Economist - Asia

The Maldives after its “coup”: Between Delhi and the deep blue sea

A Nasheed supporter fights her own battle ONE of the presidents must be wrong. The ruler of the Maldives, Waheed Hassan, says nothing would please him more than calling early elections. “The Maldives is now more democratic than ever,” he gushed during his first official trip abroad, in Delhi, on May 14th. With a firm handshake, a dapper red tie and a straight-in-the-eye stare, he says he would cheerily go to the polls tomorrow—if only he were not blocked from doing so by the constitution of the sprawling archipelago, and by some regrettably reluctant coalition allies.Nonsense, retorts his high-profile predecessor, Mohamed Nasheed, over a squeaking phone line from Male, the capital. “We need an election. It’s nothing to do with his coalition allies, it’s just him.” Mr Hassan (formerly the vice-president) could quit, but prefers taking time to crush his opponents. Some 600 people, mostly opposition party workers, have been arrested in the past few months, Mr Nasheed complains. Opposition MPs get inducements to defect. Mr Nasheed, an experienced political lag, says he thinks he will soon...

Categories: Periodicals

Presidential politics in Taiwan: Ma’s second stand

TAIWAN’S president, Ma Ying-jeou, is to be inaugurated for a second term on May 20th. His first four years, above all else, were marked by an historic detente with China, Taiwan’s old foe across the Taiwan Strait. First, China agreed to a truce in a long-running and increasingly expensive attempt to deny Taiwan diplomatic allies. Then, in 2010, the two countries signed a trade agreement known as the Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement (ECFA). Relations across the strait have never been better since Taiwan and China split in 1949, and Mr Ma can be considered the architect of that.Yet Taiwan’s public remains wary about too close a rapprochement with China, which considers the island to be a part of its territory and which insists on the right to use force to achieve reunification. And so a preoccupation of even as pro-China a leader as Mr Ma continues to be to expand Taiwan’s international ties as a counterbalance to the mainland giant. In selling the idea of an ECFA to a sceptical public, Mr Ma insisted that a framework agreement would not force the young democracy into China’s arms. Rather, he said, it...

Categories: Periodicals

Banyan: Trading strategies

TRADE negotiations sometimes seem like scrubbing the floor. They feel virtuous, take for ever and entail back-breaking work; but, when done, it is often hard to see any difference. So a first reaction to the announcement on May 13th that China, Japan and South Korea are to open talks on establishing a trilateral free-trade area is to shrug. The idea has been around for a decade. There are many obstacles to its realisation. And not so much as a date has been announced for the talks to begin.A second response is to recognise that, if it did come to anything, this would be a very big deal. In aggregate, the three countries account for nearly a fifth of global output—more than the euro area—and 18% of world exports. A third is to note that, with the stalling of the Doha round of multilateral trade talks, regional free-trade agreements (FTAs) in Asia have become one of many arenas of strategic competition between America and China.There are a couple of shrug-worthy elements to the proposed free-trade area. The first is that it will be terribly hard to bring to fruition. In all three countries, important lobbies will...

Categories: Periodicals

The Australian Federal Police in the Pacific: Booting out big brother

VANUATU, a nation of just 257,000, expelled the 12-member police contingent from neighbouring Australia on May 10th. The action was in retaliation for an incident at Sydney airport involving Vanuatu’s prime minister, Sato Kilman. While in transit to Israel, Mr Kilman and his entourage were made to pass through immigration, rather than being ushered into a VIP lounge. Once on Australian soil, Mr Kilman’s private secretary, Clarence Marae, was promptly arrested by federal police on charges of tax fraud. The Vanuatu government has been careful to justify the expulsion of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) not by complaining about Mr Marae’s arrest but by protesting at the discourtesy shown to the prime minister. Australia’s foreign minister, Bob Carr, responded by threatening to cut aid to Vanuatu.This is not the first time Pacific Island leaders have taken umbrage at their treatment in Australian airports. In 2005 security officers in Brisbane airport required Papua New Guinea’s then prime minister, Sir Michael Somare, to remove his shoes, sparking angry protests. Nor is it the first time Vanuatu has clashed with the...

Categories: Periodicals

India’s parliament at 60: Badly drawn

INDIA’S parliament marked its 60th birthday, on May 13th, with an apparently nonsensical row. MPs of all parties worked up a froth, claiming to be offended by a cartoon older than parliament itself. The drawing, now reproduced in a textbook, shows the architect of India’s constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, astride a snail; beside him is Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister. Each holds a whip.Mayawati, a national MP who leads a pro-dalit (low-caste) party in Uttar Pradesh, says that demeans Ambedkar, a hero to fellow dalits, by suggesting that the high-caste Nehru had to whip him to finish the constitution. Kapil Sibal, the communications minister, promptly apologised and said he would banish the sketch from future books. MPs then leapt on other drawings in the textbook they disliked. How could scribblers possibly depict politicians as crooked, or the Indian electorate as a stubborn elephant?It all fits a regrettably mirthless trend. West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, defends the arrest last month of an academic in Kolkata who had e-mailed a cartoon...

Categories: Periodicals

India-Pakistan relations: Make lolly, not war

A DROWSINESS hangs over the vast new customs post at Wagah, India’s main border crossing to Pakistan. A “Jattha shed”, a towering shelter for hundreds of pilgrims, stands empty. The vehicle park has space for 500 lorries, but today just two gaudy Pakistani ones are unloading sacks of chemicals.Built from pink and yellow stone, the 120-acre (50-hectare) site opened a month ago. Tall white letters spell out “trade gate” across a dust-blown arch that marks the exit to Pakistan. The calm, however, is about to end. The chief at Wagah says the warehouses, vehicle-inspection pits and staff with high-tech scanners are poised to handle as many as 1,000 lorries a day—several times more than before. He pledges to “work round the clock” to let bilateral trade between South Asia’s two largest economies bloom like never before.Pakistan is unpicking official barriers to trade, after last year offering most-favoured nation trading status to India (reciprocating India’s 1996 offer). Restrictions on traded goods, notably by road, are going, with potentially huge effects. Road transport is only one-third the cost of shipping goods...

Categories: Periodicals

Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws: An inconvenient death

Mourning Uncle SMS HIS only crime, allegedly, was to send four text messages to a government official about Thailand’s royal family. But they were deemed by a court to be offensive to the monarchy, and under the country’s strict and oppressive lèse-majesté laws Ampon Tangnoppakul was sentenced, in November, to 20 years in prison. The whole case, and especially the wildly inappropriate sentence, sparked an outcry, both in Thailand and abroad. Mr Ampon, a hitherto blameless and unrevolutionary 61-year-old, became known as “Uncle SMS”. He denied all charges, claiming that he did not even know how to send a text message.On May 8th Mr Ampon died in a Bangkok prison hospital. He had been unwell, but the exact cause of his death has still to be determined. It has provoked renewed concern over the increasingly harsh application of the lèse-majesté laws, enshrined in Thailand’s criminal code and a newer Computer Crime Act. “Red shirt” activists, supporters of a former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed in a coup engineered by...

Categories: Periodicals

Australian politics: Another fine mess

FACING a fight for re-election next year, Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, was banking on a budget surplus to help rescue her Labor government’s declining political fortunes. When Wayne Swan, the treasurer (pictured, above, with Ms Gillard), announced the budget on May 8th, he seemed to have fulfilled her hopes. Declaring that the “surplus years are here”, he said the current financial year’s deficit of A$44 billion ($44.8 billion) would become a A$1.5 billion surplus in 2012-13, the first since Labor took power five years ago. He projected the surplus would be five times that amount in three years, more than most people had expected. Yet even as he spoke, Ms Gillard’s government was rocked by separate allegations of unseemly behaviour, one against the speaker of the federal parliament and the other against an ex-Labor politician upon whose support she depends. The uproar has undermined her minority government’s position in parliament and may yet squash any bounce from the budget.Thanks largely to investment in mining, Australia has survived the global downturn better than most rich countries. Mining...

Categories: Periodicals

Banyan: An absence of architecture

GOING by past form and the evidence of satellite imagery, North Korea may soon test another nuclear device, its third such experiment. The regime is not yet threatening to do so in so many words. But on May 6th it blustered that it would “persistently safeguard the sovereignty of our nation, based on self-defensive nuclear deterrent”. It is some consolation that the previous tests have been judged at best partial successes, and that North Korea’s efforts to test rockets that might carry bombs across continents have fizzled. Nevertheless, that such a volatile, bellicose and unstable regime should possess even a rudimentary nuclear capacity is enough of a security threat. But even if a magician were to turn North Korea into a peace-loving democracy overnight, north-east Asia would remain a dangerous place.Understandably, the nuclear threat has in recent years dominated discussions about regional security. Besides constituting a threat in itself, North Korea has managed to raise tensions and heighten suspicion between the other members of the “six-party talks” (America, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea),...

Categories: Periodicals

The Philippines: The family plot

THE flag of the United Luisita Workers’ Union flaps in the breeze rolling across Hacienda Luisita, a vast sugar plantation named after a Catalonian marchioness, 100km (60-odd miles) north of the capital, Manila. The flag shows three stalks of cane severed by a tip-heavy machete, known as a bolo. For a decade the union has been trying to sever this land from its powerful owners, who happen to be the family of the Philippines’ president, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino. On April 24th it won a big victory. The Supreme Court upheld a 2011 decision to distribute 4,335 hectares (10,712 acres) of the plantation’s fertile land to 6,269 farmworkers. “We are very happy,” says Lito Bais, acting president of the union, with a gap-toothed smile.The ruling was a defeat for Mr Aquino’s cousins and uncles, but a victory for his late mother, Cory Aquino. In 1988 she passed a land-reform law, two years after “people power” swept her into the presidency. The law was supposed to uproot the country’s colonial legacy of concentrated landownership.But progress has been slow and costly. In 2009 the World Bank calculated...

Categories: Periodicals

South Korea’s foreign-born: The lovable Ms Lee

MENTION Jasmine Lee at the Philippine market in Seoul’s Hyehwa-dong district, and faces instantly brighten. Ms Lee, born in the Philippines, recently became the first foreign-born South Korean to win a seat in the National Assembly, running for the ruling Saenuri party. “Everybody loves her”, says a Filipina stallholder selling cassava cakes.Well, not quite everybody. After Ms Lee’s election last month, thousands of virulent Twitter messages labelled her a “mail-order bride” and plenty worse. The local media responded with a bout of soul-searching over the scourge of racism.Until relatively recently, nearly all Koreans prided themselves on their “pure” blood. Both in reaction to and emulation of imperial Japan, Korea’s colonial rulers from 1910-45, Korean society developed an intense brand of ethnic nationalism. North Korea pursues this today, to brutal extremes. Notions of a pure race are central to the regime’s propaganda, and women who conceive children with Chinese men are frequently subjected to forced abortions or infanticide. But in the South, times are changing. There are 110,000 naturalised South Koreans now, a number projected to rise to over 200,000 by 2020. One in ten marriages is now international. Mixed-race children challenge traditional notions of what it means to be Korean.Prejudice against some foreigners remains, particularly against South-East Asians...

Categories: Periodicals

Pakistan’s relations with America: The hardest word

SAYING sorry is proving hard for a superpower. Relations between the United States and Pakistan, supposed “strategic” allies, have been paralysed since American aircraft mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops stationed on the Afghan border in November, in an awful “friendly fire” incident. Now, like two bickering children unable to swallow their pride and make up, President Barack Obama’s administration is unwilling to apologise over the deaths, and the Pakistani government has refused to reopen its roads for supplying NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, after closing them as punishment.At the end of April, America’s special envoy to Pakistan, Marc Grossman, left the capital, Islamabad, without a face-saving deal. Discussions continue behind closed doors in an atmosphere one participant describes as “toxic”. But both sides still hope for an agreement to reinstate NATO supply routes in time for Pakistan to be invited to a NATO summit in Chicago on May 20th and 21st. Participants are to discuss arrangements in Afghanistan after most foreign troops leave by the end of 2014. But time is running out for President Asif Ali Zardari to get the call for Chicago.This week the diplomatic impasse appears to have claimed a surprising victim. The American ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, unexpectedly said he would step down within weeks. Mr Munter had a reputation in Pakistan as a...

Categories: Periodicals

Cambodia: Blood trail

Chhut Vuthy, tireless campaigner THE killing of Chhut Vuthy has shaken Cambodia. A well-known environmentalist and founder of the Natural Resource Protection Group, he had travelled to Koh Kong province in the west of the country to try to film illegal loggers. He was in a heavily forested area near the construction of a 338-megawatt hydropower dam being built by China Huadian, one of China’s five biggest power generators. The project is one of four dams which have drawn widespread criticism because of adjacent logging, and the impact the dams could have on wildlife and the livelihoods of local villagers.How Mr Chhut Vuthy was killed is not clear, but the official explanation has raised eyebrows. The Cambodian army claims that he was taking photographs without permission. He was confronted by a military police officer who demanded he hand over his camera. An argument followed, says the army. Guns went off, and when the officer realised he had killed the environmentalist, it says, he turned his AK-47 on himself, managing to pull the trigger twice to shoot himself in the stomach and...

A dam on the Mekong: Opening the floodgates

WHAT looked like an admittedly temporary reprieve for the swift currents and extraordinary biodiversity of the Mekong river is now over. In December the Mekong River Commission (MRC), an intergovernmental body made up of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, called again for approval of a potentially devastating dam at Xayaburi in northern Laos to be withheld until more is known about its effect on the lower Mekong. Apart from high up in the gorges of south-western China, the Mekong remains undammed. But now CH. Karnchang, a Thai construction giant contracted to build a $3.8 billion dam at Xayaburi has told the Bangkok Stock Exchange that dam construction officially began on March 15th, and that 5,000 workers have just been hired.The news has triggered an angry response from riparian neighbours. The December agreement, calling for further scientific study of the environmental impacts, included Laos. Opponents of the dam argue that the Xayaburi dam will cause immense harm to ecosystems and imperil 65m South-East Asians who rely on the Mekong, the world’s biggest inland fishery, for their sustenance.Cambodia’s...

Categories: Periodicals

The South China Sea: Shoal mates

PHILIPPINE and American troops charged ashore from the South China Sea on April 25th in an exercise to show they could jointly recapture a small Philippine island from hostile forces. It was all make-believe, of course: just another round of a game in which China pretends it owns almost all the South China Sea, and the Philippines and four other East Asian countries pretend otherwise. America says it does not take sides in the squabble embroiling China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines over ownership of all or parts of the South China Sea. The sea has (or had) a rich marine life, and oil and gas. But America does play chicken. It has a mutual-defence treaty with the Philippines, which an American general this month described as “self-explanatory”. However, the treaty fails to spell out whether America would help defend Philippine-claimed territory if it was also claimed by China.In this way, America keeps China guessing as to where the tripwire for armed conflict is buried. The Americans and Filipinos made the usual denials that the mock enemy in their annual joint military exercises is China....

Categories: Periodicals