Despite 2-child policy, China sees fewest births in almost 60 years in 2018

The number of babies born last year fell by some 2 million from 2017, to 15.23 million, it was the least since 1961 and the third-lowest since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

 

 

International News: Births in China dropped to the lowest level in almost 60 years in 2018, signaling the country’s looser two-child policy has done little to reverse its slowing birthrate, and worsening the outlook for growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

The number of babies born last year fell by some 2 million from 2017, to 15.23 million, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed on Monday. Demographer He Yafu said it was the least since 1961 and the third-lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

The demographics stand to fuel concerns about China’s economy, which is on a long-term slowing trajectory even as signs of stabilization suggest efforts to cushion its deceleration are taking hold. China’s expansion was the slowest since the 2009 financial crisis last quarter, as the government grapples with a debt cleanup and ongoing trade war with the U.S.

Signs of a steep drop in birth numbers had already emerged, as China’s major cities disclosed their birth figures for 2018. Wenzhou, a manufacturing hub and wealthy coastal city, saw its birth number drop to the lowest level in 10 years. A neighboring city, Ningbo, estimated births declined by about 17 percent.

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Two-Child Policy China

Google faces protests over censored China search engine 'Project Dragonfly'

Several Google employees citing a lack of corporate transparency in the wake of the censored search engine project.

 

International News: Google's offices in the US, UK, Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark witnessed renewed protests by human rights groups over its plan to re-enter China through a censored search application code-named "Project Dragonfly".
The demonstrations were organised by a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups outside the tech giant's offices. The Tibetan advocacy groups that were protesting included Free Tibet and the International Tibet Network.
"They fear that a censored search engine would lead to further oppression of the Tibetans, as filtered searches would erase terms such as 'Tibet' and 'Tiananmen Square' in line with the official narrative of the Chinese Communist Party," the Business Insider reported late on Friday.
The same concerns apply to the Chinese citizens, including other oppressed minorities such as Uighur Muslims and Southern Mongolian people, the report added.
The Internet giant designed a censored version for China search engine to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, peaceful protest, and religion in accordance with strict rules on censorship in the country that are enforced by its Communist Party government.

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Google shuts down Project Dragonfly

China passes law to have own version of Islam, make it conform to socialism

The other four religion of China are Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

International News: China has passed a law that seeks to "Sinicize" Islam within five years and might do that with other four religions in the country, according to the state media.

Under the all-powerful Chinese President Xi Jinping, China has heavily cracked down on religion, especially Islam practised by most Uighurs in the country's Xinjiang province who Beijing suspects of having separatist and extremist tendencies.

"China passed a five-year plan to Sinicize Islam at a meeting on Saturday with representatives from China's eight Islamic associations," said a report in the Global Times.

There are over 20 million Muslims in the country. Islam is one of the five officially recognised religions in atheist China. The other four are Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

The top officials in the Chinese government have often likened the religion to "mental disease" that "needs to be cured."

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China tries to indoctrinate 12 million Muslims through forced labor

China has defied an international outcry against the vast internment program in Xinjiang, which holds Muslims and forces them to renounce religious piety and pledge loyalty to the party.

International News: Muslim inmates from internment camps in far western China hunched over sewing machines, in row after row. They were among hundreds of thousands who had been detained and spent month after month renouncing their religious convictions. Now the government was showing them on television as models of repentance, earning good pay — and political salvation — as factory workers.

China’s ruling Communist Party has said in a surge of upbeat propaganda that a sprawling network of camps in the Xinjiang region is providing job training and putting detainees on production lines for their own good, offering an escape from poverty, backwardness and the temptations of radical Islam.

But mounting evidence suggests a system of forced labor is emerging from the camps, a development likely to intensify international condemnation of China’s drastic efforts to control and indoctrinate a Muslim ethnic minority population of more than 12 million in Xinjiang.

Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders.


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Typhoon Mangkhut: 54 dead, over 250,000 people affected in Philippines

With winds reaching a speed of up to 165 mph, the typhoon, dubbed as the world's strongest storm of the year, had made landfall in the Philippines on Saturday.

International News: At least 54 people were killed in the Philippines on Sunday after Typhoon Mangkhut wreaked havoc in the island nation as the storm continued its devastating path and made landfall in Hong Kong and mainland China.

The typhoon, dubbed as the world's strongest storm of the year, had made landfall in the Philippines on Saturday. With winds reaching a speed of up to 165 mph, the storm sent debris flying, toppling roofs of houses, crashing down trees and flattening huts, CNN reported.

According to government officials on Sunday, 42 people were missing and rescue operations to trace those missing will resume on Monday. Over 250,000 people were affected by the storm across the island nation, forcing them to seek shelter in evacuation centres in the northern Philippines, a region which has seen 51 incidents of landslides.

Harry Rogue, the spokesperson for Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, told CNN that most of the casualties occurred due to landslides in Cordillera Administrative Region in northern Luzon. Duterte also undertook a visit to the affected areas to take stock of the situation and oversee the rescue operations.

Meanwhile, the governor of Benguet province Crescencio Carino Pacalso said that those missing were believed to be miners working in small villages in Itogon municipality.

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Daniel Zhang to be Alibaba boss when Jack Ma hangs up his boots next year

Jack Ma has remained the public face of Alibaba and is a charismatic advocate for China's technology industry

 

International News: Jack Ma will step down as executive chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. in exactly 12 months’ time with Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang to succeed him at Asia’s most valuable company.

Ma will remain on the board until Alibaba’s annual meeting of shareholders in 2020, the Hangzhou-based company said in a statement Monday. His retirement as executive chairman will coincide with his 55th birthday.

Ma has become synonymous with the company he helped found in his apartment nearly 20 years ago and has used the chairman’s post to develop managerial talent since ceding the CEO’s role in 2013. He is moving on with Alibaba in a dominant position in China and pushing into overseas markets from Southeast Asia to Russia. Leadership will now fall to Zhang and the 35 other partners who control the company.

Jack Ma Stepping Down

“Starting the process of passing the Alibaba torch to Daniel and his team is the right decision at the right time because I know from working with them that they are ready,” Ma said in the statement. “Since he took over as CEO, he has demonstrated his superb talent, business acumen and determined leadership.”

A former English teacher, Ma started Alibaba.com in 1999 as a business-to-business marketplace with 17 co-founders. An investment from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. helped the company expand to allow consumers in China buy online and fueling its rise. Through the Taobao and Tmall platforms, it is responsible for billions of dollars in sales and last year saw daily package deliveries reach...continue reading

Xi Jinping: Statesman, strongman, philosopher and autocrat rolled into one

Some see Xi as the first leader of a new era of strongman rule, in which there are few constraints on the top leader.

International News : What kind of leader is Xi Jinping, who became general secretary of China’s Communist Party in November 2012 and China’s president in March 2013?

Specialists are giving very different answers to this question now than they did five years ago.

One reason is that rules were in place then to make Xi step down from the presidency after serving two five-year terms. Now, the rules have been changed. He can rule as long as he likes.

In addition, there are now centers on Chinese campuses devoted to the study of “Xi Jinping Thought.” His name has been added to China’s Constitution. No living figure has gotten this treatment since the most famous Chinese Communist Party leader of all: Mao Zedong.

I am keenly aware of how dramatically Xi’s stature and the thinking about him have shifted due to my experiences working on two editions of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know,” the most recent of which was just published.

My co-author Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and I finished writing the second edition just as Xi Jinping rose to power. We completed work on the third edition late last year, when term limits were still in place. Even then, it was already clear that Xi was a charismatic leader of a kind not seen in China for decades.

Emperor or thug?

Is Xi a bold thinker, a tireless anti-corruption crusader, a man who cares not about personal power but only about helping his country regain the position of greatness it once had?

Yes, say the official Beijing media. No, say many articles in the international press – think of him instead as a 21st century emperor, or a thuggish Chinese counterpart to Putin.

To understand Xi, the Beijing official media suggest, read his “The Governance of China,” a two-volume collection of his speeches that detail his devotion to China’s people and traditional Confucian morals.

Critics call him, instead, a Big Brother figure. Read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which describes a surveillance state whose leader demands complete obedience.

My own sense, based on following closely Xi’s moves to maximize his power and crush civil society, is that the official Beijing media’s celebration of him distorts reality.

I also feel, though, that it is not completely fitting to instead compare him to Putin, Mao, an emperor or Big Brother.

India can be the next China for Apple: Tim Cook

With iPhone sales growing at a fast clip in India, the last large untapped market globally, CEO Tim Cook is confident that he can turn the country into the next China for Apple.

As sales of the iconic iPhone continue to fall globally, India is emerging as a shining star for Apple. Sales of the flagship devices were up by 50 per cent year-on-year in the 12 months that ended September.

"Our iPhone sales in India were up over 50% in financial year 2016 compared to the prior year, and we believe we're just beginning to scratch the surface of this large and growing market opportunity," said Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in its latest earnings call with investors on Wednesday.

While sales of the iPhone in India are still minuscule in comparison to that of China, a fast growing economy and massive youth population could help Apple develop it into a huge market. Moreover, with 4G infrastructure only bursting onto the scene in the past few months, sales of smartphones in India are expected to accelerate even further.

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Eighth BRICS Summit: Fantastic five

8th BRICS Summit

The sun, sand and sea of Goa will play host to some of the most powerful global leaders over the next two days, as India chairs the 8th BRICS Summit with a packed economic and political agenda.

From being an acronym denoting the four emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, coined by Goldman Sachs analysts in 2001, BRIC became a formal grouping by 2006. Four years later, South Africa joined, making it BRICS, a transcontinental alliance comprising 43 per cent of the world's population and 30 per cent of its GDP, with a 17 per cent share in world trade.

Starting essentially with economic issues of mutual interest, the agenda of BRICS meetings has widened to encompass topical global issues such as political and safety challenges. While India leads the group in GDP growth, it trails on other parameters such as per capita income, poverty and life expectancy.

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Why boycott calls against China, India's largest trade partner will fail

The Export-Import Imbalance

Cellphones, laptops, solar cells, fertilisers, keyboards, displays and communication equipment — including earphones — these are India’s chief imports from China, according to our analysis of ministry of commerce data.

 

Why China bazars are popular

IndiaSpend visited Manish market, the hub of imported Chinese goods in Mumbai’s heart. Chinese products here are cheaper, available in bulk, neatly packaged and easy to buy.

“If the 50 different types of LED lamps that I sell were available from say, Surat, at a cheaper rate and at my doorstep, why would I go for Chinese lamps?” asked a lamp distributor and retailer, requesting anonymity. “If I had to buy these in India, this collection would cost me double.”

Market access is easier in China

Customers rarely have to waste time in China searching for markets and products, said Kasliwal. It took him less than a week to buy a three-month consignment that ranged from jewelry to fabric.

“Even small market-towns like Yiwu — comparable to Varanasi in terms of population — have a one-stop, dedicated market for all consumer durables, from fashion to home accessories, with cost and quality options,” he said. “In India, it would take us weeks.”

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Behind Pakistan's military confidence: China's growing shadow

Until five years ago, the USA and China shared an almost equal proportion of Pakistan’s arms imports: 39% and 38% respectively. Today, China supplies 63% of Pakistan’s armaments, with the USA dropping to 19% and second place, an India Spend analysis reveals, as Pakistan mulls a response to India’s strike on terror camps across the border.

China’s rise to becoming the world’s third-largest arms exporter was to a large degree helped by heightened demand from Pakistan, which now buys 35% of these exports and is Beijing’s biggest buyer (Bangladesh follows at 20%), according to this February 2016 report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The military supplies are bolstered by unwavering support at a time of heightened tension with India and faltering ties with the US (there was a 73% drop in US security aid over four years to 2015,The Wire reported in August 2016; the US also cancelled the subsidised sale of eight F-16 fighter jets).

 

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Link 1 & Link 2

Last month, Pakistan’s ministry of defence production confirmed a contract with China for the purchase of eight conventional diesel-electric submarines, which will cost between $4 billion to $5 billion (Rs. 25,600 crore to Rs. 33,200 crore), China’s biggest defence export deal.

From 2011 to 2015, China sold $8.4 billion worth of arms, overtaking long-established arms exporters France ($8 billion) and Germany ($6.7 billion), although it still lags the leaders: the US ($47 billion) and Russia ($36.2 billion).

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Figures in million US$ at constant 1990 prices

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