For instance, the satellites saw a steep decline in lighting in Rwanda in 1994 and the following years, reflecting that country’s civil conflict and genocide. Similarly, a civil war in Cote d’Ivoire from 2002 to 2004 severely darkened the country, with lights only returning in recent years. As well, increased lighting in Iraq in 1999 corresponded to the UN lifting import restrictions at the time, while external investment in Afghanistan led to increases in satellite-observed lighting starting in 2002.

Perhaps not surprisingly, countries undergoing rapid growth, such as China, had a high correlation between lighting and both GDP and population. In contrast, highly developed countries, such as the U.S. and Western Europe, showed fairly stable lighting patterns that didn’t shift despite increases in population and GDP.

This effect is clearly visible in the contrast between China and South Korea, Japan and Taiwan from 1992 to 2010 (click through to view a time-lapse sequence). North Korea remains almost entirely dark throughout.

A second sequence at Wired shows similar images of India and its neighbours. See more on the observation of city lights from NASA.gov, and timelapse videos taken from the International Space Station showing flyovers of various regions around the world, as well as orbital views of the Northern and Southern lights.

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Post tags: economic growth, GDP growth, India, Japan, North Korea, satellites, south korea, Taiwan
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On Wednesday, Mr. Obama announced that the United States planned to deploy 2,500 Marines in Australia to shore up alliances in Asia, but the move prompted a sharp response from Beijing, which accused Mr. Obama of escalating military tensions in the region.

The agreement with Australia amounts to the first long-term expansion of the American military’s presence in the Pacific since the end of the Vietnam War. It comes despite budget cuts facing the Pentagon and an increasingly worried reaction from Chinese leaders, who have argued that the United States is seeking to encircle China militarily and economically.

“It may not be quite appropriate to intensify and expand military alliances and may not be in the interest of countries within this region,” Liu Weimin, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in response to the announcement by Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia.

To further consolidate Chinese suspicion that the US is “seeking to encircle China militarily,” there has also been talk of US Naval deployment in Singapore, a city-state directly bordering the disputed maritime region. From the Washington Post:

If China is unhappy with the Obama administration’s decision to send a handful of Marines to northern Australia, wait until the U.S. Navy starts basing warships in Singapore, on the edge of the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

The United States and Singapore are in the final negotiating stages of an agreement to base some of the U.S. Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships at the Changi Naval Base. Former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced in June that a deal was near to deploy the ships to Singapore, and a Pentagon spokesman said this week that officials “remain excited about this opportunity.”

While China views US military presence in such a sensitive area as a threat, other Asian countries find a sense of security in these recent developments in US policy, as can be seen in this article from the Times of India:

The US move to create a naval base in northern Australia close to the South China Sea can actually mean more dollars in the Indian kitty, and put more strategic and business opportunities in New Delhi’s way, sources said. The first piece of evidence has come by way of Australia’s decision to sell uranium to India.

The US move will provide a sense of protection to East Asian countries including Japan, who have serious conflicts with China but buy vast amounts of Chinese goods. The new found protection will encourage East Asia to reduce its dependence on China for goods and enhance economic ties with India, sources said.

[...]“This is God sent. The more US ramps up its military presence in South China Sea, the more it will divert Beijing’s attention from India,” [Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, research officer at the Institute of Conflict Studies in New Delhi] said.

China has spoken directly to this optimism, and an article in the state-owned Global Times seems to suggest that it may not be in the greater interest of other Asian countries to support US military campaigns in Asia:

[...]These acts bring great pressure to China and it is now expected that China will take some countermeasures.

The US is carrying out smart power diplomacy that takes China as its target in Asia. Stopping it is not realistic, but it is equally unrealistic to expect China to stand idly by and indulge Asian countries as they join the US alliance to guard against China one by one. Confronted with such frictions, which has the most resources and means at its disposal? Is an all-out confrontation possible? These should be the real concerns.

As the US prepares to take part in this weekend’s East Asia Summit (for the first time), we can expect this to be a hot issue – despite Beijing’s desire to steer clear of the topic. For more about recent US policy in the Asia Pacific, see America’s Incoherent Asia Policy, via CDT. Also see prior CDT coverage of the South China Sea debate.

For another opinion on what the South China Sea debate means in the long-term, see Robert D. Kaplan’s The South China Sea is the Future of Conflict.

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Post tags: east asia summit, India, South China Sea, United States
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Research firm Forrester released a study last week showing global mobile usage trends. In almost every mobile usage aspect, metropolitan China and other Pacific Rim countries lead the way. That includes mobile social usage, work usage and multiple device ownership. Mobile is near an inflection point, changing the way people interact with information around the globe.

Forrester’s research shows that the mobile Internet is starting to become the prime point of entry to the Internet for many people around the world. This is perhaps what a “post-PC” world looks like ….

In metropolitan China, 46% of people access the mobile Internet, 57% listen to music, 36% play games on their mobile devices and about 33% access social networks. In contrast, near 25% of U.S. mobile consumers use their devices for social networking. Only 11% of European users have accessed social networks through their devices.

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Post tags: cell phones, India, Internet access, mobile technology, social networking
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The report estimates that in 2008, the number of females who died at birth or before being born in China was 1.1 million, while in India the figure was 260,000. Northern India was identified as being particularly bad. In China, this is a significant increase from 1990, when the figure stood at 890,000.

The findings of the World Bank’s study are the latest indication that the cultural preference for boys over girls in both China and India persists despite the rising incomes of their populations.

If anything, the report notes that improved economic conditions are, for the time being, actually making things worse since “higher incomes have increased access to ultrasound technologies that assist in sex selection at birth.” Although it is illegal in both India and China to know the sex of a baby before it is born, the practice remains common.

Critics blame the preponderance of boys in China on the one-child policy. The nation now has about 120 males for every 100 females. While Chinese officials continue to stand by the policy, it faces pressure from a number of academics and foreign officials who worry that it is leaving China with an aging work force that could be less productive in coming decades and more expensive to look after. Officials have launched pilot programs in a few places toward liberalizing the policy. For example, under a pilot program proposed in China’s southern Guangdong province, a couple would be allowed to have two children if just one of the parents was an only child.

The rise in China since 1990 comes despite a dramatic fall of 62% in neonatal mortality over a similar period.

In an interview at Shanghai Scrap in June, Mara Hvistendahl emphasised the present role of selective abortion over other frequently cited factors, including the one-child policy, in feeding China’s gender imbalance:

Scrap: Focusing on China – it’s almost accepted gospel, for those not familiar with the issue, that infanticide, the one-child policy, and abandonment account for the country’s skewed sex ratio, and that abortion is only part of the mix. Yet you not only object to that formulation, you seem to imply that it’s both condescending and a gross distortion that obscures the real issues. Could you give a sense of how important each of those facts is, in fact, to China’s gender issues, and why they are only a small part of the overall picture?

Hvistendahl: That is the typical explanation given for China’s skewed sex ratio at birth, and it’s amazing how consistently it crops up in reports by news organizations and NGOs. I think abandonment is on the radar in the West because of our history of adopting children from China. But it is a relatively small part of the story in 2011, and infanticide happens very rarely today. Skewed sex ratios at birth are now found in many countries with no tradition of infanticide and no one-child policy. By and large, the gap is the result of sex selective abortion.

I think these local or cultural explanations persist in part because they’re easy. It’s easier to say this is a culture that has a tradition of killing girls than it is to interrogate our own role in bringing sex selection to Asia. Too often Western narratives about China explain what happens there as either the product of a monolithic government or an immutable past—as if China were not home to the same complexity and deep, varied history as the West.

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Post tags: abortion, gender imbalance, gender selection, India, one-child policy, women's health, women's rights
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Burma could become China’s California. Chinese authorities have long been vexed by the soaring gap in income between its prosperous eastern cities and provinces and the many poor and backward areas to the west. What China is lacking is another coast to provide its remote interior with an outlet to the sea and to its growing markets around the world. Chinese academics have written about a “Two Oceans” policy. The first is the Pacific. The second would be the Indian Ocean. In this vision, Burma becomes a new bridge to the Bay of Bengal and the seas beyond.

China’s leadership has also written about its “Malacca dilemma.” China is heavily dependent on foreign oil, and approximately 80 percent of these oil imports currently pass through the Strait of Malacca, near Singapore, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and just 1.7 miles across at its narrowest point. For Chinese strategists, the strait is a natural choke point where future enemies could cut off foreign energy supplies. An alternative route needed to be found. Again, access across Burma would be advantageous, lessening dependence on the strait and at the same time dramatically reducing the distance from China’s factories to markets in Europe and around the Indian Ocean. That Burma itself is rich in the raw materials needed to power industrial development in China’s southwest is an added plus.

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Post tags: Burma, India, Indian Ocean, Myanmar, oil pipeline, port, railways
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Getting this pre-eminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other co-operative institutional mechanisms has proved unsuccessful so far in any basin. Instead, the construction of upstream dams on international rivers such as the Mekong, Brahmaputra or Amur shows China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns of downstream nations ….

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already clear. First, China is in water disputes with almost all its neighbours, from Russia and India to weak client-states such as North Korea and Burma. Second, its new focus on water mega-projects in the homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered tensions over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by protests against Chinese rule. Third, the projects threaten to replicate in international rivers the degradation haunting China’s internal rivers.

The Financial Times has also reviewed Chellaney’s book, ‘Water: Asia’s New Battleground‘, alongside two others on China’s rise and its international context. Chellaney regards Indian recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet as a strategic error in terms of water security, warning that strong diplomacy is vital to avoiding conflict over water resources in the future.

For details of Chinese proposals to dam upstream of the Indian border (which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied are part of official plans), see Chinese Engineers Eye Tibetan Rivers.

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Post tags: Afghanistan, Burma, dams, India, Inner Mongolia, North Korea, Russia, south-to-north water diversion project, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Vietnam, water crisis, water resource, Xinjiang
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Even today, America remains the largest single donor, dishing out $31 billion in 2010.

But second on the list, if reports monitored by New York University’s Wagner School are to be believed, would be China, which gave away $25 billion in 2007. (Statistics on aid from new donors are dodgy and the line between aid and trade is blurred; by another count China’s officially reported aid was only $1.9 billion in 2009.)

Over the past decade China has evolved from a net recipient to net donor. A milestone was reached in 2005, when the World Food Programme dispatched its last shipment of grain after donating to China for some 25 years. This year Britain’s DFID wound up its bilateral aid programme in China. At the same time, China has become a far bigger donor. Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, has promised that in 2010-13 China will provide $10 billion in low-interest loans to African countries, bolster the China-Africa Development Fund by $1 billion (bringing it to $5 billion) and cancel debt owed by highly indebted countries with which China has diplomatic relations. In April this year the Chinese government issued its first white paper on its foreign-aid programme. The amount budgeted for aid had “increased rapidly” since 2000, it said, with growth of nearly 30% a year between 2004 and 2009 ….

The new donors stress that their aid is different from that provided by the West. They reject the traditional idea of beneficent donor helping indigent client and claim to be engaged in “South-South co-operation”. China says the “first principle” of its development assistance is “equality and mutual benefit in providing aid”. In practice, though, the real differences with the West lie elsewhere.

However, Deborah Brautigam, author of ‘The Dragon’s Gift’, takes issue with much of the article’s content on Chinese aid. For example:

Yes, Wen Jiabao said that China would provide $10 billion in low-interest loans to African countries between 2010 and 2012 (not 2013). This pledge was made at the November 2009 FOCAC; these pledges go on three year cycles. Some of these loans will be “concessional” (you hui dai kuan) and some will be preferential export credits (you hui mai fan xin dai). Technically, only the former would qualify as official development assistance by the OECD’s guidelines. Even if they all were to be counted as “aid”, this would amount, on average, to $3.3 billion per year, divided among the 49 or so countries with which China has diplomatic ties, or an average of about $67 million per country, per year.

On the other hand, the China Africa Development Fund, which has been capitalized with $1 billion, and which is now scheduled to raise its second billion (it will only reach $5 billion at full maturity, at some distant point), is not aid, but investment: equity finance in support of FDI (foreign direct investment) by Chinese firms.

Finally, the debt to be canceled is not all debt, but, as stated by the Chinese, overdue debt from zero-interest loans, a modest portion of China’s aid. It’s important to get that right, as borrowers reading The Economist may believe that China is going to cancel all their debts, including concessional loans and commercial debts. No way.

Brautigam also suggests that the popular perception of Chinese aid as a means of promoting resource extraction interests is misguided. She tweets approvingly, however, about another recent Economist article, on the China International Fund and its dealings in African natural resources.

Sources:

Charity begins abroad – The Economist
More Mistakes by The Economist: “Charity Begins Abroad” – China in Africa: The Real Story

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Post tags: Africa aid, BRIC, China-Africa Development Fund, foreign aid, India, Wen Jiabao
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S. Pandiyarajan was fiddling around with his shortwave radio set one hot summer evening at Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, when he stumbled upon a strange station.

At first listen, it was a language he couldn’t identify. It sounded like Tamil, but spoken in an accent he could not recognise. He listened on, straining his ears. To his surprise, he discovered that the voices were coming from faraway China.

“I could hear two Chinese people speaking in perfect Tamil!” he said. “And this was Sentamizh [classical Tamil], which you never hear anywhere, anymore, even in Tamil Nadu ….”

With humble beginnings in the civil war-torn China in the 1940s, CRI today is at the centre of a massive multi-billion dollar effort to boost rising China’s “soft power” overseas, sending out daily broadcasts in 63 languages, 24 hours a day, from its expansive multi-storey headquarters in west Beijing ….

The Tamil station started broadcasting in 1963. Since then, it has continued to beam its shows uninterrupted, building up an almost cult following overseas, with its fans even organising themselves into a network of listeners’ clubs.

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Post tags: BBC, broadcasting, India, radio, Voice of America
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The emerging perception of China’s superpower status no doubt reflects global recognition of its growing economic might, and the fact that the U.S. is increasingly seen as trailing China economically. Nowhere is this more evident than in Western Europe, where the percentage naming China as the world’s “leading economic power” has increased markedly over the past two years, along with the view that it will ultimately eclipse the U.S. as global superpower ….

But not many are cheering. Unlike just a few years ago, when the publics of America’s oldest allies rued America’s power, they are now alarmed by its diminishing economic might. Among the pluralities who now see China as more economically powerful than the U.S., most view this as a bad thing—and by a 2-to-1 margin in France, Germany and Spain, for example ….

Outside the Muslim countries, … there is a general consensus that it would be bad if China were to rival the U.S. militarily. Eight in 10 Western Europeans subscribe to this view, and even majorities of Russians (57%) and Turks (54%) would disapprove of this development.

The American people, suffering through a weaker-than-expected recovery from the recession, are less upbeat about the state of the nation than they were a decade ago. And they are clearly troubled about America’s place in the world relative to China.

The survey also claims that China is one of the few countries in which the majority feel that things are on the right track. According to Pew’s polling, 85% expressed satisfaction with the country’s direction, and 88% were happy with its economic situation.

Only in a handful of countries do more than half express satisfaction with their country’s direction. Among these exceptions are China, Brazil, and India – all dynamic, emerging economic powerhouses, regionally and globally. In Egypt, too, there is substantial satisfaction with the country’s direction (65%), likely reflecting renewed optimism about the country’s future, following the democratic uprising earlier this year.

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Post tags: Brazil, Egypt, Europe, France, Germany, India, muslim, Pew Global Attitudes Survey, recession, Russia, Spain, superpower, turkey, United States
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Indian political scientists often look enviously at China’s one-party political system, viewing it as more efficient and more capable of curbing problems like corruption. But, as in India, Chinese leaders are increasingly identifying corruption as a major problem, with Premier Wen Jiabao saying earlier this year it could lead to instability in the country.

While both India and China suffer from endemic corruption, they differ in their approaches to handling corruption cases. In India, the cases go through lengthy court proceedings amid a huge backlog of cases. China, on the other hand, has been dealing with the corrupt officials in recent years more aggressively—and, critics say, repressively ….

Perhaps taking a cue from their northern neighbor, some of India’s recent anti-corruption crusaders like Baba Ramdev have been demanding capital punishment for those convicted of corruption.

“Corruption can happen to any political party in the world,” said Mr. Chen, adding that the Communists were “committed to combat corruption effectively because we want to be the ruling party for a longer time.”

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Post tags: corrupt officials, corruption, courts, execution, India, New Delhi, Wen Jiabao
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