had honed their skills studying another virus, HIV, who discovered the new Omicron variant of covid
  • When cases spiked unexpectedly, they studied samples, determined that it was a new and worrying variant and—most importantly—shared their findings immediately.
  • Britain shut its airports to flights from South Africa and several other southern African countries. America and the European Union soon followed suit, banning flights and closing their borders to travellers from the region.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Many South Africans felt they were being unfairly punished for their country being scientifically rigorous and open.
  • some South African scientists have pointed out that the travel ban may also be hampering the race to learn more about Omicron by blocking supplies of the reagents they need to study it.
  • Partly because of this South Africa was, until recently, recording less than one-tenth as many daily covid cases as Britain. “It boggles the mind that people in the United Kingdom can pile into a full football stadium and in the United States it appears as though it’s business as usual, but as soon as something happens on African soil, those countries go into a hysterical tailspin,”
  • The new travel restrictions will wallop the region’s tourism industry, just as hotels, game reserves and wine estates were preparing for their busiest months of the year
  • Tourism contributes about 3% of South Africa’s GDP and much more to some others in the region, such as Namibia (11%) and Botswana (13%).
  • Last year covid and travel restrictions cut foreign visits to South Africa by 71% and threw some 300,000 people out of work.
  • Because of the drop in tourism and the imposition of lockdowns the economy shrank by about 6% last year. Thousands of small businesses collapsed
  • The ripples may spread far beyond southern Africa to countries such as Kenya and Uganda that do not yet face travel restrictions.
  • South Africa’s health workers are gearing up for another December of mayhem as covid’s fourth wave washes over the country.
  • Modelling suggested that fewer people would end up in hospital than during a vicious third wave that crested in July. In part this was because antibody tests suggested that in many parts of the country a whopping 59-69% of people had already been infected. And around a quarter of people have been fully vaccinated.
  • The emergence of Omicron, which seems to spread easily, will probably upset those estimates. “It looks like it's spreading quickly but there’s so much that’s unknown, specifically if it will evade the vaccines and its severity,”
  • In previous lockdowns the government banned the sale of alcohol to prevent drunks from occupying precious beds in hospitals. Although this did indeed reduce hospital admissions from car accidents and drunken fights, it also taught many that lockdowns divide people into two groups: the quick and the thirsty.
  • It is difficult to fault governments elsewhere for trying to slow the spread of the new variant, after they were roundly criticised for having failed to act quickly when covid first emerged. But, in turn, South Africa deserves more than just praise for having informed the world quickly about the new variant.
  • If other countries are to be encouraged to do the same with future variants, rich countries should lift travel bans as quickly as it is safe to do so. Many South Africans think rich countries should go further, and compensate South Africa for taking an economic hit that may well spare the rich world a great deal of pain
woodlu

Just like modern humans, honeybees avoid each other amid plagues | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...-avoid-each-other-amid-plagues

social

shared by woodlu on 29 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • A recent study by Michelina Pusceddu of the University of Sassari, in Italy, and six colleagues found that honeybees in hives infected by parasites implement their own form of lockdowns.
  • They achieve a degree of compliance that human public-health officials would envy.
  • more bees succumb each year to the ominously named Varroa destructor. A parasitic mite, it attaches itself to bees’ bodies and helps itself to their stored energy resources.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Bees live in ordered communities that depend on social interactions. Their hives are split into sections.
  • It enters a colony by hitchhiking on foragers, but needs to reach the nursery near the centre to reproduce.
  • Once larvae in mite-infested cells emerge as young bees, they carry the newborn parasites with them throughout the hive, infecting other bees.
  • authors set up six colonies, half of which were infected with the mite. They studied two common activities: the “waggle dance”, which forager bees perform to communicate the site of a newly discovered food source, and “allogrooming”, when bees clean debris or parasites (including mites) from each other’s bodies.
  • In the Varroa-free group, waggle dances and allogrooming both occurred throughout the hive
  • By contrast, in infected colonies, most waggling occurred by the sides of the entrance, keeping potentially infected foragers far from brood cells.
  • allogrooming was concentrated in the centre of the hive, where parasite removal had the greatest impact.
  • Limiting where waggle dances are performed could reduce awareness of where to find food, and focusing allogrooming efforts in brood cells may worsen forager bees’ hygiene
woodlu

To prevent floods, China is building "sponge cities" | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...hina-is-building-sponge-cities

policy economics social

shared by woodlu on 22 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Leshan lies at the confluence of three tributaries of the Yangzi river. Centuries ago its residents carved a stone statue of the Buddha into a cliff face. It towers 70 metres high, overlooking the swift currents.
  • By the time of last year’s disaster, its built-up area, including satellite towns, was more than half as big again as it was in 2000. City planners had failed to make due provision for floodwater runoff.
  • After four decades of frantic expansion, many other cities are in similar difficulty. They are poorly prepared for extreme downpours, which are likely to become more common as a result of global warming.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • July over Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan, drenched the city in a year’s worth of rain in three days
  • In all, nearly 300 were killed.
  • In 2018 Zhengzhou announced a plan to ensure that nearly nine-tenths of its core urban area would be “spongified” by 2030.
  • About 70% of those cities are in floodplains.
  • urbanisation has resulted in a third of farmers’ ponds and half of all wetlands disappearing.
  • The aim is for 80% of cities to collect and recycle 70% of rainwater by 2030.
  • According to Chinese researchers, average annual losses from floods in China doubled from around 100bn yuan ($15.6bn) in the decade after 2000 to over 200bn yuan in the early 2010s.
  • Cities have long tried to prevent flooding with hard engineering involving the “grey infrastructure” of dams, dykes and barriers. But urban surfaces of tarmac and concrete cause floodwater to rush into often inadequate drains.
  • Producing a sponge effect requires measures such as creating artificial wetlands, planting roadside shrubs and using permeable materials to build pavements and plazas.
  • Experts reckon that implementing the government’s sponge-city guidelines will cost at least $1trn nationwide.
  • It is the case that local governments sometimes misspend the money they are given for sponge-city building. They are often reluctant to use expensive land to create natural drainage systems such as parks and ponds.
  • But the work had clearly failed to avert disaster (and had not reversed the extensive building-over of Zhengzhou’s wetlands that had occurred in recent decades). Officials insisted that the downpour was a “once in a millennium” event that even the best-built sponge city could not have coped with perfectly.
  • They point out that the government had required sponge projects to cover only 20% of the city’s urban area by 2020. So it may be difficult to evaluate Zhengzhou’s efforts at least until 2030.
  • “We overbuilt, and we built it wrong,” says Yu Kongjian, a landscape architect at Peking University.
  • they must be capable of absorbing rain without creating floods.
  • He drew inspiration from old Chinese irrigation systems, such as “mulberry fish ponds” that act as natural reservoirs
woodlu

The Indian government's addiction to subsidies has dire effects | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-to-subsidies-has-dire-effects

social politics policy economics

shared by woodlu on 19 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Delhi’s air is so filthy that on November 13th the government decreed an indefinite closure. One rarely mentioned reason for the pollution also plays a part in a host of other troubles: subsidies.
  • Despite endless warnings about moral hazard and distorted markets, politicians and bureaucrats keep creating them
  • Rice uses a lot of water, and the region around Delhi is fairly dry, but decades ago the government began paying fat prices to push rice-growing
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It also subsidised wheat, fertiliser and diesel to fuel water pumps.
  • farmers pumped ever more water to grow ever more wheat and rice. With some 9m pumps, parched India now uses more groundwater than America and China combined, and holds far bigger grain stocks than it needs.
  • They have also created dangerous dependence.
  • Those for electricity make power more affordable, but leave the distribution network underfunded
  • To compensate, commercial consumers pay up to four times more for power, helping make Indian manufacturers uncompetitive.
  • During the worst of the covid slump, many economists counselled boosting demand by giving cash to the hardest hit. The government’s biggest initiative instead propped up manufacturers, encouraging them to invest where bureaucrats think they should by offering “production-linked incentives” to make things like solar panels. In other words, it offered subsidies.
  • Indian Railways can afford government-imposed low passenger fares only by raising the cost of freight. It relies on shunting coal from forest-devouring strip mines to smoke-belching power plants.
  • A World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement required India to phase out varied export-promotion subsidies by 2016.
  • Instead the country ramped up several programmes, earning in 2019 a sharp reprimand from the WTO
  • It was chastised again this year, this time for concealing subsidies for agricultural exports.
  • The WTO might be more sympathetic if it were to study a typical Indian election campaign, where parties vie to offer ever-higher handouts.
  • The current government started off in 2014 insisting it would slash subsidies, and compressed a multiplicity of government schemes into just 40 main ones (not counting various hidden handouts and cross-subsidies)
  • Only 77% of electricity is paid for, piling up debts reckoned in 2019 at around $57bn.
  • Farmers hurry to clear the rice harvest before planting spring wheat, burning off stubble in a vast pall of acrid smoke.
woodlu

How the game of Go explains China's aggression towards India | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...hinas-aggression-towards-india

social politics policy economics

shared by woodlu on 18 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • N THE ANCIENT Chinese game of weiqi, better known in the West as Go
  • build the largest, strongest structures, and only secondly to weaken and stifle enemy ones. Better players shun contact, preferring to parry threats with counter-threats.
  • long as India and China were focused on building their own core structures, each largely ignored the other.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • The two have lately engaged in sabre-rattling and name-calling. But such tension has been rare during their seven-decade rivalry as modern nations.
  • the Asian giants’ 3,500km-long border region remained an empty section of the board
  • mostly avoided contact
  • India and China maintained overlapping claims, and their forces sometimes clashed, as in a brief war in 1962. But they both also judged that there was not enough at stake to fight a big war over.
  • territorial limits continued to be defined in many areas by a “Line of Actual Control” rather than an internationally recognised boundary
  • border patrols went lightly armed
  • unresolved challenges multiply, the advantage shifting to whoever poses the sharpest ones
  • a democracy bound by rules, India has repeatedly sought to end the ambiguity by negotiating a permanent border
  • China has repeatedly rebuffed such efforts
  • why foreclose on potential pressure points? Better to leave them open for use in the future, when you have more leverage and your opponent has more reason to fear you
  • China appears to have decided that this future is now
  • several strategic spots along the border in the spring of 2020, Chinese troops marched into long-established patches of no-man’s-land, setting up permanent forward positions. When India sent in soldiers to challenge the intrusions, fisticuffs ensued
  • 20 Indians and at least four Chinese dead
  • This leaves it in control of lands India regarded as its own and, more seriously, in control of vantage points from which to threaten crucial roads and other Indian infrastructure.
  • From a weiqi perspective China’s boldness is understandable
  • In the 1980s its economy was roughly equal to India’s. It is now five times bigger, and churns out ever-more sophisticated weaponry while India relies on imports
  • China’s infrastructure has expanded towards its peripheries at a speed India has been unable to match
  • China’s southern neighbour looks weak in other ways
  • Its democracy is messy and inefficient
  • China extends strength by tightening its alliance with India’s arch-enemy Pakistan, Mr Modi dithers
  • In his dream of a Hindu golden age India needs no allies, only weaker satellites or rich friends.
  • India’s army has little functional interoperability with any other.
  • the board fills up and one player emerges dominant, there should be no surprise for it to push the advantage
  • Even if his opponent is erratic, the global gameboard may prove wider, and India may turn out to have better-placed assets than Mr Xi realises.
  • India retains a big reserve of goodwill as a democracy and a decent global citizen; it would gain fast allies if it really tried to win them
  • India’s core strength may run deeper, too. Its relative smallness is deceptive: the eastern third of China, where 95% of Chinese actually live, is no bigger than India.
  • India’s remains packed with upward potential.
woodlu

Nuclear energy united Europe. Now it is dividing the club | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...pe-now-it-is-dividing-the-club

shared by woodlu on 02 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • “The peaceful atom”, wrote Jean Monnet, the cognac salesman turned founding father of the EU, was to be “the spearhead for the unification of Europe”.
  • Europe was a nuclear project before it was much else. In 1957 the EU’s founding members signed the Treaty of Rome to form the European Economic Community, the club’s forebear. At the same time they put their names to a less well-known organisation: Euratom, which would oversee nuclear power on the continent.
  • Where nuclear power was once a source of unity for Europe, today it is a source of discord
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Of the EU’s 27 countries, only 13 produce nuclear power. Some ban it. France and Germany, the two countries that dominate EU policymaking, find themselves directly opposed
  • France generates over 70% of its power from nuclear reactors
  • The reality of European politics is kaleidoscopic
  • Is nuclear power green (since it emits very little carbon dioxide) or not (because nuclear accidents, though extremely rare, are dangerous)?
  • How the EU is managing the decision reveals a lot about the club.
  • politics
  • Franco-German engine sputtering on nuclear policy, unlikely alliances have formed. France and the likes of Poland and the Czech Republic are usually sparring partners.
  • Countries in eastern Europe see the French as protectionists who suck up to Russia
  • when it comes to nuclear power the two are firm pals. It is tempting to carve the EU into simple blocs,
  • Nuclear policy is a reminder that fates in the EU are bound together, whether the topic is energy, the environment or the economy
  • Germany has pledged to close all its nuclear power plants by 2022
  • Countries from Belgium to Bulgaria followed
  • scrapping plans to build nuclear power stations and pledging to switch others off
  • Europe falling back in love with nuclear power is just one example of the many policy debates heading in a French direction
  • Nuclear power is another debate in which Paris gets its way.
  • the EU is a dealmaking machine, with consensus forged via a mix of bribery, blackmail and back-scratching.
  • Gas power is undergoing the same kinds of debate as nuclear power. While gas generates carbon emissions, it is cleaner than coal, argue its supporters.
  • If the politics are linked, so are the policy consequences
  • A likely compromise is that while stiff rules could remain for day-to-day spending, countries could be able to spend more freely in the name of the green transition. If nuclear power is labelled green in the private sector, it becomes harder to avoid a similar designation when it comes to public money
  • On paper the European Commission, which makes the initial decision on how to treat nuclear power, is full of civil servants who offer technocratic answers. In practice, they know the question of nuclear power is political. They also know that life will be easier if they answer it quickly, preferably before a new German government containing a virulently anti-nuclear Green party is formed
  • Germany is likely to be on the losing side. It gave up on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown in Japan
  • those countries that pride themselves on only using the cleanest energy will benefit from those that rely on more debatable sources.
  • The EU is an increasingly homogenous beast, with fewer carve-outs for those who want to do things differently. Collective decisions have collective outcomes. “To approach our atomic future separately…would have been insane,” wrote Monnet. The EU will approach its atomic future together, whether some countries like it or no
woodlu

What Happens When Everyone Is Writing the Same Book You Are? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-the-covenant-jerusalem.html

social Culture history

shared by woodlu on 01 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • It was as if the story were floating in the air, waiting to be rediscovered. And by coincidence, a handful of writers came across it at the same time.
  • Montagu Brownlow Parker. Known as “Monty,” he was my great-great-uncle.
  • That was nearly everything I knew of him. All my family had left of his adventure in Jerusalem was a black box of papers telling a captivating tale.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • an encounter between Monty and an eccentric Finnish scholar, Valter Juvelius, who claimed he had identified ciphers in the Old Testament that showed where the ark was hidden in Jerusalem. He wanted to go and find it;
  • Monty, a veteran of the Boer War and a son of a wealthy politician, had the connections and credibility to make it happen.
  • Monty gathered investors, permissions and a team, and in 1909 the “Parker expedition” started digging in Jerusalem for the ark, a holy relic whose value — immeasurable — Monty promised to split with the Ottoman government.
  • A mosque attendant, appalled, caught the diggers in action and rumors began to fly, scandalizing members of the city’s various faiths.
  • I started to research the story, not knowing that my explorations made me a member of a curious, modern-day venture that paralleled its historical counterpart: the Parker expedition writers.
  • the events of the expedition’s aftermath — including the revelation, shocking to Jerusalem’s Muslim residents, that corrupt Ottoman officials were aiding the British explorers — add depth to our understanding of the factors influencing the emergence of Palestinian nationalism.
  • My grandfather gave her a few photos and documents, and in 1996 she staged an exhibition on the Parker expedition, her paper on it making her a key contact for everyone who came to the story later, looking for sources.
  • She welcomed each of us who wrote to her as though she were our party host, passing on news of our fellow expedition explorers and enjoying the coincidence that these books were all happening at once.
  • I felt my loose connection to Great-Great-Uncle Monty shift into possessiveness:
  • Nirit emailed with a smiling emoji about “the new guy in town”: Brad Ricca, an author in Cleveland who writes books that blend fact and fiction. And four months after that, my dad was sitting down for dinner one evening when Nirit rang to introduce him to Lior Hanani, a young Israeli software developer who chose the expedition as the basis for his debut novel.
  • Graham shared a scoop he’d found in the British archives: Monty had a diagnosis of neurasthenia, what we’d now call PTSD.
  • In 1995, Nirit, then early in her career but with characteristic resolve, tracked down a box of glass negatives from the expedition, enlisted a student to locate the great-grandson of Valter Juvelius in Finland and reached out to my grandfather in England.
  • The expedition may have had an impact on British foreign policy in the region, Andrew said when we talked, and it helped spawn the world’s ongoing fascination with the ark of the covenant (and Indiana Jones). It illustrates how people at the time viewed the Bible, science and chronology, Timo explained over Zoom, and why secret ciphers might have made sense to them.
woodlu

Remote-first work is taking over the rich world | The Economist - 2 views

www.economist.com/...-is-taking-over-the-rich-world

politics economics

shared by woodlu on 01 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • N FEBRUARY 2020 Americans on average spent 5% of their working hours at home. By May, as lockdowns spread, the share had soared to 60%—a trend that was mirrored in other countries.
  • Most office workers remain steadfastly “remote-first”, spending most of their paid time out of the office. Even though a large share of people have little choice but to physically go to work, 40% of all American working hours are still now spent at home
  • Last year British government ministers exhorted workers to get back to the office; now they are quieter
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • bosses expect that in a post-pandemic world an average of 1.3 days a week will be worked from home—a quarter more than they expected when asked the same question in January.
  • Many people remain scared of contracting covid-19, and thus wish to avoid public spaces.
  • workers have more bargaining power.
  • it takes a brave boss to make people take a sweaty commute five days a week (workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut).
  • Work that is largely done remotely may be more efficient compared with an office-first model.
  • Not all the papers find a positive impact on productivity. A recent paper by Michael Gibbs of the University of Chicago and colleagues studies an Asian IT-services company. When the firm shifted to remote work last year average hours rose but output fell slightly.
  • “higher communication and co-ordination costs”. For instance, managers who had once popped their head round someone’s door may have found it harder to convey precisely what they needed when everyone was working remotely.
  • more positive results
  • Only 15% of home-workers believe they are less efficient working in this way than they were on business premises before the pandemic, according to a paper published by the team in Apri
  • One possibility is that they can more easily focus on tasks than in an office, where the temptation to gossip with a co-worker looms large.
  • Commuting, moreover, is tiring. Another factor relates to technology.
  • Remote workers, by necessity, rely more on tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. This may allow bosses to co-ordinate teams more effectively, if the alternative in the office was word-of-mouth instructions that could easily be forgotten or misinterpreted.
  • If it is so wonderful, then why is there little evidence of a shift towards “fully remote” work, where firms shut down their offices altogether? Companies that have chosen to do this are in a tiny minority.
  • A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, however,suggests that firms have good reason to hold on to their office buildings, even if they are used less frequently.
  • Remote work makes people’s collaboration practices more “static and siloed”, it finds. People interact more with their closest contacts, but less with the more marginal members of their networks who can offer them new perspectives and ideas
  • That probably hurts innovation. The upshot is that fully remote teams might do quite well in the short term, but will ultimately suffer as innovation dries up.
woodlu

Japan's ruling party wins another election | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ng-party-wins-another-election

politics economics

shared by woodlu on 01 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • OBARA HIROYUKI, a 33-year-old office worker in Tokyo, considered voting for the first time this year. But he overslept on October 31st—election day—and had other plans in the afternoon. When it comes to politics, “nothing grabs my attention,” he says. “Nobody around me votes—at work, there's a sense that you shouldn't talk about politics.”
  • news was even worse for Japan’s embattled opposition, which failed to make use of the political tailwinds. It could not motivate independent voters. And memories of its messy rule from 2009 to 2012 remain potent.
  • Along with its coalition partner, Komeito, the LDP kept control of the country's lower house despite posting its worst results since it briefly lost power in 2009:
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Frustration with the government’s handling of covid-19 fuelled the losses. While Japan has seen relatively few deaths as a share of population and has reached relatively high rates of vaccination (after a slow start), voters have given the national government little credit.
  • Party grandees hoped the ire would recede after Kishida Fumio replaced the unpopular Suga Yoshihide as party leader and prime minister in October. But Mr Kishida, a milquetoast figure, has not done much better at connecting with the public.
  • Mr Kishida’s administration's approval ratings have hovered between 45% and 60%, relatively low for a new prime minister.
  • Turnout was just 56%, essentially unchanged from 54% in the last lower-house election in 2017.
  • The biggest beneficiary of the LDP’s slide was instead the Japan Innovation Party, an Osaka-based right-leaning populist outfit, which more than tripled its seats, from 11 to 41
  • But it has limited appeal beyond its home region, and it is rare for regional parties to go national in Japan.
  • On the whole, voters opted for stability. The ruling coalition secured more than 261 of the lower house’s 465 seats, a threshold known as an “absolute stable majority”
  • His first order of business will be his debut on the world stage: he is expected to travel to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on Monday, November 1st.
  • That will force him to begin fleshing out his economic policies, which have thus far consisted of lofty-sounding but fuzzy pledges to create a “new model of capitalism”.
woodlu

Why Democrats' tax plans are such a mess | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...rats-tax-plans-are-such-a-mess

politics policy economics

shared by woodlu on 29 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • 0E BIDEN promised to pay for his big social-spending proposals by raising taxes on the rich and nobody else.
  • Now Democrats are rushing to find a big pot of money without raising headline rates of tax at all.
  • predicting that they would soon reach a compromise on a social-spending bill that would pass in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, where they cannot afford a single dissenting vote in their ranks.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona,
  • satisfy two centrists:
  • Joe Manchin of West Virginia
  • desire for higher tax revenues without higher tax rates has left Democrats scrambling to make deep changes to how some levies work
  • new minimum tax on the biggest corporations’ accounting profits, which can exceed those declared to the tax authorities.
  • is a levy on
  • firms that buy back their own stock, a longtime bugbear on the left
  • a reform to the federal capital-gains tax that is designed to ensnare the ultra-rich. It would tax them annually on the paper gains of their investment portfolios, rather than when assets are sold, as under the current system
  • firms could avoid the tax attached to them by paying dividends instead.
  • no sound economic reason for penalising share buy-backs
  • A tax on the book profits of companies would outsource tax rules to unaccountable accounting bodies, reduce the efficacy of desirable tax deductions for investment and, by interfering with the ability to carry forward losses, play havoc with firms whose profits are volatile.
  • The “mark-to-market” capital gains tax is a messy attempt to rapidly extract enormous amounts from a tiny number of the very rich
  • proposal which is even more poorly designed, and which Mr Manchin is right to oppose
  • That would ultimately be bad for investment and the incentive to innovate, and would get in the way of the widespread ownership of equities.
  • straightforward result of their fragile control of Congress and the idiosyncrasies of two of their senators
  • failed to bring in straightforward reforms that raise revenue by enlarging the tax base
  • abolishing the egregious exemption that resets accrued capital gains to zero when owners die and pass on their estates.
  • Taxing capital gains at death, as Mr Biden first proposed, would raise more than $200bn over a decade—not far off the “several hundred billion” Democrats say the tax on investment portfolios would yield
  • lobbyists defeated the idea
  • also preserved the carried-interest loophole, which lets investment managers class their fees as lightly taxed capital gains, not income.
  • lifting the cap on an exemption from federally taxable income of money used to pay state and local taxes. Doing that would benefit the wealthy, narrow the tax base and subsidise high-tax states.
  • Mr Biden ignored the example of Europe. Its social spending is funded using broad-based and efficient taxes, most notably value-added tax, a levy on consumption
  • unfriendly to economic growth to begin with. Narrowing the target further—the capital-gains reform would apply only to billionaires and those with more than $100m in annual income sustained over three years
  • this tax would apply only to securities traded on public markets, with different rules for stakes in privately held firms, it would deter entrepreneurs from floating their companies on the stock exchange.
  • Democrats have pretended that raising taxes on businesses would have no negative effect on wages, contrary to the overwhelming consensus among economists.
  • The failure to agree on a tax plan carries echoes of doomed Republican attempts, under Donald Trump, to “repeal and replace” the Obamacare health-insurance system.
  • Democrats will have to confront the fact that permanently expanding the welfare state without damaging the economy means winning an argument for higher taxes, rather than always telling voters that some rich person will pay.
woodlu

Opinion | Covid Will Likely Be With Us Forever. We Need to Plan. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vid-forever-endemic-plans.html

Culture politics pandemic

shared by woodlu on 27 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • I pondered what seemed like a miraculous paradigm shift: Apparently, I no longer had to fear that my fellow joggers would kill me, or I them.
  • it was suddenly easier to imagine a Covid-free future. We had a president strongly committed to stamping out the virus. America could lead the world in rolling out vaccines. And on July 4, albeit with caveats, President Biden announced, “Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.”
  • a once-unthinkable idea is breaking through any assumptions that we would vanquish Covid-19.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Within weeks of those remarks, cases spiked, I.C.U.s overflowed, and we were reminded yet again of Covid’s power to outwit us.
  • Dr. Mokdad can literally map how our desire to prematurely claim victory, rather than accept the virus’s continuance, has led us to throw off restrictions, with deadly effect
  • “We all want it to be over. But contingency planning for long-term response is absolutely essential.”
  • If we think Covid-19 is going away, then we will drop our guard and not make essential investments now.
  • we need to debate how to live with it
  • “We have to start thinking, planning and coming to grips in every way that this is now a human endemic infection and it’s never going to go away,”
  • we need to organize effectively for the very long haul, dramatically improve our pandemic response and embed safeguards into our everyday lives.
  • Masks, which so many Americans abandoned when it seemed the end of the pandemic was in sight, could still make a difference: If 95 percent of Americans wore a mask, his model projects roughly 56,000 fewer deaths by Feb. 1.
  • “Any effort to predict a future course beyond 30 days relies on pixie dust for its basis.”
  • An escape variant
  • is not a certainty, said the experts with whom I spoke. But it is not far-fetched, either, in part because of our slow pace at vaccinating the world.
  • That mind-set is not only a crucial hedge against complacency, in which we settle for the good-enough defenses we have now. It could drive us to capitalize on the extraordinary scientific progress of the past year.
  • As we come to terms with Covid forever, what might our daily lives look like?
  • Will we have to pare back our holiday party guest lists for years to come? Will home testing before any social gathering become de rigueur? Will vending machines in every subway station carry cheap KN95 masks?
  • some experts I spoke with seemed wary of detailed predictions. “Every morning, I scrape five inches of mud off my crystal ball,”
  • “We would expect that the transmission will never go to zero,” Dr. Mokdad told me. “The virus is going to be with us for a long time” — meaning that deaths, and efforts to prevent them, could continue for years.
  • envision flulike seasonal surges of Covid-19, accompanied in some years by heavy death tolls. Those could lead us to mask up seasonally, get an annual vaccine as we head into the winter months and make ongoing improvements to ventilation in critical public spaces like transportation hubs.
  • the biggest shift in our new normal could be a growing societal embrace of protective measures, rather than a continued war over school mask wearing or workplace vaccine mandates.
  • “They will come around to accept reality.” To him, the clashes over seatbelt wearing, and its ultimate acceptance, offer a useful comparison.
woodlu

The confidence of China's Communist Party is striking | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...as-communist-party-is-striking

politics Culture

shared by woodlu on 26 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Chinese who are oppressed by local officials have sighed, by way of explanation: “The heavens are high, and the emperor far away.”
  • They want the masses to believe that, even in the remotest villages, their welfare is the concern of an all-knowing leader, Xi Jinping, served by officials striving to follow his stern but wise example.
  • A central task of the Xi era is to transform morale among the country’s 90m party members, including millions of bureaucrats.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Officials are told that they serve a rising China, whose growing strength is the awe of the world
  • Chaguan recently spent four days in Malipo, a remote county of conical, cloud-topped hills, terraced fields and fruit orchards in the southern province of Yunnan, on the border with Vietnam
  • The ministry uses its connections to help the county, which was declared free of extreme poverty in 2019 and last year recorded an average income per person of 11,984 yuan ($1,874).
  • Foreign embassies and businesses have donated school buildings, books and scholarships. On October 17th America’s National Basketball Association donated a new basketball court to a middle school in Malipo (the NBA is still trying to mend fences in China after a coach signalled support for Hong Kong’s democrats, triggering nationalist fury).
  • A new motorway opened on October 1st, following lobbying by the foreign ministry. A diplomatic charity raised funds to build clean water systems for villagers who previously fetched water by hand.
  • the ministry sends a mid-ranking official to serve for a year or two as Malipo’s deputy county chief.
  • Domestic tasks also loom. The ministry’s current man in Malipo, Chen Minghuang, served in Japan for several years. In addition to seeking inward investments for the county, he is, among other things, responsible for water quality in several rivers.
  • local official praises foreign-ministry volunteers for their promotional skills.
  • “Compared with the masses, party members represent more progressive and developed forces. That’s how they can help the people,” says the visitor from Beijing. A years-long anti-corruption drive has created a culture of honesty among officials of all ranks, she adds
  • Farmers may not understand which crops will grow well, and which will make money, says a county official. The role of experts is to guide them to harness market forces.
  • Lots of officials are increasingly proud of the system they serve, especially as they survey what they regard as chaos in the West.
  • they talk openly about the party’s role in that system. As Mr Chen puts it, millions of party members are working towards the same goals, guided by strong leaders.
  • changing views of Malipo’s masses as they see their roads being paved, and houses and schools restored. “The central government always enjoyed a high status in people’s minds. Now local government’s reputation has also risen,” Mr Chen says.
woodlu

California's approach to gendered toys says a lot about the state's political direction... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-states-political-direction

politics Culture

shared by woodlu on 25 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • The one drawing most attention, rightly, is a law that will expand the number of units that can be built on single-family plots and offer a much-needed boost to housing supply.
  • new law taking aim at child’s play
  • Starting in 2024, large retailers with more than 500 employees will no longer be permitted to offer just “boy” and “girl” sections for toys and other child-care items in their stores. They must also add a “gender-neutral” section.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • new law will help combat gender stereotypes
  • opponents see this as government overreach
  • But should it be government’s role to tell businesses how to display such merchandise?
  • the new toys law shows that California is intent on managing “minute” issues “down to a level I never thought it would go, in regards to state-level involvement”.
  • Mr Newsom also signed a new law requiring public universities and schools to offer menstrual supplies on campus.
  • it may come as no surprise that politicians are using their power to advance issues their party cares about, such as gender equality
  • mostly symbolic
  • California is becoming more involved in businesses’ and people’s daily lives
  • As the state pushes forward with its efforts to combat climate change, “there is probably no dimension of life that will be untouched by California’s decarbonisation agenda”
  • signed a law banning the sale of new gas-powered leaf-blowers and lawnmowers
  • signed an executive order banning the sale of gas-powered cars from 2035
  • Some cities are even talking about banning the use of natural gas in new homes and businesses, a measure which would, in effect, bar gas stoves.
  • “advance a cultural agenda”,
  • He draws a connection between the toys law and red-state governors, including Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, who are forbidding companies to require employees to wear masks and get vaccinated
  • Texas and Florida are interfering with the freedom of businesses to decide their own policies.
  • According to Mr Cain of Stanford, “It’s not like one party is for freedom and the other isn’t. Both parties are for different forms of intrusion.”
woodlu

In Xinjiang, officials are trying to stamp out Uyghur identity | The Economist - 2 views

www.economist.com/...21805768

politics crisis Culture

shared by woodlu on 21 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • They worry that it may fuel separatist yearnings in the far-western region. But in 2014, as the authorities stepped up their campaign to crush terrorism there, the government still tolerated displays of pride in Uyghur culture
  • after the death of Mao Zedong, Uyghur culture was allowed to flourish, as long as it avoided any hint of support for a separate Uyghur state. Uyghur writers produced poems and songs filled with universally familiar themes such as love and loss, but also conveying pride in their identity
  • But it fell victim to a security clampdown, launched in response to sporadic attacks by Uyghurs on Chinese belonging to the ethnic-Han majority.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • of the show’s stars have disappeared into a vast new gulag in which more than 1m people, most of them Uyghurs, have been locked up.
  • Officials say the camps offer “vocational education” to help Uyghurs find better jobs and to curb their “extremist” tendencies.
  • shown no more sign of extremism than simply being devout Muslims.
  • their crime has been to show too much enthusiasm for Uyghur culture, not necessarily just Islam.
  • Uyghur groups in the West reckon the four are among nearly 400 intellectuals and cultural figures who have been detained in the new camps, sent to regular prisons or who have otherwise disappeared since the clampdown began.
  • Others associated with Uyghur culture have been paraded on state television praising the virtues of the Communist Party or singing patriotic songs.
  • In September 2014 Ilham Tohti, a revered academic with moderate political views, was sentenced to life in prison for separatism.
  • Mr Tohti had maintained a website that hosted writing by Uyghur intellectuals on social and cultural issues.
  • conforming to a stereotype endorsed by the party such as smiling Uyghurs wearing brightly coloured traditional costume, dancing in public squares and singing, often in Mandarin
  • Uyghurs in exile have been waging a parallel campaign to keep their culture alive
  • There are still underground artists in Xinjiang, she says. As repression has tightened, their works have become increasingly suffused with lament and despair.
  • Mr Tursun’s writings and links with other cultural personalities in Xinjiang may have led to his detention in 2018 and his reported jail term of 16 years.
  • But displays of loyalty to the party are no longer enough to keep people safe.
  • It includes fawning lyrics such as: “You put light into the hearts of the people.” Uyghurs in exile were dismayed to hear a much-loved performer crooning for the regime.
  • It returned last year, with changes. Introducing the new series, the host made approving remarks about building socialism in Xinjiang and loving the party.
  • In the show’s early days, this would have been “unimaginable”, says Elise Anderson of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, an American ethnomusicologist who competed in the inaugural series of “The Voice of the Silk Road” in 2014.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 73 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page