<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>COLD WAR PROJECT DOCUMENTS REVEALS ,</b> how Beijing comrades see HINDUS as their enemies , their hate is evident in this conversation .......
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Mao Zedong: Our mistake was that we did not disarm the Dalai Lama right away. But at that time we had no contact with the popular masses of Tibet.
N.S. Khrushchev: You have no contact even now with the population of Tibet.
Mao Zedong: We have a different understanding of this issue.
N.S. Khrushchev: Of course, that is why we raised this issue. One could also say the following: both you and we have Koreans who fled from Kim Il Sung. But this does not give us ground to spoil relations with Kim Il Sung, and we remain good friends. As to the escape of the Dalai Lama from Tibet, if we had been in your place, we would not have let him escape. It would be better if he was in a coffin. And now he is in India, and perhaps will go to the USA. Is this to the advantage of the socialist countries?
Mao Zedong: This is impossible; we could not arrest him then. We could not bar him from leaving, since the border with India is very extended, and he could cross it at any point.
N.S. Khrushchev: It's not a matter of arrest; I am just saying that you were wrong to let him go. If you allow him an opportunity to flee to India, then what has Nehru to do with it? We believe that the events in Tibet are the fault of the Communist Party of China, not Nehru's fault.
Mao Zedong: No, this is Nehru's fault.
N.S. Khrushchev: Then the events in Hungary are not our fault, but the fault of the United States of America, if I understand you correctly. Please, look here, we had an army in Hungary, we supported that fool Rakosi - and this is our mistake, not the mistake of the United States.
Mao Zedong: How can you compare Rakosi to the Dalai Lama?
N.S. Khrushchev: If you like, you can to a certain degree.
Mao Zedong: The Hindus acted in Tibet as if it belonged to them.
N.S. Khrushchev: We know. As you know, Nepal wanted to have a Soviet ambassador, but we did not send there for a long time. You did the same. This is because Nehru did not want that Soviet and Chinese ambassadors were there. This should not come as a surprise - nothing else can be expected from Nehru. But this should not be a grounds for us for breaking off the relations.
Mao Zedong: We also support Nehru, but in the question of Tibet we should crush him.
N.S. Khrushchev: Why did you have to kill people on the border with India?
Mao Zedong: They attacked us first, crossed the border and continued firing for 12 hours.
Zhou Enlai: What data do you trust more, Indian or ours?
N.S. Khrushchev: Although the Hindus attacked first, nobody was killed among the Chinese, and only among the Hindus.
Zhou Enlai: But what we are supposed to do if they attack us first. We cannot fire in the air. The Hindus even crossed the McMahon line. Besides, in the nearest future [Indian] Vice President [Savrepalli] Radhakrishnan comes to China. This is to say that we are undertaking measures to resolve the issue peacefully, by negotiations. In my letter of 9 September to Nehru we provided detailed explanations of all that had occurred between India and us.
N.S. Khrushchev: Comrade Zhou Enlai. You have been Minister of Foreign Affairs of the PRC for many years and know better than me how one can resolve disputed issues without [spilling] blood. In this particular case I do not touch at all the issue of the border, for if the Chinese and the Hindus do not know where the borderline goes between them, it is not for me, a Russian, to meddle. I am only against the methods that have been used.
Zhou Enlai: We did not know until recently about the border incident, and local authorities undertook all the measures there, without authorization from the center. Besides, we are talking here about three disputed regions between China and India. The Hindus were the first to cross the McMahon line and were the first to open fire. No government of China ever recognized the McMahon line. If, for instance, the Finns attacked the borders of the USSR, wouldn't you retaliate?
M.A. Suslov: We do not have claims against the Finnish government.
N.S. Khrushchev: That the center knew nothing about the incident is news to me. I would tell you, what I was against. On 22 June 1941 Germans began their assault against the Soviet Union. Stalin forbade opening fire in response, and the instruction to open fire was sent only after some time. As Stalin explained, it might have been a provocation. Of course, it was Stalin's mistake. He simply got cold feet [on strusil]. But this case is absolutely different.
Zhu De: Hindus crossed the McMahon line that tears away 90 thousand square kilometers from China.
Chen Yi: After the revolt in Tibet there were several anti-Chinese, anti-communist campaigns in India. There were demonstrations against our Embassy in Dehli and the consulate in Calcutta; their participants reviled the leaders of the PRC and shouted anti-Chinese slogans. We did nothing like that, and the Indian Ambassador in the PRC had not the slightest pretext to claim [that we] were unfriendly.
N.S. Khrushchev: Our Soviet representatives abroad had much more fallen on them than yours. Since the establishment of our state not a few of Soviet ambassadors were killed abroad. And in the Soviet Union only a German ambassador was killed in 1918. True, at some point the windows in the embassies of the United States and Federal Republic of Germany were broken, but we organized it ourselves.
Chen Yi: Speaking of the effectiveness of efforts to pull Nehru to our side, our method will be more efficient, and yours is time-serving [opportunism- prisposoblenchestvo].
N.S. Khrushchev: Chen Yi is Minister of Foreign Affairs and he can weigh his words. He did not say it at random. We have existed for 42 years, and for 30 years we existed alone [as a socialist country] and adjusted to nothing, but carried out our principled communist policy.
Chen Yi (in great agitation and hastily): The Chinese people evoked pity for a long time and during many decades lived under oppression of British, American, French and other imperialists. The Soviet comrades should understand this. We are now undertaking certain measures to resolve the conflict with India peacefully, and just one fact testifies to this, that perhaps Vice President of India Radhakrishnan will come to us in mid-October. We also have a certain element of time-serving. You should understand our policy correctly. Our line is firmer and more correct.
N.S. Khrushchev: Look at this lefty. Watch it, comrade Chen Yi, if you turn left, you may end up going to the right. The oak is also firm, but it breaks. I believe that we should leave this issue aside, for we have a different understanding of it.
Zhou Enlai: Comrade Khrushchev, even the Hindus themselves do not know what and how it occurred on the Indo-Chinese border.
Lin Biao: During the war between the Soviet Union and Fascist Germany, the Soviet Army routed the fascists and entered Berlin. This does not mean that the Soviet Union began the war.
N.S. Khrushchev: It is not for me, a lieutenant-general, to teach you, comrade Marshal.
M.A. Suslov: Comrade Lin Biao, you are trying to compare incomparable things. During the Patriotic War millions of people were killed, and here is a trivial incident.
Zhou Enlai: The Hindus did not withdraw their troops from where they had penetrated. We seek peaceful resolution of the conflict and suggested and do suggest to resolve it piece by piece.
N.S. Khrushchev: We agree with all that you are doing. It is what you have done before that we disagree with.
Zhou Enlai: The Hindus conducted large-scale anti- Chinese propaganda for 40 years until this provocation. They were the first to cross the border; they were the first to open fire. Could one still consider under these circum- stances that we actually unleashed this incident?
N.S. Khrushchev: We are communists, and they are like Noah's Ark. You, comrade Zhou Enlai, understand it as well as I do.
M.A. Suslov: Noah's Ark in a sense that they have a pair of every creature.
Peng Zhen (in hasty agitation): Nasser has been abusing without reason the Soviet Union that delivers to him unconditional assistance. Here we should keep in mind the reactionary aspects of the national bourgeoisie. If you, Soviet comrades, can lash out at the national bourgeoisie, why we cannot do the same?
N.S. Khrushchev: Nobody says you cannot lash out - but shooting is not the same as criticism.
Peng Zhen: The McMahon line is a dirty line that was not recognized by any government in China.
N.S. Khrushchev: There are three of us here, and nine of you, and you keep repeating the same line. I think this is to no use. I only wanted to express our position. It is your business to accept it or not.
Mao Zedong: The border conflict with India - this is only a marginal border issue, not a clash between the two governments. Nehru himself is not aware what happened there. As we found out, their patrols crossed the McMahon line. We learned about this much later, after the incident took place. All this was known neither to Nehru, nor even to our military district in Tibet. When Nehru learned that their patrols had crossed the MacMahon line, he issued the instruction for them to withdraw. We also carried out the work towards peaceful resolution of the issue.
N.S. Khrushchev: If this had been done immediately after the skirmish, the conflict would not have taken place. Besides, you failed to inform us for a rather long time about the border incident.
Liu Shaoqi: On 6 September I informed you through comrade [Soviet charge d'affaires in Beijing Sergei F.] Antonov about the situation on the border. Earlier we could not inform you, since we still had not figured it out ourselves.
Zhou Enlai: The TASS announcement was published before you received my letter to Nehru. It was passed to comrade Antonov on the afternoon of 9 September.
M.A. Suslov: It was probably done simultaneously, considering that the time difference between Moscow and Beijing is 5 hours.
A.A. Gromyko: The ambassador of India in the USSR told me that the Chinese letter not only fails to make things calmer, but also actually throws everything back.
M.A. Suslov: At the present moment the temperature has fallen and we can let this issue alone.
Mao Zedong (peevishly). The temperature has fallen thanks to your announcement?
M.A. Suslov: Not only, but also thanks to the decision of your parliament.
Liu Shaoqi: On 6 September I passed a message to you via comrade Antonov that within a week [we] would deliver retaliation to the Hindus.
M.A. Suslov: The decision of your parliament was considerably softer than your Note.
Peng Zhen: The delegates of the All-Chinese Assembly of People's Deputies asked me how one should understand the TASS announcement, was it that the senior brother, without finding out what was right and who was wrong, gave a beating to the PRC and India.
Wang Ixia-Sang: But the first who began to fire were the Hindus, not us.
N.S. Khrushchev: Yes, they began to shoot and they themselves fell dead. Our duty is to share with you our considerations on the incident, for nobody besides us would tell you about it.
Zhou Enlai: There could be disputes and unresolved issues between the CCP and the CPSU, but for the outside consumption we always underline unity with the Soviet Union.
Lin Biao: The Hindus began to shoot first and they fired for 12 hours, until they spent all their ammunition. There could be a different approach to this issue, one might admit, but the facts are facts: 1) the Hindus were the first to cross the border; 2) the Hindus were the first to open fire; 3) the Hindus sustained fire during 12 hours. In this situation there might be two approaches to the issue: 1) the Hindus crossed the border and we have to beat retreat; 2) the Hindus cross the border and we offer a rebuff.
Mao Zedong: The rebuff was delivered on the decision of local military organs.
Lin Biao: There was no command from the top.
Mao Zedong: We could not keep the Dalai Lama, for the border with India is very extended and he could cross it at any point.
M.A. Suslov: You should have known in advance about his intentions and plots.
Mao Zedong: We wanted to delay the
transformation of Tibet by four years.
N.S. Khrushchev: And that was your mistake.
wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=library.document&id=14857<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Chinese economy to retain above 9% growth </b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> The Chinese economy is forecast to continue booming this year with 9.4 per cent growth before a slide in exports cools things down more significantly in 2006, state media reported on Friday.
In the latest report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), gross domestic product (GDP) growth this year was expected to fall only marginally from last year's 9.5 per cent.
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Day before yesterday they were showing on TV how China had built so many luxury building but majority of them are empty. There is an abject poverty in rural China. Force eviction, bankrupt banks, empty stock exchange building, they have all best technology installed in offices but they are empty etc.
They showed very grim situation of Chinese govt machinery.
<b>Defections reveal extent of China's espionage operations</b> <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->www.janes.com/security/in..._1_n.shtml
By John Hill
"China is the biggest [espionage] threat to the US today," David Szady, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) head of counterintelligence, told The Wall Street Journal on 10 August. It is a concern fuelled by a number of Chinese defectors in recent months who claim Beijing is engaged in large-scale intelligence-gathering operations overseas.
Chen Yonglin, the first secretary of the Chinese Consulate General in Sydney, Australia, defected on 4 June. Chen told Australian authorities that Beijing had been overseeing a network of more than 1,000 spies and informers in Australia. These claims were mirrored in Canada in July when Han Guansheng, a former Public Security Bureau official in Shenyang who defected to Canada in 2001, stated publicly that Beijing manages informants in Canada's Chinese community and gathers intelligence on key economic areas.
A second defector in Australia, believed to be a low-level intelligence official named Hao Fengjing, who came over to the Australians shortly after Chen, confirmed that China has more spies in Canada than in any other country. The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) will not comment on individual nations' intelligence activities, but CSIS officials told JIR: "Foreign countries who send students and visiting scientists often use them to obtain proprietary or classified information in Canada."
Europe is also said to be subject to China's scrutiny. The UK's Daily Telegraph reported in July that a Chinese intelligence defector in Belgium who had worked in European universities and companies for more than a decade, has given the Belgian security service (Sûreté de l'Etat) detailed information on hundreds of Chinese spies working at various levels of European industry. A British intelligence source told JIR that the two countries with the biggest intelligence operations in the UK were Russia and China. Whether this anecdotal evidence represents an increase in Chinese intelligence activity or just business as usual is a moot point. June Teufel Dreyer, a member of the US Congress's US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told JIR: "My guess is that the Chinese do not spy any more now than they did, say, 20 years ago. But they are getting better at it. Unfortunately, we are not getting better at counterspy activities." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>ARE WE GETTING AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF CHINA</b>? -Guest Column by Hari Sud
I agree with Hari Sud. Its all hype and coverup. West is waiting for sudden collaspse of Chinese economy.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>What goes Wrong When the Statistics are Created</b>
According to Florence Chan, the statistics making in China is a five-grade affair. It begins in the village, moves to the city, onwards to the province and then to the country and then to the State Committee. At each level, data is fudged or rounded upwards to look good. Remember, China is still a Communist country; any failure is punishable. Hence everybody has to report good statistics. Interesting feature of data generation is that if the state or central committee sets up a target of 8% growth or increase, the village level or the city level must report a percentage or two higher. Lower or equal report will not look good. The national level data gathering bureaucrats are fully aware of this fudging. They are under the same pressure as state or city level; hence faithfully use the modern techniques of computers and analysis to report the faulty data. The latter becomes a gospel in the West.
<b>What do Smart people in the West rely upon?</b>
Window dressing by the Chinese has turned many of the China watchers off. They immediately take a percentage or two out of the reported statistics or rely upon their own devices to reach their own conclusions. Professor Rawski uses secondary sources to reach his own conclusions. These include airline occupancy rate, little known Chinese trade journals (not directly connected to the great official statistics-gathering machine in Peking), or other means like true investments in China (UNTAD data), import statistics not from China but from the exporting country, eliminating double accounting at city, state or village level or simply checking whether they have reported in metric tones or other weight measures. Each of these will have a dramatic impact on the net GDP calculated. Impact of all these corrections will lower the Chinese GDP over twenty years by well over 20 to 30%. This re-calculation will be a great blow to the Chinese elite now ruling and the country. It will bring the sky rocketing prestige of Chinaâs economic progress to a more earthly level. If you take 20% off the $1.3 Trillion Chinese GDP reported it would be about a Trillion dollar and <b>Chinese per capita income at about $800. That is a more realistic number (comparable statistics for India are: GDP of $690 Billion and a per capita income of about $690).</b>
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http://www.centurychina.com/plaboard/upl...962war.htm
In September 1951, the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai, proposed to the Indian ambassador to stabilize the Tibetan frontier through discussions between India, China and Nepal, confirming that China had decided to accept the McMahon Line as India�s northwest boundary. But India passed the opportunity to formalize the McMahon Line. In July 1952, when China proposed to settle "pending problems" related to commercial intercourse and trade in Tibet, the boundary question was not raised.
There was doubt in India about the decision not to raise the boundary questions with China. But it was decided that McMahon Line might be the "scars left by Britain in the course of her aggression against China" and that to "seek to heal or ease this scar" was not in the liking or interest of India. The Indian government was fully aware that China, "never having accepted � as the frontier between Tibet and us," would not regard the McMahon Line as the settled boundary. They decided to treat the Line as the boundary and leave it for China to either agree or ignore the statement. In 1954, when the Indian delegation went to negotiate trade and intercourse in Tibet, they even went out of their way to avoid the subject.
The agreement stated the famous "Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence," or "Panch Sheel" as Indians called them, the first of which was "mutual respect for each other�s territorial integrity and sovereignty." China�s sovereignty in Tibet was unequivocally recognized, and the British attempts and latter Indian attempts to treat Tibet as independent were formally buried. India formed a crucial China policy that India would make clear and treat what India regarded as proper boundary, leaving it to China to protest, and then "refuse to reopen the question." Based on the first principal of the Panch Sheel, China would have not choice but to accept the boundary.
It was understood, based on Chinese acquiescence in the 1951 Indian takeover of Tawang, that China was going to accept the McMahon Line. The decision not to renegotiate transformed a boundary problem into a dispute, which then progressed into a border war. China maintained that parts of the boundaries were undetermined and to be negotiated. Indians held that the boundaries were already determined and decided to establish checkposts all along them.
China upgrades Multirole fighters jointly with TSP. This I suppose is a counter to the LCA.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->From DefenceTalk.com
Military Aviation
JF-17 Sino-Pakistani Fighter Improved
By Janes Defence Weekly
URL of this article: http://www.defencetalk.com/news/publish/...r_4365.php
Tue, 6 Dec 2005, 00:17
The joint Sino-Pakistani FC-1/JF-17 light multirole fighter aircraft has undergone a major redesign, including changes to its air intakes as well as the wing-fuselage join and rear fuselage section. The fourth prototype with the modifications has completed three months of trials.
The Chengdu FC-1, which will also be manufactured by the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC) as the JF-17, is an export-orientated programme under joint development by the two countries. The fourth prototype (TP4) with new features is well into its test programme while a fifth aircraft is being used for static testing (along with the second prototype).
The PAC is establishing its own facility to build the aircraft and has been importing specialist machine tools from suppliers in Sweden, and elsewhere, to set up a better production line than the one already established at Chengdu. Work on the first PAC aircraft is expected to begin in 2006.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>THE COSTS OF CHINAâS MODERNIZATION</b> By Wenran Jiang
In a rare disclosure of the enormous hidden cost of Chinaâs rapid economic development, the Chinese government acknowledged last week that âsudden public incidentsâ such as industrial accidents, social safety accidents, and natural disasters are responsible for over one million casualties and the loss of six percent of GDP every year. Shocked by the recent explosion of a major petrochemical plant in Northeast China that caused large-scale pollution to the Songhua River and cut off water to over 10 million people for a week, and a series of large coalmine accidents, China is now debating not only how the system can better respond to disasters but also if the current development paradigm can be sustained.
<b>Costs Too Dear to Bear</b>
According to a recently Peopleâs Daily online special, over 5 million âpublic accidentsâ occurred in 2004 alone, causing the death of 210,000 people, injuring another 1.75 million, and resulting in the immediate economic loss of over USD $57 billion (455 billion Chinese yuan). It is estimated that the direct annual cost of such disasters for China is more than USD $81 billion (650 billion yuan) on average, equal to six percent of the countryâs annual GDP. To state the obvious: most of Chinaâs economic growth each year is simply cancelled out by the immediate sacrifice of human lives and long-term damage to the environment.
China is no doubt one of the countries in the world that is seriously affected by natural disasters, which are large in volume, high in frequency, and severe in losses. The lives of more than 200 million people, or one-seventh of the Chinese population, are routinely disrupted by natural disturbances. Seventy percent of Chinaâs major citiesâmore than one-half of the Chinese population and more than 75 percent of Chinaâs GDPâare spread across the eastern part of the country where climate, water, and earthquake disasters cause considerable damage.
Yet, losses due to natural disasters seem to be a small portion of the total, with government figures showing just over USD $12.5 billion (100 billion yuan) per year. That means financial losses of some USD $69 billion (550 billion yuan) every year are caused not by natural events but by human-generated accidents. Take the coalmine sector for example: China has the worst safety record in the world. From 2001 to 2004, according to the official Xinhuanet, accidents in Chinaâs coalmines claimed 6,282 lives every year on averageâthat is more than 17 people dead every day from accidents alone. More than 50 incidents occurred each year, with each accident resulting in more than 10 deaths; in the past three years, five major coalmine accidents have each claimed more than 100 minersâ lives. Moreover, a BBC report (July 17) estimates that the real death toll per year may be close to 20,000 because many mine operators intentionally cover up the death numbers to evade responsibility.
Worse yet, Chinaâs work safety authorities predict that for the foreseeable future China faces a severe challenge as more catastrophic accidents occur because the countryâs industrialization process has entered a high-growth and high-accident phase.
<b>Responsibilities Nobody Dares to Bear</b>
Chinaâs economic development is based on an industrial structure that demands heavy resource and energy consumption, with coal comprising close to 70 percent of Chinaâs total energy needs. With Chinaâs shortage of energy and increasing oil prices, the price of coal in the domestic market is also on the rise, which has resulted in a new boom for the coal mining industry. While large-scale industrial efforts are bound to bring a higher number of industrial accidents, the old, heavy industrial infrastructure, built in the early decades of Chinaâs industrialization, has begun to age, and with little repair or renewal has become ripe for further accidents.
Yet tracking down who is responsible for taking precautions to prevent accidentsâand for taking measures to deal with disasters once they occurâis a frustrating process. This is fully illustrated by the toxic contamination of the Songhua River last month. The Jilin provincial authorities, overwhelmed by the initial chemical plant explosion on November 13, which released large quantities of chemicals into the air and benzene into the nearby Songhua River, were slow in making initial assessments of the scale of the pollution. They then had to file their findings all the way up to the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) because local authorities are not permitted to take any action or to make any public announcement without central approval on accidents of such scale. Jilin province was at the outset instructed to cover up the pollution, and not to inform tens-of-thousands of people along the river of what had happened, including the neighboring province of Heilongjiang and Russia, both downstream from the plant.
When it was clear that the scale of the pollution was too extensive to hide, Heilongjiang was informed that an 80-kilometer long slick of polluted river was on its way to Harbin, a city of 9 million residents. Then it was Heilongjiangâs turn to report up the chain to SEPA for instructions. The Harbin government was told to find an excuse to shut down the cityâs water supply. Only when Premier Wen Jiabao personally intervened, according to those who are familiar with the government response to the event, did the Harbin authorities tell the truth to the public. Although Harbin narrowly escaped a poisonous disaster, every other city downstream on both the Chinese and Russian sides of the border struggled to cope with the approaching pollutants. After defending its role as the leading agency that handled the initial cover-up, the head of SEPA resigned (Xinhua, December 2). Some have given credit to the effective mobilization that the government launched to save the urban residents. Yet the failure of the first-stage warning system has serious consequences: rural residents who were not informed on time may have drunk from the river, and the long-term ecological impact is yet to be fully estimated.
To blame the system is not enough. Evidence has shown that many of the âpublic accidentsâ were in fact human errors that could have been avoided. Last week, just after the water supply had been restored to Harbin residents, a large explosion in a nearby coal mine killed 169 workers. The investigation into this accident reveals that the leadership of the state-operated mining group simply failed to follow basic work safety procedures. In the pursuit of higher production volumes and profits, the managers ignored the increased levels of danger indicated by the detection system, and carried on with operations. When the explosion happened, no one could tell exactly how many miners were trapped underground because the work-shift record was so confusing that there was a 30-person discrepancy between the names on the record and the actual people who went down the mine for their shift. Nor did the leaders of the mine have any knowledge of the recent government documents that call for nationwide coalmine safety upgrades. <b>Rather than put people first and follow the necessary safety procedures, many of Chinaâs industrial enterprises appear only focused on increasing their cash earnings.</b>
<b>Burden of Reforms that China Must Bear</b>
It is uncertain if the recent crises will produce the necessary impetus for reform. There are indications, however, of a changing public mood in China. Citizens who suspect that the government lied to them are demanding transparency and accountability from the government in the latest ecological and mine tragedies. Encouraged by Premier Wenâs intervention in the Songhua pollution case, the Chinese press, which has been on a tight leash in recent months, has taken the opportunity to launch an aggressive campaign of its own to report and investigate the truth behind the growing number of accidents and disasters. <b>Many have now given serious consideration to the thought that, given the enormous costs, Chinaâs obsession with high GDP numbers in the past 25 years cannot be sustained in the future.</b>
Yet Chinaâs infrastructure for disaster response is very weak. First, a lack of legislation that deals with different kinds of accidents and disasters has led to an unclear division of labor among different levels of government and different regions. Second, the flow of crisis information management has fatal flaws. The current system of reporting through vertical ministry/agency chains is too small to handle large volumes of information, slow to transmit information and decisions, and ineffective in meeting rapid response requirements.
<b>Third, in recent years, Chinaâs social welfare system is collapsing while a primitive form of capitalism is taking over in the market place. According to Chinaâs labor and welfare protection authorities, among the more than 700 million employees nationwide, only 124 million people have medical insurance; 45 percent of the urban population and 80 percent of the rural population do not have any form of medical coverage and must pay from their own pockets for any medical treatment.</b> The government has not invested in the education system for disaster prevention and related education. China is far behind other advanced industrialized countries in societal readiness to deal with large-scale disasters.
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen have repeatedly told the world that being âclose to the peopleâ is a top priority in their administration. If a human-centered approach for constructing a "harmonious society" is to take root in Beijingâs overall modernization strategy, China must reconsider the human and ecological costs of its drive for great power status. Yet, if the Chinese leadership fails to translate the latest setbacks into much-needed political reforms that include more press freedom to monitor government activities, future disasters and their fallouts may come at a scale in which the regime is unable to cope.
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There is only so much you can progress by paying your people slave labor wages and the ever present threat of the 'danda'. Also there are reports that most of the Chinese big industries are funded by grants from the State tresury and the capital+interest repayment schedule is hoary at best. Any good articles on industrial and trade finances on china are eagerly awaited.
A little note on my previous post - the JI (Jian) series of multirole fighters are nothing more than refurbished and dolled up Mig 21s. Maybe we shall start seeing a lot of dead Paki pilots soon enough.
12-09-2005, 12:53 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-09-2005, 12:55 AM by rhytha.)
i heard one of my clients say that if have a contract from a buyer from US/Europe for manfacturing a product, example a bullet proof vest, the chinese gov. will give loan for the equipment based on the written contract, heavily subsidised power, land( for the factory if the need arises), labour.
He also said that the chinese work for long hours because they have very small 1 bed room apartments/houses so there nothing much you can do after going there, so stay and work atleast, i don't know if this true. Even big families stay in a 1 room apartments.
Also workers from outside city like villages conditions are well he said you can compare them with jail inmates, work from morning to evening, stay in a big dormitory, only sundays holiday etc.
i don't know if the above are true, but the guy has visited china.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->He also said that the chinese work for long hours because they have very small 1 bed room apartments/houses so there nothing much you can do after going there, so stay and work atleast, i don't know if this true. Even big families stay in a 1 room apartments.
Also workers from outside city like villages conditions are well he said you can compare them with jail inmates, work from morning to evening, stay in a big dormitory, only sundays holiday etc.
i don't know if the above are true, but the guy has visited china. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Itâs true.
When I was working in Singapore, Around 15 Chinese joined our project for short duration. They never hesitated working long hours or even sleeping under desk. They were very happy to see separate bathroom in home. According to them in China 6-7 families share bathroom, live in tiny house, they can't use electricity after 8 pm. Forced one child policy. They take afternoon nap in work place.
But conditions are improving for some who are either educated or doing business. Cities are doing much better but rural area is still quite behind.
Even when tourist or businesses visit China they are restricted to some limited area. Real china is hidden even now.
Kaushal had visited China recently and very impressed by Chinese progress, he can shed some light.
<b>The Prime Minister of India told the media on board Air India One on way to Kuala Lumpur on 11 Dec 05 that India and China are not competing against each other .He also stated that the border talks and trade talks are progressing in the right direction.
In fact the Western media often makes the remark that India and China are competitors and as such they may clash and it may lead to security problem in Asia. They also speculate that USA is taking more interest in India of late so that it can use India to counter the growing influence of China in the world. With regard to India and China being in a collusion course, it appears to be a journalistic hallucination to create some story. The growing trade and other economic ties between the two Asian nations is the testimony of the closeness with which both are operating. These two oldest civilizations have lived in peace for more than 2500 years except for a 20 day border war in 1962. So there is no reason to believe that they cannot co exists peacefully.
With regard to the renewed US interest in higher level of interaction with India, particularly in strategic and other matters, there are several reasons. The first is that India is a democracy and it is also emerging as a big market for US products. It being a country with substantial number of English speaking people is much easier to operate in and the legal and other systems are more westernized, being modeled on British system. Secondly, the US finds that the two million strong Indian presences in the USA is making a valuable contribution to the US economy and it is safe to do business with familiar faces.</b>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Beware of the dragon Brahma Chellaney</b>
A weakness of almost every Indian prime minister has been to portray any major foreign visit as path setting. No Indian leader usually wishes to return home to domestic problems without having signed a 'momentous' agreement or having achieved some other
'success' overseas. With a planeload of officials and media representatives in tow, it is easy for the PM to embellish the outcome of his tour.
Some major powers seek to consciously play to this Indian weak spot. They know that when an Indian PM comes calling, it is time to win concessions in the garb of opening a new chapter in bilateral ties. No power has done this better than China.
The previous two Indian PMs who went to China after India restored full diplomatic ties with that country returned home claiming to have signed a 'historic' agreement. But if there was anything historic about the agreements signed by Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 and P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1993, it was the extent of Indian diplomatic naïveté.
Senior-level border negotiations had been going on since 1981, but to contrive a breakthrough during Rajiv Gandhi's visit, the mechanism of talks was reclassified as a Joint Working Group, although there was nothing new or joint about it. The officially instilled elation in India about the 'success' of Rajiv Gandhi's trip came handy to Beijing to begin covertly transferring the first missile systems to Pakistan. The Chinese construction of the plutonium-producing Khushab reactor in Pakistan also began in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi's 'success'.
More success professedly came India's way when Narasimha Rao signed an agreement with Beijing to maintain "peace and tranquillity" along the Line of Actual Control, a line that the Chinese had refused to define, let alone delineate, as a way to maintain military pressure on India and pin down large numbers of Indian troops along the Himalayas. A follow-up accord three years later farcically prohibited certain military activities at specific distances from a line that remains largely undefined and illusory.
The 1988 and 1993 accords supremely suited Beijing's strategy of seeking to change Indian perceptions about China without conceding any ground to New Delhi and yet continuing to quietly contain India. The result was that with the Indians lulled by the 'peace' overtures, the Chinese opened a new flank against India by setting up eavesdropping and naval facilities along the Burmese coastline. Today the Chinese are building a naval base at Gwadar, Pakistan, and working to swamp Indian interests in the Maldives. The Chinese navy is positioning itself along sea-lanes vital to Indian security and economy.
For the old apparatchiks who constitute the new leadership in Beijing, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's impending visit to China is an opportunity to further Chinese interests. They believe that Vajpayee wants to show success at least on the China front because of the little headway he has made with his initiatives with Pakistan since Lahore and the slow progress on building an Indo-U.S. strategic partnership, which was to be the centrepiece of his foreign policy.
So the Chinese have intensified their now-familiar 'peace' spiel. That this lingo represents only clichéd ad lines to sell something less innocuous is apparent from what they have conveyed to Indian officials for ensuring a major 'breakthrough' during Vajpayee's visit - India abandoning some of the cardinal principles on which its bipartisan policy towards China is built. Having watched Vajpayee's policy pendulum swing from one end to the other on Pakistan, Beijing believes it could use his yearning for a successful visit to alter the fundamentals of India's China policy. It is dead wrong in its calculations.
If anything, the Chinese are providing valuable training to Indians on how to talk peace but aggressively pursue national interests. Clearly, the Chinese want peace with containment, a win-win posture that permits them to maintain direct strategic pressure and mount stepped-up surrogate threats.
A question that has not been answered, however, is why Vajpayee is going to China now. His decision to visit at a time when foreigners are shunning China because of the SARS epidemic may be read by his hosts as confirmation that he is desperate to score some foreign-policy success. More broadly, the visit is part of a pattern of diplomatic zealousness that has seen India making all the first moves and first visits since Mao's death.
As if India had to pay obeisance to the self-perceived Middle Kingdom, the first visits at the president, prime minister and foreign minister level were by Indians. In fact, Vajpayee has the dubious record of ignoring warnings of Chinese designs and making the first foreign minister-level visit in 1979, and then cutting short his tour after China attacked Vietnam for the same admitted reason it invaded India in 1962 - "to teach a lesson".
Vajpayee may be seeking to live down that record. But while China took almost a decade to reciprocate Narasimha Rao's visit, Vajpayee is going to China close on the heels of then-Premier Zhu Rongji's 2002 India visit. In time-related reciprocal order, not Vajpayee but new President Hu Jintao should be paying a visit.
A consequence of the zealousness is that instead of an Indian prime ministerial visit being a response to distinct signals of a positive shift in Chinese policy towards India, the bargaining has focused on what could be showcased during Vajpayee's tour.
So far China's Leninist rulers have shown little sign of revising their basic approach towards India.
Despite 22 years of continuous border negotiations-the longest between any two states in modern history - India is the only country with which China has not settled its land frontiers or even fully defined a line of control. After being shamed into exchanging maps with India showing each other's military positions in the largely undisputed middle sector, the Chinese have reneged on their promise to swap similar maps of the western sector, deadlocking the negotiations again. China has now deliberately injected confusion by suggesting that instead of defining the LAC, the two sides agree during Vajpayee's visit to seek an overall border settlement through a package deal. This is clearly a clever ploy: If the Chinese are not willing to even define the LAC, why would they be willing to resolve the border problem through a package settlement?
Contrary to repeated Chinese pledges to honour international norms, the flow of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) technology to Pakistan continues, even if at a lower level. Some Chinese missile items have been routed through North Korea to Pakistan.
There is increased Chinese military activity in Tibet and Myanmar directed at India. China is also expanding its strategic interests in Nepal and funding anti-India activity there. Due to mounting Chinese pressure, Nepal ignored UN and Western protests and for the first time ever deported 18 new refugees from Tibet on May 31, setting a precedent that could cut off the main route for Tibetans trying to reach India.
The continuing Chinese cartographic hostility towards India is reflected in official maps that show Sikkim as independent, Arunachal Pradesh as part of China, and Jammu and Kashmir as disputed (but not the J&K parts occupied by China and Pakistan). Now the Chinese are saying they might be willing to accept the reality on Sikkim but only if the Indians grant them a major concession - the opening up of the Sikkim-Tibet land trade route, which China had used in 1962 to supply its troops invading India. Why should India bargain over China's acceptance of a reality recognised by all other nations?
In the nearly 54 years since the communists seized power in Beijing, no nation has undermined India's interests more than China. The Chinese Communist Party and its institutions, particularly the PLA, remain implacably antagonistic towards India. Without the collapse of the anachronistic Chinese political system, it is unlikely that China would become a benign neighbour of India. That collapse in a country buffeted by rapid changes could happen sooner than many expect.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Rural riots and denial in China</b>
The American Thinker, February 9
Our contributor Brian Schwarz highlights in his blog China Challenges the deep denial of Chinese authorities about the escalating domestic unrest they face.
<b>Last month, Beijing reported that the number of disturbances to public order rose 6.6 per cent last year to 87,000. According to the SCMP, it seems some officials are still in deep denial over the massive problems in the countryside. Vivian Cui writes:</b>
Mainland police have played down the growing wave of social unrest sweeping the country, describing it as a phase common to fast-growing economies worldwide. Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping said in Beijing yesterday that the rural riot was âa concept that does not existâ.
âIn the phase [of fast economic development], the interests, relations and positions of different parts [of society] are undergoing adjustment. In the process of adjusting, there will accordingly be an increase in [the number of] common people who, in order to defend their own interests, express their pleas to government and relevant departments through various channels,â Mr Wu said.
Somehow I must have missed the wave of riots which accompanied Japanâs period of rapid economic growth in the 1960s. Sure, there were demonstrations over political issues and student issues, but nothing comparable to the violent unrest roiling China.
Thomas Lifson 2 08 06 <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Caught in a pincer</b>
India is ringed by hostile neighbours, who hope to bleed and balkanise it.
By Gautam Sen
India is encountering a geopolitical pincer movement to corner it, prior to its eventual liquidation as a significant political entity. The principal instigator of this pincer movement is China, which has already garlanded India with a ring of hostile countries, itching to see it prostrate. The garland of thorns surrounding India begins with Bangladesh, Burma and Nepal and ends with the bleeding dagger of Pakistan already thrust deep into India's body politic. Nepal's unabashed participation in this campaign has been held back by India's economic stranglehold over it, but its dominant elites are more than anxious to plunge a dagger of their own into India's heart. Where Sri Lanka will fit into this equation barely requires much imagination, despite the apparent current honeymoon, because the Sinhalese have long harboured iridescent contempt for India...
<i>Dr Gautam Sen formerly taught at the London School of Economics & Political Science.</i>
Read on at: http://www.indiareacts.com/columns/full_column11a.htm <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Caught in a pincer
Return to Part I
A huge number of people have a stake in ensuring an overbearing role for the government in running the Indian economy. The government is the central platform for the destructive re-distributive struggle that has seized India, overshadowing the primary goal of productive effort. Everyone seeks a piece of the ill-gotten revenue pie and has an imaginative argument to buttress their claim. And ministerial office itself seems to mean that nothing has to ever be paid for again and every urgent necessity entails a trip abroad, preferably with oneâs entire family in tow. One calculation suggests that half of Indiaâs entire middle class is directly or indirectly dependent on the government for their incomes. Gratifyingly for them, government jobs, whether in administration, medicine, teaching and much else besides, are political rewards and very little actual work is required of the privileged few lucky enough to have them. In some leading teaching institutions in the national capital staff appear once a month only to collect their salaries.
Unsurprisingly, in such a corrupt system, much public investment is simply a circuitous route for embezzlement, since contractors, politicians and bureaucrats conspire to siphon off as much as possible. The ostensible intended work itself is the least of their concerns. The immediate damage is through direct theft, but private producers also suffer huge productivity losses because they need efficient services like transportation, energy, etc, in order to operate themselves. This is why the failure to expand employment in the organised sector is the unavoidable corollary of the mafia trade union politics of India, supported by all major political parties, which nurture their respective labour wings. This minuscule group of blackmailers and extortionists has made it extremely unattractive for prospective employers to hire labour because being held to ransom by trade unions is the norm. Only informal employment has grown in India in the past decade while employment in the formal sector has actually shrunk. But the Left is always present to ensure that the jobs of their work-shy members are protected at all costs.
The incumbent prime ministerâs powerlessness in the face of rampant deceit and unashamed criminality within his own Union cabinet, with a succession of indicted ministerial colleagues forcibly ejected, is a harbinger of the shape of things to come. The writing is clearly on the wall since the functioning of most state governments has merely become a sublimated cover for illegality. In the grimly self-destructive pursuit of money and power political life in India has been reduced to unadulterated entrepreneurial activity that stops at nothing. Such is the cynical depth of this phenomenon that one sighs in silent relief when an accused legislator or parliamentarian is only alleged to be involved in kidnapping and armed robbery rather than multiple homicide.
In some regions the pretence of serving the public interest has been replaced by out-and-out criminality. A shocking calculation suggests that legislators accused of criminal activities in UP, belonging to all political parties, could form a government of their own, since they have enjoyed an absolute majority in the state assembly for some time. Not only are state legislatures and the national parliament itself teeming with felons, chief ministers of many states are also engaged in blatant criminal activity. Recently, a chief minister vitiated all precepts of justice and morality by instigating the illegal arrest of religious leaders, who define the very nature of Indian civilisation. An ally of the same state government is also ruthlessly harassing a business rival for making innocuous statements on safe sex by wilfully misusing a fully complicit judiciary.
The persistence of any public purpose in governance is not so much fortuitous as merely the final vestiges of a dwindling historic idealism. It survives by virtue of a degree of inertia, the prior dominance of the better educated and the integrity of selection procedures for higher administrative jobs, preventing outright collapse. But the arrangements barely survive. The bureaucrat, who may have once idealistically sought to further the public interest, has increasingly joined hands with his political masters to pursue corrupt enrichment. The capital city itself is in the thrall of political goons in hock to criminals, collectively engaged in a feeding frenzy of theft and extortion. The recent attempt to impugn an uncharacteristically honest municipal chief executive, who forlornly sought to inject a modicum of transparency, was launched jointly by government and Opposition legislative members. Amazingly, it went virtually unnoticed and he is now being put out to pasture.
The political class as a whole, both government and Opposition, hoodwinks the electorate by engaging in make-believe public jousts. In fact, they co-operate with each other behind the scenes against the public interest. Occasionally, an unfortunate individual may succumb in the course of such contrived displays of public divergences, but the political class usually ensures its own collective survival by looking after each other. Thus, governments in power rarely go in for the kill against the Opposition, confident that they too will receive due consideration from them when they happen to form the government. A catalogue of the mutual courtesies between political parties in recent history, while they strive to fabricate the impression of earnest and high-minded conflicts, is a salutary reminder that political entrepreneurs are not about to commit suicide by fighting each other to death. They have too much to gain by co-operating discreetly in order to secure their extremely profitable joint future robbing a credulous public.
It is also clear that ISI terrorists like Dawood Ibrahim and his associates were financing major political parties within India and businesses in various parts of the country. This gives the lie to expressions of serious intention by the Indian government in demanding Dawoodâs extradition from Pakistan. In fact, one senior Maharashtra politician was seen in the company of Dawood in the VIP lounge of Mumbaiâs international airport at a time when he was supposedly a fugitive from the law, accused of mass murder. But what are a few hundred dead bodies and national honour to Indian politicians and their bureaucratic co-conspirators when both can be bartered for hard cash? The lethal pincer has bitten deep indeed into the entrails of India.
Concluded
Dr Gautam Sen formerly taught at the London School of Economics & Political Science.
<b>Dr Sen's article is an excellent analysis of the present state of affairs in India. There is no denying of the fact that the compulsions of coalition politics and the vested interest within the bureaucracy both are great impediment in the path of economic liberalization. The political agitations on the privatization of the two airports and the subsequent political fall out are the latest examples of this impediment.
We the people of India are responsible for this sorry state of affairs. There is an urgent need to review our political system and bring necessary reforms so that the persons elected by us and are entrusted with the task of speeding up the socio economic development of the nation do have sufficient knowledge and foresight to carry out this gigantic task.</b>
<b>''China's Strategy of Containing India''</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->............
Furthermore, China is not only opposing India's N.S.G. membership but is also trying to prevent the India-U.S. nuclear deal by presenting itself as the champion of nuclear non-proliferation. With Beijing aggressively and openly joining the voices against the nuclear pact, New Delhi's quest for nuclear technology is turning knottier by the day. From Beijing's perspective, if India and the U.S. start drifting apart over the collapse of the nuclear deal, it will further contribute to China's strategy to isolate and concircle India.
<b>Conclusion</b>
All of these negative developments indicate that India's so-called "healthy competition with China" is becoming one of rivalry. In fact, China's behavior toward India is not much different from that of the U.S.' behavior toward China for the simple reason that China is a status-quo power with respect to India while the U.S. is a status-quo power with regards to China<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Saturday, March 04, 2006 E-Mail this article to a friend Printer Friendly Version
US neglecting Australia and Asia: Armitage
SYDNEY: The United States has neglected Asia and Australia since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took office, former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage told an Australian newspaper Friday.
In an interview in Washington, Armitage told The Australian newspaper that Rice had placed too much emphasis on other parts of the world and not enough on the Asia Pacific region.
In more than a year in the job, Rice has visited 59 countries but only one in Southeast Asia, Thailand, and that for less than 24 hours, the paper said. Armitage, deputy secretary of state to Colin Powell during President George W. Bushâs first term, said that Rice had also made a âgross errorâ by skipping the Association of South East Asian Nations forum in Malaysia in December. Asked whether he agreed that Rice had placed too much focus on events across the Atlantic and not enough in the Pacific, Armitage said: âYes, I would.â He criticised Rice, who is due here later this month for security talks also including Japan, for twice cancelling visits to Australia.âTwice failing to travel to Australia after scheduling to do it - combined with the fact in Australia we donât even have an ambassador - leads me to the conclusion that we have been distracted,â he said.
The post of US ambassador to Australia has been vacant for more than a year. âI would be apoplectic if I was still in the Department of State that this had happened,â Armitage, who runs his own consultancy firm, said. âIt kind of shows a more lackadaisical attitude than I think is warranted because we do have a close relationship.â Armitage said Rice needed to go to Australia âso she can hear from both Japan through Foreign Minister (Taro) Aso and from (Foreign Minister) Alexander (Downer) about just exactly whatâs going on and how the region is changing.â afp
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