Podcasts about on china

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2021 17:21

Chinese investment in Africa has built roads, railways, dams, and more, spurring new interest and competition from other global investors. Critics say China’s too often exploitative, including with loans that leave some countries too deeply in debt. But its investments helped famine-prone Ethiopia become one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Now, however, civil strife is putting that success at risk, for both Ethiopia and China. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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China's New Silk Road | 08 | The Other Asian Giant – India

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2021 16:45

China is one of India's top trading partners, but India has chosen not to be part of China's New SIlk Road. It's not wild about a future in which China leads Asia, much less the world. Instead, India's offering its own investments and vision of a more multipolar world. And with Chinese and Indian troops in a tense stand-off on their contested border, India's strengthening its ties with the US, Japan, Australia and others, to counterbalance China's influence. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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China's New Silk Road | 07 | China’s Digital Silk Road

UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 13, 2021 19:11

China is fast becoming a global leader in cutting edge technologies—such as AI, facial recognition, surveillance, and 5G—and is exporting them worldwide. Fans like the high quality and low cost. Critics say China’s technology enables authoritarian control and increases dependence on an autocratic state. They call for democracies, including the U.S., to work together to create a tech ecosystem that protects privacy and freedom of speech. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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Paul Kingsnorth: science can never replace the mythic

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2021 50:41

Paul Kingsnorth doesn't fit neatly into Left or Right — which is only one of the reasons we consider him one of the more interesting thinkers of our time. He has been talking and writing about nature for over 25 years, and during that period he has developed a his own self-reliant, localised form of environmentalism.Formerly a climate activist, Paul grew disaffected with the movement when he came to the realisation that “economic monster” that enveloped the world was too great to fight against. Instead, he channelled his energies into writing books, essays, novels and poetry, all of which have been hugely influential in the way we view our relationship with the modern world and its maladies.In his own life, he has tried to “secede from the system” as much as possible by living on his own farmstead out in western Ireland in county Galway. While he admits that it is impossible to fully withdraw from the world, small acts of resistance — whether they are using an unconnected compost loo or refusing to use a smartphone — allows him to “jump off the treadmill”. His recent conversion to Christianity came as a surprise, not least to Paul, and it gave him a deeper appreciation of the importance of limits and humility. Below are some excerpts from this enthralling interview:On the culture wars:The more modern and the more westernised the world is, the more lost people seem… It seems to me that both sides in this horrible toxic culture battle that's going on are talking about identity as if it's something that's under threat for them and something that they've lost and something they feel attached to and something that the other side wants to take away from them. On rationalist versus mystic modes of thought:So you've got sort of mythos versus logos…. So we have a very rationalistic, very secularistic, scientific, mathematical way of looking at the world, which is useful, obviously… But we also have something which is deeper and to some degree truer than that, which is the mythic way of looking, which is where true poetry comes from, it's where art comes from. But it's also where I think our deep love of nature comes from, and it's where religion comes from. That stuff flows through absolutely every human being and every human culture always at all times.I think liberal modernity and neoliberal capitalism as well have operated on the false assumption that the mythic way of seeing will be ultimately superseded by the rational way, by the logoic way of seeing if you like, because obviously, myth was just a silly thing we believed in before we had science, that we don't need anymore. That's not what's happening.On giving up climate activism:What you end up seeing if you are an activist for long enough is that we have built this enormous, unsustainable economic monster that now envelops the world, which requires endless growth to keep it going. It isn't possible to feed it with enough natural resources to power that endless growth, the fossil fuels that it uses to power that endless growth is changing the climate. So we all know these terrible stories: we've kicked off a mass extinction event, the climate is changing, all of these kinds of horrors. So you end up having to try and turn this around, and you end up campaigning to stop climate change. And after many, many years of doing that, I was unable to avoid the reality, as it seemed to me and it still does — it actually isn't possible to do it in the way that we wanted to do it. On the capitalist system:We're not citizens, we're not people rooted in a culture, we're not individuals who have a sort of wider sense of worth. We're primarily consumers and producers for that machine. We measure everything in terms of economic growth, we measure that in a material sense, rather than in any other sense. We've become a kind of a society of merchants and those consumer values have infiltrated everything, absolutely every aspect of our lives…I think that's a tragedy. It's a cultural tragedy, and it's an ecological tragedy too. On Covid:Covid is interesting in the sense that we've all been acting like science is going to solve this using the algorithms and the mathematical formula and the rest of it. But there's also something very mythic about this virus isn't there? It's very apocalyptic, I think, in the original sense of the word. The word apocalypsis is Greek for unveiling, it means revelation. On Bill Gates:It's an interesting one this, because you've got all the crazy conspiracies about how Bill Gates is going to inject you with microchips and all this stuff. But there's a basis for this. Bill Gates is a very powerful man and he's using his money to change the world in particular ways. He's using his money to fund newspapers. He's using his money to promote development in places like Africa in a very particular pattern. He's doing certainly all sorts of things. And the same is true of Soros, who's always the centre of conspiracy theories as well. So although the conspiracies themselves are crazy and often dangerous and unpleasant, the sense of powerlessness that fuels them is real. I think that these conspiracies come about when people try to join dots that they don't understand, because we don't really know how it's working anymore. On China ‘lifting a hundred million' people out of poverty:China has made, for example, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people landless through the construction of dams; through the construction of giant cities. Obviously, the state in China is all-powerful, and so people are just moved. And then they're put into cities. And often if you take people who've been living on their own land, in a subsistence economy where they have enough and you put them into a city, where they then are earning wages, but very low wages; they've lost any sense of control through that process of enclosure that we talked about earlier. Then you can stick that on your balance sheet and you can say look at these people we've lifted out of poverty. Maybe some of them wanted to be but were they? On his conversion to Christianity:I've been on a sort of spiritual search for 10 years or so. Because actually, so much of what we've been talking about seems to me to be at root, a spiritual question in the broadest sense of that slightly horrible word. That it's actually about what we value. And so much of our destructive nature, it seems to me, comes from our sense of self-worship. So once you believe that there's nothing above you, once you believe that there's nothing sacred about the world, that the world is simply a material object, a giant resource that you can harvest, then you can become quite tyrannical. On Jesus' teaching:It's very interesting to go back to the teachings of Jesus 2000 years ago, and see him basically addressing the same flaws in human nature that we have now. And of course, that's not just true of Christianity. So there's a there's a lesson in radical humility that you can get from it, which I hadn't realised until I started to look at it properly. And that's still working its way through me. It's quite a radical and exciting thing to be happening in a way. Read the Post here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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On China's New Silk Road | 05 | China In America’s Backyard: Panama & Mexico

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2021 18:34

Many Latin American countries have joined China’s New Silk Road, including Panama, where Chinese companies now manage ports on both ends of the Panama Canal. As Mexico considers whether to join, some countries in the region are facing heavy pressure from the Trump Administration warning them not to get too close to China. Still, China's investments and loans are seen by many leaders as a way to help their economies. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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On China's New Silk Road | 04 | Rough Seas: Malaysia, Cambodia & Thailand

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2021 19:15

Southeast Asian countries have long managed a complex relationship with China—the region’s biggest trading partner and powerful neighbour. The New Silk Road promises opportunities for economic growth, but at what cost? With China increasingly enforcing its disputed claims to the South China Sea with its military, many Southeast Asians are wary the New Silk Road will help China strengthen its ability to project its power in the region and beyond. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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On China's New Silk Road | 03 | Old World, New Silk Road: Italy & Europe

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 13, 2021 19:12

Italian populists—skeptical of the value of EU membership—drove Italy to become the first G7 country to join China’s New Silk Road amid pushback from Europe and the US. Italians hoped this would boost their exports to China and increase Chinese investment in Italy. But not much happened. Then came the pandemic, and generous EU aid, leaving Italians to reassess who their real friends are, and how best to help their economy. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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On China's New Silk Road | 02 | Paving the Old Silk Road: Kazakhstan & Central Asia

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2021 19:50

For centuries, Kazakhstan—situated on the overland route from China to Europe—has played an important role in global trading. Some Kazakhs are optimistic the New Silk Road will ultimately boost their country's economy, but others are wary of China's growing influence in the region, especially in light of its detention of Muslims in neighbouring Xinjiang province. As a former Soviet republic that shares borders with both Russia and China, Kazakhstan looks to safeguard its independence as it negotiates a new relationship with China.. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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On China Henry Kissinger

Knowledge = Power

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2021 1211:01

"Fascinating, shrewd . . . The book deftly traces the rhythms and patterns of Chinese history."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon's historic trip to Beijing. With a new final chapter on the emerging superpower's twenty-first-century role in global politics and economics, On China provides historical perspective on Chinese foreign affairs from one of the premier statesmen of our time.

On China's New Silk Road | 01 | Chengdu

Anticipating The Unintended

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2021 19:23

Chengdu is one of China’s fastest-growing cities, thanks to major investments in infrastructure. Now China’s taking its success at home on the road, promising that infrastructure done well can transform people’s lives around the world. Starting in Chengdu, a stop on both the ancient Silk Road and the new one, this episode looks at how China's effort to create what it's calling a "community of shared destiny" is building on its recent—and extraordinary—economic transformation within its own borders. On China’s Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada, which produces and teachers global journalism. The podcast was created by Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for US public radio’s The World, working with partner reporters on five continents. The full series is available wherever you get your podcasts or by visiting the Global Reporting Centre podcast project webpage.

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#92 India's Marathon 🎧

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2020 19:46

This newsletter is really a weekly public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration courtesy the good folks at Ad-Auris. If you have any feedback, please send it to us.New Book Out! — India’s Marathon: Reshaping the Post-Pandemic World Order— Pranay KotasthaneI’ve co-edited India’s Marathon — a collaborative effort that brings together bold ideas on India’s place in the changing world order from some of India’s finest young thinkers. (India’s Marathon, book cover by Anirudh Kanisetti)Don’t take my word for it. This is what Ambassador Shivshankar Menon writes in his foreword:“This volume poses questions which everyone wants answered but few dare to reply: how will the world order evolve and how can India deal with it? The Takshashila Institution has brought together some of the best minds to answer this question, and to give an Indian perspective on world order issues. Just for this the book deserves to be welcomed. This volume consists of coherent contributions from these scholars covering how India should manage its external relationships and the reforms that India needs to undertake domestically.… No reader would or should agree with everything in this book. I, for one, am not sure that India’s choice is between alignment and non-alignment any more, or that strategic autonomy is an unattainable goal for India. After all, strategic autonomy by one name or another is what all powers, even superpowers, seek. But this book would have served its purpose if it provokes thought and rational discussion about India’s place in the emerging world, whether it is ‘orderly’ or not. Despite the daunting world that seems likely, and the scale and scope of the necessary domestic reforms outlined in this book, I found it reassuring that so many contributors found it possible to rationally conceptualise these issues from an Indian perspective, and to map out a path through the dimly sensed future that awaits us.”Pranay Kotasthane, Anirudh Kanisetti, Nitin Pai (editors). India's Marathon (Kindle Locations 144-150). The Takshashila Institution. Kindle Edition.This Twitter thread lists all chapter ideas and contributors. It’s a stellar list, I tell you.Get your copy from Amazon India. Do give it a read!Global Policy Watch: Fukuyama (et al) And The ‘Middleware’ Solution To Social Media Monopolies — RSJTwitter India did a first last week. It labelled a tweet by BJP IT cell head as ‘manipulated media’. It claimed the label was based on its Synthetic and Manipulated Media policy. This was a policy launched by it in February this year. The rule for its user states:“You may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm. In addition, we may label Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media to help people understand their authenticity and to provide context.”Curbing Digital ColonialismIt is unclear if Twitter found no such tweets in India since February that satisfied the criteria for manipulate media. Surely, this wasn’t the first instance of false information shared by a blue-tick user in India. In any case, a beginning has been made and it will be interesting to see where and how far it will go with this. These steps are part of similar efforts by other social medial platforms to self-regulate themselves as they come under increasing government and regulatory scrutiny. There is a greater urgency among regulators around the world to curb the abuse of the dominant positions of the big tech platforms. EU pursued antitrust charges against Google for over a decade. In 2018, it fined it nearly $10 billion. But not much has come out of it. Google was left to devise its own measures to offer a level playing field to its rivals. Google continues to dominate the search-engine market in Europe with over 90 per cent market share. The U.S. Justice Department last month sued Google for violating federal antitrust laws in running its search and advertising business. Also, the US Congressional investigation into the power of Big Tech (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google) concluded in September this year with a voluminous 450-page report. The report indicts them in no uncertain terms:"These firms have too much power, and that power must be reined in and subject to appropriate oversight and enforcement. Our economy and democracy are at stake.”India hasn’t yet taken a concrete view about the dominance of Big Tech but there are rumblings. Last month, India’s antitrust regulator (CCI) opened an investigation against Google based on complaints from the start-up ecosystem. The practices of ‘forcing’ the app makers to exclusively use its billing system for in-app purchases and for bundling its payments app with Android smartphones sold in the country are under the regulatory lens. Last month, India brought all OTT platforms under the purview of its Information and Broadcasting ministry by changing the GoI (Allocation of Business) Roles, 1961. And it has been considering regulating the social media platforms and their content for a while now.Not The Usual Lens There are three key points that we have made about regulating Big Tech and social media platforms:Antitrust regulators take the old Chicago school view to monopolies. This looks at monopolies through the economic lens of consumers and checks if they are being harmed by the dominance of monopolies. This is difficult to prove in case of Big Tech monopolies who provide most of their services for free and have deep customer loyalty.The nature of these monopolies is quite different from those of the past. These players have appropriated huge amounts of data, run 2-sided platforms, have asymmetrical knowledge and power over their users, and can easily move into newer businesses based on these strengths. The traditional measures to curb the monopolies like breaking them up or stopping a line of business are difficult to implement. Economic dominance is only one part of their power. It is the political dominance or the dominance of thought that can be more insidious. Like we wrote in edition #74, “the data and attention appropriation done through these platforms constrain our choices: we live in echo chamber of our opinions, we buy things that are suggested to us and we see a version of reality that’s tailor-made for us and that no one else is seeing. Often the term ‘digital colonialism’ is bandied about when talking about Big Tech. This lack of freedom to be oneself, discover things on our own and not be dispossessed of our right to choose is what colonialism is about.” The current antitrust laws have nothing to manage this.In short, our view was the minimum acceptable price of Big Tech businesses to exist wasn’t zero. It was you. Your data and your liberty. In the normal course of events, politics would be about contestation of ideas and narratives in the political marketplace. And the best or the most acceptable idea would surface from this that would guide the polity. But social media platforms engineer a failure in these markets. The ideas that get pushed to your timelines haven’t won their duels in the marketplace of ideas. They have been programmatically fed to you. That program can be gamed. And Big Tech isn’t willing to solve this problem on its own. It took a long time to even acknowledge it is a problem. We had concluded edition #74 with these lines:“These are early days of policymaking in this area. There’s a need for deeper philosophical and sociological work in this space that will enable our thinking in how to legislate this.”A Novel But Half-formed Approach As if on cue this week we had Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel publish an article in Foreign Affairs titled How to Save Democracy From Technology: Ending Big Tech’s Information Monopoly. The article picks up the core point made by us. The antitrust regulations are using old tools to solve the economic problem. They may or may not be enough. But they don’t even begin to address the political costs of the Big Tech monopolies. The solution offered is not exactly fleshed out in the article, but it is important because it goes beyond the conventional thinking that has dominated this space.They write:“The economic case for reining in Big Tech is complicated. But there is a much more convincing political case. Internet platforms cause political harms that are far more alarming than any economic damage they create. Their real danger is not that they distort markets; it is that they threaten democracy.”It is remarkably similar to the points made by us in the past. The article then picks up the usual solution to break monopoly power – more regulations, breakup, data probability and privacy laws – and dismisses them all before proposing a solution:“If regulation, breakup, data portability, and privacy law all fall short, then what remains to be done about concentrated platform power? One of the most promising solutions has received little attention: middleware. Middleware is generally defined as software that rides on top of an existing platform and can modify the presentation of underlying data. Added to current technology platforms’ services, middleware could allow users to choose how information is curated and filtered for them. Users would select middleware services that would determine the importance and veracity of political content, and the platforms would use those determinations to curate what those users saw. In other words, a competitive layer of new companies with transparent algorithms would step in and take over the editorial gateway functions currently filled by dominant technology platforms whose algorithms are opaque.”The solution comes with its own set of problems. The authors acknowledge it and posit this as the start of a conversation to find a solution:“Many details would have to be worked out. The first question is how much curation power to transfer to the new companies. At one extreme, middleware providers could completely transform the information presented by the underlying platform to the user, with the platform serving as little more than a neutral pipe. Under this model, middleware alone would determine the substance and priority of Amazon or Google searches, with those platforms merely offering access to their servers. At the other extreme, the platform could continue to curate and rank the content entirely with its own algorithms, and the middleware would serve only as a supplemental filter. Under this model, for example, a Facebook or Twitter interface would remain largely unchanged. Middleware would just fact-check or label content without assigning importance to content or providing more fine-tuned recommendations. The best approach probably lies somewhere in between. Handing middleware companies too much power could mean the underlying technology platforms would lose their direct connection to the consumer. With their business models undermined, the technology companies would fight back. On the other hand, handing middleware companies too little control would fail to curb the platforms’ power to curate and disseminate content. But regardless of where exactly the line were drawn, government intervention would be necessary. Congress would likely have to pass a law requiring platforms to use open and uniform application programming interfaces, or APIs, which would allow middleware companies to work seamlessly with different technology platforms. Congress would also have to carefully regulate the middleware providers themselves, so that they met clear minimum standards of reliability, transparency, and consistency.”As a new approach to deal with the problem of fake news and lies circulating on social media platforms and making it sit well with the notion of free speech, this is a useful starting point. The control of what kind of content we want to see should lie with us. Like it has always been in media, the content consumer has to be active while engaging with it and the provider passive. Not the other way around.Matsyanyaaya: The Strategic Consequences of India’s Low Economic GrowthBig fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action— Pranay KotasthaneLast week I came across a data story in The Business Standard and I haven’t been able to erase off my mind. Krishna Kant writes:“Over the past 10 years, India’s per capita GDP is up 35 per cent cumulatively from $1,384 in 2010 to $1,877 now. In the same period, per capita GDP in China rose 141 per cent from $4,500 to $10,839, while it doubled in East Asian countries (excluding Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong) from $4,006 to $8,195.Bangladesh saw the fastest growth with its per capita up nearly two-and-a-half times from $763 in 2010 to around $1,900 at the end of this year. And, Vietnam’s per capita rose 115 per cent from $1,628 to around $3,500.”There’s a nice chart showing how the India growth story lost its way over the last full decade. (Source: Krishna Kant, India's 10-year growth one of the biggest laggards in Asia, EM peers, The Business Standard)The humanitarian consequences of low economic growth are obvious. I won’t bring them up here. The questions I have are concerned with India’s engagement with the world: what would be the strategic consequences of this poor economic performance? Does a decade of slow growth foreclose some options for India? Would India’s position on RCEP have been different had the last decade’s performance been at par with other peers? Would the PRC have been just as aggressive against a more prosperous India? The search for answers took me back to Sanjaya Baru’s 2002 landmark paper titled Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance. The paper captures what scholars were thinking nearly twenty years ago, just before the golden growth years between 2004 and 2009. “For India, there is no doubt that the first and most important challenge is that of accelerating the rate of economic growth and development. Economic performance and capability certainly constitute the foundation of national security and power even more so for a developing nation like India. It will define the limits to military capability and alter the relationship between India and its neighbourhood, especially its two major adversaries, namely, China and Pakistan.The paper’s observations on Pakistan have broadly stood the test of time. The Pakistani military-jihadi complex’s self-defeating policies have strangled the economy in ways that even a nuclear weapons status and use of terrorism as a state policy haven’t been able to offset. The dehyphenation between India and Pakistan in international affairs is now self-evident. However, the story of this last decade is humbling. The gap between the two has increased not because India has done well but because Pakistan has done far worse. On China, the paper argued:“The strategic consequences of the economic competition with China are, there- fore, fundamental to India’s future role within Asia and the global system. If India can sustain above average growth (over 7 per cent per annum in the next decade) and if China experiences a deceleration of growth, coupled with domestic political uncertainty, the widening gap between the two civilisational neighbours can be reversed to an extent. If not, China will emerge as the pre-eminent Asian power and force India into accepting its strategic leadership even within south Asia. The key to this strategic rivalry will be the relative economic performance of the two countries. The main strategic challenge for India in the medium term is, therefore, its relative economic performance vis-à-vis China.”Remarkably prescient. Eighteen years on, the gap between the two countries has only widened. China has been able to forge strong economic ties with all countries in the Indian subcontinent. Economic Reforms NeededThe paper identified these macroeconomic targets essential from a national security perspective:Elimination of the revenue deficit, a manageable fiscal deficit, elimination of wasteful subsidies not targeted to the poor;Low and manageable current account deficit; Low internal and external debt, low short-term debt in overall external debt; Profit-generation by public enterprises; privatisation of non-strategic public enterprises; Self-financing public utilities like power, irrigation water and public transport; An increase in the tax/GDP ratio to levels reached by rapidly industrialising developing countries of around 15 per cent of GDP from the current low of 9 per cent of GDP. What struck me was that eighteen years since, many of these targets still remain aspirations. Lessons for the FutureIt is clear now that China’s rapid and sustained economic development over three decades played a fundamental role in transforming its international stature. The bad news for India is that not only did it start on the same path ten years later than China but it also seems to have fizzled out much earlier.Going ahead as well, India’s economic development will underscore its international role. India’s economic trajectory will decide whether it can play the role of a swing power between the US and China or whether it gets relegated to a weak partner of the US, much like Pakistan is to China. The stakes have never been higher.We put this rather simply in a flowchart to conceptualise India’s future options like this:(Source: India in the Post COVID-19 World Order, Takshashila Discussion SlideDoc)Money Quote: Why Care About Budget Deficits?— Pranay KotasthaneDr M Govinda Rao pointed me to this quote by Martin Feldstein from his LK Jha Memorial Lecture at RBI. Feldstein warned about the adverse consequences of large budget deficits thus:“Unfortunately, it is easy to ignore budget deficits and postpone dealing with them because the adverse effects of budget deficits are rarely immediate. Fiscal deficits are like obesity. You can see your weight rising on the scale and notice that your clothing size is increasing, but there is no sense of urgency in dealing with the problem. That is so even though the long-term consequences of being overweight include an increased risk of a sudden heart attack as well as of various chronic conditions like diabetes. Like obesity, government deficits are the result of too much self-indulgent living as the government spends more than it collects in taxes. And, also like obesity, the more severe the problem, the harder it is to correct: the overweight man has a harder time doing the exercise that could reduce his weight and the economy with a large deficit and debt is trapped by increasing interest payments that cause the deficit and debt to rise more quickly. I emphasize the analogy to stress the point that budget deficits need attention now even when their adverse effects may not be obvious.”Enough said. HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Interview] Promarket interviews Fukuyama. “A Loaded Weapon”: Francis Fukuyama on the Political Power of Digital Platforms[eBook] Friedman 50 Years Later series. A collection of 28 essays reflecting on Friedman’s essay on shareholder maximisation[Reports] US Thinktanks CNAS and CFR make the case for two different multilateral arrangements between powerful democracies to take on China in the technological domain[Article] Amit Cowshish and Rahul Bedi have a definitive take on India’s defence pensions system.If you like the kind of things this newsletter talks about, consider taking up the Takshashila Institution’s Post Graduate Programme in Public Policy (PGP) course. It’s a 48-week in-depth online course meant for working professionals. Applications for the Jan 2021 cohort are now open. For more details, check here. Get on the email list at publicpolicy.substack.com

As Ethiopia’s civil conflict intensifies, the future for Chinese investment is uncertain

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2020

This essay is part of "On China's New Silk Road," a podcast by the Global Reporting Centre that tracks China's global ambitions. Over nine episodes, Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for The World, partners with local journalists on five continents to uncover the effects of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiative in history. The conflict between Ethiopia’s central government and local government forces in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region has sparked a humanitarian crisis with tens of thousands of refugees. It has threatened to destabilize a wider region in which China is heavily invested — a sobering reminder that grand plans, like China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), are only as good as ground truths allow them to be.Despite all of Ethiopia’s success in recent years as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, ethnic and political rivalries are fierce and deep. And they haven’t gone away just because China has invested heavily there over the past two decades, or because Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending a war with neighboring Eritrea. “We want the Horn of Africa to become a treasury of peace and progress,” Abiy said in his Nobel lecture in December 2019. “Indeed, we want the Horn of Africa to become the 'Horn of Plenty' for the rest of the continent.” The Horn of Africa, which includes Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia, has long been an area of strategic focus for world superpowers. It’s where the Gulf of Aden meets the Red Sea, in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait opposite Yemen, a strategic waterway for oil that leads all the way to the Suez Canal. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States fought proxy wars in Ethiopia and Somalia. Now, both the United States and China have military bases in the tiny coastal country of Djibouti, at a narrow part of the Strait.Much of China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) involves building a belt of land routes and a maritime Silk Road of sea routes around the world, for both economic and strategic purposes. China’s many investments in Djibouti and Ethiopia include a railway that connects them and is also meant to connect Tigray’s capital of Mekelle to Djibouti.Chinese investment has helped transform Ethiopia from one of the world’s poorest and most famine-prone countries to a model for the region of what’s possible — both in terms of rapid progress and self-sabotage of that progress.Chinese investment has helped transform Ethiopia from one of the world’s poorest and most famine-prone countries to a model for the region of what’s possible — both in terms of rapid progress and self-sabotage of that progress.Long before Chinese investment started in earnest in the early 2000s, Ethiopia’s central government fought long wars with Tigray and Eritrea, then both northern Ethiopian regions. The war with Eritrea stretched over 30 years; the war with Tigray lasted 17. Both wars ended in 1991, when Eritrea declared independence and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) took over the central government. Tigrayans stayed in power until political protests elevated Abiy to the prime minister in 2018.Related: China's new Silk Road runs through cyberspace, worrying rivals and privacy advocatesTPLF leaders have not gracefully accepted being shunted aside, despite Tigrayans making up just 6% of Ethiopia’s population. When Abiy started replacing Tigrayns in government, the TPLF left the unity party, retreated to Tigray, and conducted an election in September, in defiance of a government decision to postpone elections due to COVID-19.Tigray’s regional militia is both well-armed and sizable with as many as 250,000 armed fighters. Its recent attack on a national government military base sparked the current conflict, which includes aerial bombing by the central government, in areas where Chinese companies have spent years building infrastructure. While in power, Ethiopia’s Tigrayan prime ministers invited in Chinese investment to build desperately needed roads, dams, industrial parks and more throughout much of Ethiopia, at a time when many Western investors saw Ethiopia as too risky.“China was courageous enough to get involved in such a market,” says Ethiopian economist Getachew Alemu. “So it really helped us. We used to have a huge backlog of demand for infrastructure, but we didn’t have the finance to finance it and push our economy forward. So, Chinese capital came as a savior for us.” Related: Opening the door to Chinese investment comes with risks for Southeast Asian nationsChina counts the billions of dollars invested in or lent to Ethiopia as part of China’s BRI. By the Chinese government’s calculation, some 140 countries have signed on in some way, including 44 African countries, drawing closer to China over the past two decades under the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.“Always standing on an equal footing, China respects African countries’ own decision-making rights, and lets African economies go into global markets through the Chinese market,” wrote Wei Jianguo, a former Chinese vice-minister of commerce in the Chinese Communist Party-run newspaper, The Global Times.Wei counts China’s successes in Africa over the past two decades: building 3,750 miles of railways and roads, and “almost 20 ports, more than 80 large-scale power facilities…more than 130 hospitals and medical centers and more than 170 schools, which have brought significant progress to Africa’s economic and social development.” China’s approach in Africa has received mixed reviews from Africans. The African survey group Afrobarometer found in a survey in 36 African countries in 2014-15, that 63% of Africans surveyed had a favorable view of China. And some African leaders prefer Chinese loans because Chinese lenders aren’t particular, like the World Bank and IMF are, about human rights conditions, corruption levels and whether a project can generate enough economic growth to repay the loan. The Chinese-built African Union complex in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Credit: Courtesy of Mary Kay Magistad But Chinese loans often have higher interest rates and shorter repayment schedules. By contrast, Abiy has equated loans from the IMF and World Bank as being like borrowing from your mother. Ethiopia now owes an estimated $16 billion to Chinese lenders, roughly half of Ethiopia’s total debt. Abiy has called for debt forgiveness for the world’s poorest countries, from all international lenders. Related: China's new Silk Road traverses Kazakhstan. But some Kazakhs are skeptical of Chinese influence. Zambia, too, has struggled to repay its debt. It missed a Eurobond payment, becoming the first African country to default during the COVID-19 pandemic, amid reports that Chinese lenders were pressing to take control of at least one copper mine if Zambia couldn’t repay its debt to China. And then there’s Sudan, where China’s arms-for-oil approach in the early 2000s contributed to mass killings in Darfur, in what the US government later called a genocide, with an estimated 400,000 people killed and thousands more displaced. “In Sudan, in the early 2000s, this was the showcase country, that Chinese oil investment would bring peace, that Chinese infrastructure would develop the country,” says Luke Patey, author of “The New Kings of Crude: China, India and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan. ... And what happened — not the Chinese fault, of course, but the Chinese didn’t solve it — there was a civil war, multiple civil wars. Sudan hasn’t developed. Now you have the Janjaweed that were militias in Darfur, displacing and killing civilian populations. They’re now in charge of the country to a large degree. So there wasn’t a happy ending to China’s investments in Sudan.”Whether and when there will be a happier way forward in Ethiopia is now an open question. Here, too, China didn’t cause the conflict, and Chinese interests are squarely behind a peaceful and stable Horn of Africa, so China can move the commodities and other resources it needs from Africa.But one thing China has learned on its new Silk Road is that even the most careful strategic planning only gets you so far. Much is beyond China’s control. And in response to China’s global ambitions, more global players have started their own outreach, with loans and investments, with more countries exercising more agency in deciding who to partner with and how.“They have a lot more confidence than they did before,” says Parag Khanna, a global strategy adviser and author of books including “The Future is Asian.” “And the more the global system becomes a geopolitical marketplace of multiple competing powers, the more agency these smaller countries can actually have.”So for all its imperfections, the Belt & Road Initiative may actually leave as its legacy a more multi-polar world, with states having more infrastructure, more investment, and more options than before, allowing them to better make their own decisions about what kind of future they want, and how to get there. To borrow a phrase China’s leaders like to use: that certainly could be considered a win-win. On China’s New Silk Road podcast is a production of the Global Reporting Centre. Full episodes and transcripts are available here.

Ethiopia and the Road Ahead

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2020 49:43

Episode 9: Chinese investment in Africa has built roads, railways, dams, and more, spurring new interest and competition from other global investors. Critics say China’s too often exploitative, including with loans that leave some countries too deeply in debt. But its investments helped famine-prone Ethiopia become one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Now, however, civil strife is putting that success at risk, for both Ethiopia and China. On China's New Silk Road is produced by the Global Reporting Centre.

India guards against China’s growing regional plans

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 17, 2020

This essay is part of "On China's New Silk Road," a podcast by the Global Reporting Centre that tracks China's global ambitions. Over nine episodes, Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for The World, partners with local journalists on five continents to uncover the effects of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiative in history. As winter arrives high up in the Himalayas, troops from Asia’s two giants remain in a tense standoff at their long-contested border, where India and China fought a war in 1962, and then faced off again just months ago. Now the two sides are in talks to deescalate the situation, with a plan on the table to pull back military forces. In hand-to-hand combat around May, Indian and Chinese troops beat each other with sticks and stones — before better-armed soldiers arrived in June. Despite the long-standing agreement not to use gunfire on the non-demarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC) border, at least 20 Indian troops and an undisclosed number of Chinese soldiers died in the clashes. The confrontation also signaled a sharp turn for the worse in India’s and China’s relationship, which had somewhat warmed over the past dozen years, with China becoming one of India’s top trading partners. Chinese companies have helped to build and supply subway lines in India’s cities, with hopes in some quarters that India will be able to further engage China’s experienced construction companies to overhaul aging Indian infrastructure."We can't build enough bridges or we can’t modernize our railways fast enough. So, all of those skills, actually the Chinese have."Santosh Pai, partner, Link Legal“We have an infrastructure deficit,” said Santosh Pai, a partner with Link Legal in New Delhi. Pai lived in China for years and now advises both Chinese companies who want to invest in India and Indian companies seeking to invest in China.“We can't get our roads built fast enough,” said Pai. “We can't build enough bridges or we can’t modernize our railways fast enough. So, all of those skills, actually the Chinese have.”Related: Opening the door to Chinese investment comes with risks for Southeast Asian nationsChina’s telecommunications companies were among those that installed 3G and 4G systems in India. And until the June border clash, Huawei was under consideration to install 5G. Their involvement may now be off the table, and India — not unlike the US — has also banned dozens of Chinese apps, including TikTok, citing security concerns.China’s critics in India consider the prospect of Beijing controlling Delhi’s 5G networks to be potentially most worrying. “The fear is that they have source code of these technologies and they can manipulate it to their advantage in a critical situation,” says VK Cherian, a telecommunications consultant in New Delhi. “Or they can literally shut off some networks — critical networks.”India’s leaders have also resisted China’s efforts to pull India into other sorts of networks that China leads or dominates. That goes for the new free-trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Agreement (RCEP), which was signed Nov. 15, and brings together most East Asian countries that represent almost a third of the global economy. And it goes for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).‘Our sovereign territory’Even before border tensions ramped up, Indian strategists had become increasingly wary of China’s regional and global ambitions — with a Chinese presence now firmly entrenched in deep-water ports to India’s east in Myanmar, to its south in Sri Lanka, and to its west in Pakistan.India has opted not to join China’s BRI, which is a massive project to finance and build roads, railways, ports, pipelines, 5G and other infrastructure in dozens of countries around the world. The objective is to solidify a new network of global trade and power with China at its center. Related: The ‘China dream’: New Silk Road begins at homeMany Indians — and other Asians — would prefer a region that’s networked in multiple directions — and not dominated by China. That’s one reason India hasn’t joined the BRI or RCEP. India also has a more immediate reason for keeping its distance from China’s Belt and Road endeavors. One of the BRI’s signature projects, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), runs through Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which India sees as its sovereign territory, unlawfully occupied by Pakistan soon after British colonialism ended in 1947. That was when the British separated the Indian subcontinent into two nations: India, a majority Hindu country, and Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country.The area where Chinese and Indian troops are now at loggerheads is the Ladakh area in the greater Kashmir region. Chinese troops seized territory there in the 1962 war and in the more recent summer skirmish. And China claims more territory that India now controls. Dhruv Katoch, a retired major-general in the Indian army. Credit: Mary Kay Magistad/The World “So far as India is concerned, there is no way we can ever support the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. It passes through our sovereign territory,” says Dhruv Katoch, a retired major-general in the Indian army who spent much of his career defending Indian sovereignty in Kashmir. Katoch has also directed India’s Center for Land Warfare Studies, the Indian army’s premier think tank. He argues that India needs to be alert about China’s Belt and Road activities in Pakistan, including the construction of dams, a railway and a road that will run from China, through Kashmir, diagonally southwest across the country, to Pakistan’s strategically-located port of Gwadar. Gwadar is near the Iranian border and not far from the Strait of Hormuz, which leads to the Persian Gulf. Around one-quarter of the world’s oil passes through there, as do US naval ships, coming and going from their base in Bahrain. China’s BRI includes big expansion plans for the Gwadar port. The development encompasses industrial parks and new housing for Chinese workers. The vision is consistent with a Chinese strategy called “port-park-city,” which promotes urban growth starting with port facilities and then continuing with other infrastructure. The term also is associated with the idea that China can build for predominantly civilian use now but pivot toward potential military use later. ‘Very major security concern’Katoch is troubled by the road passing from China through contested Kashmir to Gwadar.“I think it is a very major security concern,” Katoch says. “To protect that road, a very large number of Pakistani military troops are employed. But what is not known is that a very large number of Chinese soldiers are also employed.”“These soldiers are not in uniform, but they are part of the security apparatus of the Chinese state,” he added. “And I think it gives China and Pakistan a nexus to join hands from this particular area should any hostilities take place between India and China.” A general view of signs along a highway leading to Gwadar, Pakistan, April 12, 2017. Credit: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters Isfandiyar Pataudi, a Pakistani retired major-general who was once up for consideration to head Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), disputes that any armed Chinese are operating in Pakistan.“No foreigner can carry a weapon in Pakistan, including Chinese,” he says. “That’s the rule. And so this fear — American audiences need to dispel — that there is going to be a Chinese outpost at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.” Gwadar has more challenges than most BRI ports. It’s in Balochistan, one of Pakistan’s poorest provinces. Over the years, it’s seen outsiders come in to mine copper and gold and drill for oil, leaving little benefit for ethnic Baloch people.Now, with China’s presence, the separatist Baloch Liberation Army has pushed back with repeated attacks on Chinese workers, on a luxury hotel in Gwadar, and on the Chinese consulate in Karachi. But still, Chinese construction continues. “I think China’s had its eyes on Gwadar Port for a very long time,” says Taha Siddiqui, a Pakistani journalist who long covered Balochistan. “And it’s going to get that no matter what, and keep that, no matter what.”

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The Other Asian Giant: India

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2020 44:38

Episode 8: China is one of India's top trading partners, but India has chosen not to be part of China's New Silk Road. It's not wild about a future in which China leads Asia, much less the world. So India's offering its own investments and vision of a more multipolar world. And with Chinese and Indian troops in a tense stand-off on their contested border, India's strengthening its ties with the US, Japan, Australia and others, to counterbalance China's influence. On China's New Silk Road is produced by the Global Reporting Centre.

By Building Roads, China Paves Way for World Domination

WorldAffairs

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2020 28:34

As tensions intensify between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China is pursuing its global ambitions through the “Belt and Road Initiative,” a massive global infrastructure project. In her new podcast, former NPR Beijing correspondent Mary Kay Magistad partners with local journalists on five continents to investigate the initiative’s impact. She joins journalist Shuang Li to explain how China tightens its hold on communities by building roads and pipelines around the world. Guest: Mary Kay Magistad, Creator & Host, “On China’s New Silk Road” and former East Asia correspondent for NPR, & for PRX's The World Shuang Li, Journalist and documentary filmmaker If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.

Interview with Chicken Genius Singapore - TSLA, SQ, LMND, and more! (Ep. 173)

Dave Lee on Investing

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2020 95:32

Interview with @Chicken Genius Singapore Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 2:40 - What got Chicken started on YT 6:05 - Confidence during the recession 7:30 - Future plans 9:15 - Dealing with trolls 10:15 - Researching crypto 15:15 - Bitcoin risks 22:45 - India tracking financial transactions 24:30 - Gov issued crypto 24:45 - How got interested in Tesla 31:40 - When first think, “I need to buy TSLA stock” 32:50 - Background, job, business 34:40 - Meaning of “Chicken Genius Singapore” 35:45 - Lemonade Insurance 48:20 - Square 59:55 - US stock market valuation and corrections 1:06:20 - Tesla in China 1:08:00 - What Chinese gov wants 1:11:30 - View on China 1:14:00 - US China relations 1:19:50 - Question of Chinese copying Tesla 1:21:55 - US China trade war and tension risk to Tesla 1:26:30 - On China kicking out Tesla 1:28:10 - Risk of a Chinese trading block 1:32:40 - Hobbies Social

China's new Silk Road runs through cyberspace, worrying rivals and privacy advocates

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 27, 2020

This essay is part of "On China's New Silk Road," a podcast by the Global Reporting Centre that tracks China's global ambitions. Over nine episodes, Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for The World, partners with local journalists on five continents to uncover the effects of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiative in history.To win the hearts and minds of Mexicans, marketers from China’s Huawei telecommunications giant figured they’d sponsor a popular soccer team called Club America. “That was the best thing ever that we could invest in,” says Adriana Moreno who, until recently, headed Huawei Latin America’s marketing and communications for businesses in Huawei’s regional headquarters in Mexico City. In what Moreno calls a remarkably short time, Mexicans went from sneering at Chinese products as cheap and low quality, to cheering for a team with the Huawei logo on their shirts, buying more Huawei smartphones, and being impressed with the value for their money. At the same time, Huawei has been lobbying to build end-to-end 5G telecommunications networks for Mexico, and throughout Latin America and the world — as it promotes its ability to offer all-in-one 5G networks, as a key part of China’s “digital Silk Road.” It’s part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative — building out roads, railways, ports, pipelines, and laying fiberoptic cables around the world. Its vision is to create a new network of global trade and power, with China at the center. Since 2012, the US government has been urging people to stay away from Huawei, citing its equipment as a security risk. It has also banned Huawei from using US-made technology, including semiconductors. China is fast becoming a global leader in cutting-edge technologies — such as artificial intelligence, facial recognition, surveillance and 5G — and is exporting them worldwide. Fans like the high quality and low cost. But critics say China’s technology enables authoritarian control and increases dependence on an autocratic state. They’re calling for democracies, including the US, to work together to create a tech ecosystem that protects privacy and freedom of speech.Related: The ‘China dream’: The new Silk Road begins at home Compared to the current 4G telecommunications networks that connect most of the world, 5G transmits much more data, much faster, with more capacity and less latency. It can power the Internet of Things, communicating with your smart thermostat and smart appliances — and perhaps with your future driverless electric car. But these days, the Trump administration — and President Donald Trump himself — have been urging US allies in Latin America and around the world to avoid Huawei, too. “We convinced many countries, many countries — and I did this myself, for the most part — not to use Huawei, because we think it’s an unsafe security risk,” Trump said in July. “It’s a big security risk. And I talked many countries out of using it. If they want to do business with us, they can’t use it.” One concern is that Huawei equipment may contain vulnerabilities or “backdoors” that allow Chinese state security to access the data of those who use it — in the same way that some US equipment has been discovered to have to have backdoors, sometimes installed in foreign exports by the National Security Agency, or NSA. Huawei denies having backdoors. Whether it does or not, a Chinese national intelligence law passed in 2017 says Chinese citizens and organizations, including companies, must help Chinese intelligence organs if they ask for help. "...if you're using the Chinese technology, your data is not just in those private companies’ hands, such as Google or Apple. Your data is essentially in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”Xiao Qiand, founder, China Digital Times“So, in other words, if you're using the Chinese technology, your data is not just in those private companies’ hands, such as Google or Apple. Your data is, essentially, in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party,” says Xiao Qiang, a native of Beijing and founder of China Digital Times. Qiang also heads the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information’s Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on digital rights and internet freedom.That’s a risk, he argues, for those signing on to China’s digital Silk Road —whether having China install a 5G network or a "smart city" surveillance camera system. It’s even a risk at the personal level, he says, for users of Chinese apps like TikTok and WeChat, both of which the Trump administration has targeted in an effort to limit or control their use within the United States.“The form of generalized surveillance and political repression that most concerns me is the pervasive surveillance of WeChat, which is the chat and everything else app that pretty much all Chinese people who use smartphones are going to be using,” says Graham Webster, a research scholar who edits the DigiChina project at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. WeChat concentrates a huge amount of personal data in one place: who you know, who you talk to and what you say, where you go and when, what you buy, and medical and banking records. The app is used by most Chinese within China, where it’s largely considered a must-have convenience and not a surveillance tool.Related: WeChat users in the US rankled by potential ban on the app But the Chinese government has increased surveillance since President Xi Jinping took over China’s top leadership in 2012. It has even been experimenting with a “social credit” system that rewards what the Communist Party considers good behavior and punishes transgressions, both financial and political. Already, millions of Chinese have been blocked from buying plane and high-speed train tickets through various local versions of this system.Other government surveillance in China is done through millions of security cameras, facial and voice recognition technology and artificial intelligence. On its digital Silk Road, it has exported surveillance camera systems to countries such as Ecuador. Within China, the government has used this cutting-edge surveillance technology on Uighurs, Turkic Muslims who live in China’s western region of Xinjiang, who the Chinese government largely distrusts as being separatists. Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been detained over the past three years, while many more face a daily gauntlet of checkpoints.“The human rights abuses in Xinjiang are nothing short of ongoing atrocities,” Webster says. “And there’s a technology element there, in that the people who are being targeted may be recognized through facial recognition tools — which, by the way, have high error rates and are likely to misidentify people all the time.”But the dystopian digital future that Xinjiang’s experience shows is not inevitable, even as China’s digital Silk Road rolls out globally. Nor is the digital Silk Road only something to be feared and blocked. China’s ability to make affordable high-quality technology cheaply has put smartphones in the hands of hundreds of millions of people in developing countries who otherwise may not have been able to afford them. It has also created ever-faster networks to connect them.The trick in building a more positive, less invasive digital future, Webster says, is to take more seriously the fact that values are embedded in how technologies are made and regulated and be more proactive in steering both in a less invasive and predatory direction. “These could be some pretty darned compelling products around the world,” he says. “If there's a whole technological ecosystem that is more respecting of freedoms and privacy and data security, then that would contrast with the Chinese offerings, which are built for surveillance and manipulation and, frankly, for lower cost.”

China's Digital Silk Road

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2020 48:20

Episode 7: China is fast becoming a global leader in cutting edge technologies—such as AI, facial recognition, surveillance, and 5G—and is exporting them worldwide. Fans like the high quality and low cost. Critics say China’s technology enables authoritarian control and increases dependence on an autocratic state. They call for democracies, including the U.S., to work together to create a tech ecosystem that protects privacy and freedom of speech. On China's New Silk Road is produced by the Global Reporting Centre.

China’s Arctic Ambition

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2020 42:54

Episode 6: China’s leaders see climate change as an opportunity in the Arctic, where a new shorter trade route is emerging as ice melts. With its Polar Silk Road, China is targeting access to rare earths, uranium, fish stocks, oil, gas—and the strategic benefits of having a presence in the Arctic. China’s initiative has revived U.S. interest in the region and stoked concerns over an ambitious rising power. On China's New Silk Road is produced by the Global Reporting Centre.

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China's new Silk Road runs through Latin America, prompting warnings from the US

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 5, 2020

This essay is part of "On China's New Silk Road," a podcast by the Global Reporting Centre that tracks China's global ambitions. Over nine episodes, Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for The World, partners with local journalists on five continents to uncover the effects of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiative in history. The Panama Canal was a marvel of American engineering when it built more than a century ago. It’s still pretty impressive, moving up huge container ships from one ocean, level by level, through three locks to a lake well above sea level, then down again and on to another ocean. Over the past century, the Panama Canal has helped transform global shipping. It can shave off two weeks or more from the route of otherwise having to go around the horn of South America — saving shippers time and money, with the bonus of skipping the stormy seas.Related: The 'China dream': China's new Silk Road begins at homeAmericans didn’t just build the Panama Canal. For most of the 20th century, from 1903 to 1979, they also controlled it. The US military was based on a strip of land that ran the entire length of the canal and 10 miles across. But Panamanians generally weren’t allowed to enter the Panama Canal Zone. That created both mystique and resentment and eventually led to an end to what pro-independence protesters saw as a neocolonial American presence. American housing in the old Panama Canal Zone has now been left to rot, with graffiti thick on the walls. And Panamanians are proud to control the Panama Canal themselves.“Even from high in the government, they have recognized that the canal is running efficiently — even better now than in the old system,” said Johnny Wong, an engineer who worked on the Panama Canal for three decades. He helped oversee an expansion project of the canal from 2007 to 2016, adding an extra lane and doubling the canal’s capacity.China is now interested in the Panama Canal both for its economic utility in cutting time and cost on shipping routes, and for its strategic and symbolic value, with China aspiring to replace the US as the global, preeminent power. Johnny Wong is an engineer who helped oversee expansion of the Panama Canal. He is one of many Panamanians of Chinese ancestry. Credit: Mary Kay Magistad/The World For 20 years, Hutchison Ports, a Hong Kong company, managed ports at either end of the canal.A Chinese state-owned company plans to build a bridge over the canal. Another has built a convention center and a cruise ship terminal on the Pacific side of the canal, where the Chinese government also wanted to build a new embassy — until pushback from both the United States and Panama caused them to look elsewhere. Several other Chinese projects were also proposed since Panama joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2017, including a high-speed rail system across Panama. “Belt and Road” stands for a belt of land routes and a maritime Silk Road of sea routes — which is what China aims to build with this global infrastructure initiative. Most of the world’s countries have signed on or expressed interest in it. When Panama shifted its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in June 2017, a step needed to join the Belt and Road later that year, then-President Juan Carlos Varela sat down for an interview with China’s state-run CGTN television network. “China has the largest population in the world, has the second-largest economy, [and] is the second-main user of the Panama Canal,” Varela said. Varela also said he gave the Trump administration about an hour’s notice of Panama’s decision to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “This is our decision,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure I did the right thing for our people.”The Trump administration soon made it clear it had a different view. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Panama in late 2018 and warned against what he called China’s “predatory economic activity.” Related: China's new Silk Road traverses Kazakhstan. But some Kazakhs are skeptical of Chinese influence. Soon after, Chinese projects in Panama started being scaled back, canceled or rejected. A $4 billion high-speed rail project was canceled. A $2.5 billion monorail project, linking Panama City with its western suburbs, went to South Korea’s Hyundai instead of, as earlier expected, to a Chinese company. The Panama Canal bridge to be built by a top Chinese state-owned company was scaled back. Negotiations between Panama and China for a free trade agreement stalled. And Panama’s government said it will audit Hutchison Ports and is considering whether to renew its concession when it expires in 2022. Patiently and methodically, China is using its Belt and Road Initiative to expand and strengthen its strategic presence around the world, including in what has long been called the United States’ backyard.Welcome to a 21st-century version of the Great Game. The 19th-century version had imperial Russia and imperial Great Britain vying for influence and access to resources in Central Asia. Now, it’s the world’s two top economies vying for influence around the world: the United States as the incumbent premier power, and China as an ambitious contender for that position. China, patiently and methodically, is using its Belt and Road Initiative to expand and strengthen its strategic presence around the world, including in what has long been called the United States’ backyard.“Our government, the generals and the president should have sat down and said, ‘Hey, something is going on around here,’” said retired US Sergeant First Class Sidney Thomas, on a cruise down the Panama Canal in November 2019. He was born in Panama, moved to the United States as a kid, and came back to Panama with the US military in the 1970s. “It’s like playing checkers, or even chess. You make a move, and you wait for the other person. If the other person doesn’t make a move, you study the board to get an advantage. So, yeah — I believe China has an advantage now.” China has been investing heavily in Latin America for more than a decade. It has built roads and dams in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest as land is cleared to grow more soybeans for export to China. It has also built or expanded ports in Peru, Mexico, Panama; a dam and surveillance system in Ecuador; and dozens of other projects throughout the region. In Latin America, 19 countries have now joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative — after a decade in which trade between China and Latin America increased more than twentyfold. The hope across much of Latin America had been that signing on to Belt and Road membership would bring more Chinese investment of the kind each country needed, and more opportunities for Latin American countries to export to China, narrowing often sizable trade imbalances. That hasn’t always happened. Venezuela and Ecuador, in particular, now have high debts to China and new economic woes in the wake of COVID-19. The region’s four largest economies — Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico — still haven’t signed a Belt and Road Initiative agreement. Together, they account for 70% of Latin America’s gross domestic product. But the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei is already building 5G networks in Mexico and Argentina, and has done pilot runs of its 5G technology in Brazil. “Mexico has to be always open to build up a strategic relationship with China, but always very, very clear: It has to be a relationship that is well-balanced. We don’t want to create any type of dependency, not to China, neither to the United States.” Idelfonso Giajardo, Mexico's former Secretary of Economy“Mexico has to be always open to build up a strategic relationship with China, but always very, very clear: It has to be a relationship that is well-balanced. We don’t want to create any type of dependency, not to China, neither to the United States,” Mexico’s former Secretary of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo told Isabella Cota, a Mexican journalist and economic correspondent for the Spanish newspaper, El Pais. Isabella Cota is the economic correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El Pais and a partner reporter for the "On China’s New Silk Road" podcast. Credit: Mary Kay Magistad/The World Later, Cota — a partner reporter for the “On China’s New Silk Road” podcast — said the hit Mexico’s economy is taking from COVID-19 is causing the government to consider the best way forward. Mexico’s central bank has warned the economy could contract by almost 13%, and 15 million or more Mexicans could fall out of the middle class and into poverty. Chinese investment in the Mayan Train, a 900-milelong tourist train on the Yucatán Peninsula and in an oil refinery may help. But Cota says many Mexicans are looking to the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement — the new North American Free Trade Agreement — more than anything else. “Mexican officials are just so hopeful that this is going to be the thing that makes the economy come back in Mexico,” Cota said. “I’m not so sure it’s going to work out that way, at least not immediately. But this shift in mentality is important. It’s been kind of like being more grounded, being more realistic about Mexico’s opportunities. Cota says it’s not clear yet how Mexico is going to balance its long-standing and close economic relationship with the United States, and new investment opportunities that may be coming from China. “But I think that they’re going to try and get the best of both worlds,” she said. “And you know what? Quite frankly, I hope they do. Because we need as much investment and as much opportunity as we can get in Mexico.”

Presidential debate: Donald Trump blames ‘China plague’ for US economic woes

Inkstone

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2020 6:22

The #PresidentialDebate2020 was a controversial affair full of interruptions and name-calling. On China, Trump blamed the country for America’s economic woes

Italy is caught in the middle of the EU's tussle with its 'systemic rival,' China

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2020 7:43

This essay is part of "On China's New Silk Road," a podcast by the Global Reporting Centre that tracks China's global ambitions. Over nine episodes, Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for The World, partners with local journalists on five continents to uncover the effects of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiative in history. If Venice makes you think of scenic canals and singing gondoliers, think, too, about how Venice was once a center of global trade. Goods from as far off as China would travel on the ancient Silk Road, in ships that would sail right up to the city’s San Marco Square. That trade brought Venice wealth, ideas, innovations — and disease. The bubonic plague, which geneticists have traced to its origins in China, wiped out a third of Venice’s — and Europe’s — population in the mid-14th century. Venice’s innovation then was to isolate incoming travelers on islands until it was clear they weren’t infected. It was the dawn of the quarantine.Now, in a new pandemic, Italy faces new challenges. Its economy was already in recession with high unemployment before COVID-19 hit this spring. In March 2019, disgruntled populists, skeptical that the European Union had much to offer Italy, led the way to make Italy the first G7 country to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — a global infrastructure initiative to build a belt of land routes and a maritime road of sea routes, in which Chinese loans and investments, and mostly Chinese state-owned companies, are building roads, railways, ports, pipelines, 5G networks and more around the world. The hope was that joining the BRI would help Italy export more of its products to China, narrow its considerable trade gap and pull in new Chinese investment. China has already invested some $20 billion in Italy over the past 20 years. But that investment peaked four or five years before Italy joined the BRI. And significant new Chinese investment, or a new Chinese appetite for Italian exports, hasn’t exactly been pouring in since — certainly not this year amid a pandemic. Related: The 'China dream': China's new Silk Road begins at homeBut Italy’s move closer to China, which the European Union calls “a systemic rival,” served as a wakeup call to the EU: If it doesn’t help member economies when they’re feeling economic pain, they could come up with solutions that may not be in the EU’s strategic interests. When Italy’s economy reeled under COVID-19, the EU offered Italy help: more than $200 billion in cheap loans and grants from the EU’s coronavirus recovery plan, an outsized share of the $890 billion total available in the fund.The EU appeared to be applying a lesson learned during the 2008 financial crisis. At the time, it insisted that an already suffering Greece undergo austerity measures. Instead of being squeezed indefinitely, Greece accepted investment from the Chinese state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) to manage, and eventually buy, a majority stake in Greece’s storied ancient port of Piraeus, which also happens to be one of Europe’s most strategically located ports. COSCO’s investment has helped transform Piraeus into the busiest port in the Mediterranean.Chinese investments in the Italian ports of Genoa and Trieste were mentioned in the memorandum of understanding Italy signed when it joined China’s BRI last year, a fact that got some Europeans speculating about whether a Chinese presence in those ports would be a Trojan horse for China to dominate central Europe.Michele Geraci is an Italian economist who, as Italy’s undersecretary of economic development at the time, was instrumental in moving Italy to join the BRI. He dismisses such concerns as overblown, given how many European ports China already manages or owns.“When we hear warnings that Chinese should not invest in the Italian ports, it’s too late. China has already invested in all major European ports and almost manages 15 to 20% of European traffic.”Michele Geraci, former Italian undersecretary of economic development“We have Bilbao, Valencia, Antwerp in Belgium, Zeebrugge, Piraeus in Greece of course, Dunkirk, Le Havre, Marseilles, Nantes in France, Malta, Rotterdam in the Netherlands,” he says. “So when we hear warnings that Chinese should not invest in the Italian ports, it’s too late. China has already invested in all major European ports and almost manages 15 to 20% of European traffic.” The container port in Trieste, Italy. Credit: Courtesy of Mary Kay Magistad The challenge, he says, should be for Italians to figure out how to make Chinese investment work for Italy’s interests.And in Trieste, a picturesque city rising above the Adriatic Sea, with a port going back to the Roman Empire, and a free port for 300 years, port president Zeno D’Agostino sees great opportunity.“We must try to use this opportunity, which is to be a node in world logistics,” he says. Related: China's new Silk Road traverses Kazakhstan. But some Kazakhs are skeptical of Chinese influence.D’Agostino says he’s been working with Chinese partners to get more Italian exports to eastern China. He’s looking to develop areas of Trieste’s free port, with factories and warehouses to take advantage of its free trade status — only paying duty on goods when they leave the warehouses. He’d been expecting this kind of investment from the Chinese. But while that’s been slow to come, the publicity that came to Trieste when Italy joined China’s BRI has drawn in more European investors. “I don’t need the money of the Chinese, I can tell you, without problem,” D’Agostino says. “So if we do what we agreed, we are both satisfied. If they do what they want, and it’s something different from what we agreed, we cannot do [it].”Italy’s “Golden Power” rules prohibit the sale of ports and other strategic assets to foreign entities. Back in Venice, the head of its modern Marghera Port, Pino Musolino, says it’s a good thing Italy has those restrictions because China has proven adept at establishing a presence at strategic ports all the way from China to Europe.“The Belt and Road [Initiative] is not just about infrastructure,” he says. “It's a huge design aimed at controlling trade flows and controlling the main global value chains. If you control those, you don't need to control any army anymore. You are controlling the very specific wealth of any country along those economical corridors. Chinese are very much aware of this, and they are doing a very good job on this, honestly. And they are also very straight forward on this, I have to say, I don't see them particularly scheming on this. They have a clear goal and they are pursuing it.” Italy’s government, made up of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party, is working out its own goals for what they expect to be an economic bounce next year, after Italy’s economy contracts 8 to 9% this year. There’s talk of upgrading train lines and creating a fast broadband network. China’s Huawei had been in the running. Italy’s leaders have since reconsidered using them, citing security concerns.

China's new Silk Road traverses Kazakhstan. But some Kazakhs are skeptical of Chinese influence.

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2020 17:55

This essay is part of "On China's New Silk Road," a podcast by the Global Reporting Centre that tracks China's global ambitions. Over nine episodes, Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for The World, partners with local journalists on five continents to uncover the effects of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiative in history. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s capital, in 2013, seemed like another boring meeting worth skipping, according to Dulat Yesnazar, then a college student studying international relations. Xi had come to announce the launch of one of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiatives in history. “I thought it was just another of those programs where you just talk much and do nothing — or do little,” Yesnazar said. Now, as a journalist, Dulat sees China’s new Silk Road — also called the Belt and Road Initiative — as an effort to extend its reach and its power.“It’s just part of China’s ambitions, big ambitions, of being hegemon,” he says.The Belt and Road Initiative, rolled out by the Chinese government in 2013, aims to build a belt of land and sea routes that stretches from East Asia to Europe, spanning some 70 countries. Kazakhstan has called itself a buckle in that belt, echoing the centuries on the ancient Silk Road when Kazakhstan was at the crossroads for caravans of traders from China, India, Persia, Turkey, and beyond. But many Kazakhs are skeptical of China’s intentions and its promises to make the new Silk Road a “win-win” for both countries.In recent years, protests have erupted in Kazakhstan against Chinese workers taking jobs Kazakhs can do, or over what some see as increasing Chinese political influence in Kazakhstan. Related: The 'China dream': China's new Silk Road begins at homeProtesters pressured the Kazakh government to be more transparent about the nature of Chinese investments. Finally, in 2019, the government released data showing 55 Kazakh projects are receiving Chinese new Silk Road investment and loans totaling $27.6 billion, with approximatley of half going toward oil and gas-related projects. Some protesters have called for some of those projects to be scrapped.But other Kazakhs see the Belt and Road Initiative as an opportunity to help Kazakhstan’s economy, and to get investments that weren’t so easy for Kazakhs to land elsewhere. Almas Chukin, an entrepreneur in Almaty, says he landed a Chinese investment for a wind energy project in Kazakhstan he’d been trying to do for a decade.“We traveled to the United State a few times, but when the first question was, ‘Where is Kazakhstan?’ you understand they’re not going to give you money.”Almas Chukin, entrepreneur, Almaty, Kazakhstan“We traveled to the United State a few times, but when the first question was, ‘Where is Kazakhstan?’ you understand they’re not going to give you money,” he says with a chuckle. He ticks off his next stops: London? Nope. Paris? Not interested. Turkey? “More words than deeds,” he says. Almas Chukin, an entrepreneur who got Chinese funding for Kazakhstan’s first major wind energy projects after US and European potential investors turned him down. Credit: Mary Kay Magistad/The World “And with China, we finally got the project,” he says. The result, he says, will be Kazakhstan’s first major wind energy project at a time when the Kazakh government has committed to moving toward using more renewable energy. Chinese investment is also helping to transform Kazakhstan’s border with China. On the Kazakh side, there’s now a new dry port where companies load containers onto trains, with plans for much more. And in a new free trade zone on both sides of the border, a new Chinese city has sprung up in Khorgos, where a dusty trading town used to be. Kazakh shoppers come in by the busload to snap up bargains and sell them for a profit back home. “Business is good and getting better,” says Li Xin, a Chinese shop owner in Khorgos who sells handbags and other women’s accessories, who came from northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province. “I didn’t know much about this place, or about the Belt and Road, before I came here. But I’m glad I did.”Li says she thinks she’s here to stay, and she hopes the Belt and Road strengthens relations between Kazakhs and Chinese. She says she hopes the two sides can learn to communicate better. Unintentionally illustrating the challenge, she calls Kazakhs mao zi, the Pinyin spelling of a somewhat derogatory term in Chinese for “Russian.” When it comes to cultural understanding across the border, the easiest cultural understanding may be between Kazakhs, most of whom are Muslim, and Uighurs, the Turkic Muslim population that, until recently, had been the majority in Xinjiang — the region of China that abuts Kazakhstan. When China’s Communist Party came to power in 1949, it encouraged Han Chinese — the ethnic majority in China — to move to Xinjiang and tame China’s wild west. Uighurs are now a minority in Xinjiang.And over the past three years, Chinese officials have forced hundreds of thousands of Uighur and ethnic Kazakh Muslims into so-called "reeducation camps" and other forms of detention. Chinese officials insist these measures are necessary to prevent extremism, terrorism and separatism. Related: Sterilization abuse of Uighurs in China meets international legal criteria for genocide, experts sayDetainees who have been released tell of being beaten, made to eat pork — against usual Islamic practice — and to recite propaganda. “Every day, we’d spend 45 minutes learning Chinese and glorifying the Communist Party and President Xi Jinping,” says Gulzira Auelkhan, who was detained for 15 months. An ethnic Kazakh, she was born in Xinjiang as a Chinese citizen, married a Kazakh man, and moved to Kazakhstan. She was detained at the Kazakhstan-China border on her way home to Xinjiang to visit her sick father. Kazakhs in Almaty hold up photos of their relatives being held in detention in Xinjiang, China. Credit: Kazakhs in Almaty hold up photos of their relatives being held in detention in Xinjiang, China. Auelkhan’s husband was eventually able to bring her home to Kazakhstan — but not before she’d completed a stretch of forced labor, making gloves for export to Germany and the US. Her experience did nothing to sell her on the win-win promises China makes about the new Silk Road.“I don’t believe that Kazakhstan and China are friends. ... I think this project is part of China’s expansion. I think they’re trying to take over other countries.”Gulzira Auelkhan, an ethnic Kazakh“I don’t believe that Kazakhstan and China are friends,” she says. “I think this project is part of China’s expansion. I think they’re trying to take over other countries.” And, she says, it seems they want to “erase Islam” within China’s borders. Kazakhstan’s leaders are left to balance between the potential economic windfall of strengthening economic ties with China under the New Silk Road, and many Kazakhs’ desire to protect their sovereignty, culture, and religious preferences, as they watch with concern the way Chinese authorities are treating Muslims just across the border. “It’s extremely destructive, because they’re creating this horrible node for just decades to come,” says Gene Bunin, an Almaty-based scholar of the Uighur language, who created an online database of detainees called shahit.biz. “You’re just going to have a lot of broken people who don’t know what to do with their frustrations.”

Mary Kay Magistad - On China's New Silk Road (Episode 1: The China Dream)

Sinica Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2020 44:45

This week, we're delighted to bring you the first episode of Mary Kay Magistad's brand new podcast, On China's New Silk Road. Mary Kay is a veteran China reporter and a dear friend of the Sinica Podcast – a frequent guest in our early days. After she moved back to the States, she created another great podcast called Who's Century It It?, a show that often looked at issues related to China. We know that Sinica's audience would really appreciate her latest series and wanted to share it with you. On China's New Silk Road is a production of the Global Reporting Centre, a nonprofit group that teaches, practices and promotes innovation in global journalism. Make sure to subscribe to this great new series! We hope you enjoy this first episode.

culture business china politics film news chinese states beijing shanghai current affairs shenzhen mary kay guangzhou chengdu sichuan hangzhou chongqing new silk road on china sinica china dream sinica podcast mary kay magistad china's new silk road

The 'China dream': The new Silk Road begins at home