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News » Politics » Japanese media weigh up Chinese drill in East China Sea

Japanese media weigh up Chinese drill in East China Sea

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 05:06 AM PDT

A military exercise conducted by China's navy, fishing administration and marine surveillance agencies on Friday has been viewed by Japan as a warning amid heightened tensions between the two countrie...

Master Kong noodles in hot water amid Diaoyutai dispute

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:54 AM PDT

Master Kong, a leading instant noodle and beverage brand in China, has become the latest target of anti-Japanese sentiment on account of the territorial dispute between the two countries. While most ...

Police in China bust online network selling guns and ammo

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:42 AM PDT

Chinese police have busted a widespresad netowrk selling guns and ammunition online, according to an announcement by the country's Ministry of Public Security on Thursday. Under the direct command of...

Former diplomat makes case for Taiwan's sovereignty over Diaoyutais

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:38 AM PDT

Stephen Chen, a former Taiwan representative to the United States, defended the Republic of China's claim to the Diaoyutai islands in the East China Sea by offering a history lesson at a seminar in Wa...

Petition demands redress for wrongful execution of Taiwan airman

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:38 AM PDT

The Judicial Reform Foundation, a Taiwanese NGO, presented a petition of 12,506 signatures to the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office on Thursday demanding that former defense minister Chen Chao-min and fi...

China's business climate index falls in Q3

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:34 AM PDT

China's business climate index, a major gauge of the country's macroeconomic outlook, continued to fall in the third quarter, according to a latest survey. The quarterly index dropped to 122.8, 4.1 p...

The Real Romney released in Chinese edition

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:26 AM PDT

A Chinese version of the book The Real Romney about the US Republican presidential challenger was launched Thursday in Beijing. The biography was published by the China Democratic and Legal System Pu...

Handmade goods draw attention to Taiwan's declining industries

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:06 AM PDT

A company that specializes in handmade products made with materials from Taiwan's declining industries showcased some unique soap at the Taiwan International Cultural and Creative Industry Expo on Thu...

Taiwan-France electric vehicle seminar opens in Taipei

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:06 AM PDT

A Taiwan-France forum on the electric vehicle sector opened in Taipei on Thursday, attracting hundreds of experts and industry representatives from the two countries. The Taiwan-France Automotive Ind...

Big potential for Chinese investment in Taiwan: scholars

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:06 AM PDT

Taiwan's further opening to Chinese investment has huge economic potential as long as it includes new complementary measures, scholars said Thursday. Liu Da-nien, director of the Regional Development...

Labor insurance system will not go bust: Taiwan premier

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 04:06 AM PDT

Taiwan's premier, Sean Chen, said Thursday the country's Labor Insurance Fund will not go bankrupt and there is no need for workers to panic or rush to apply for their benefits. The fund stands at NT...

The end of the New World Order | Seumas Milne

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 10:21 AM PDT

The upheavals of the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow

In the late summer of 2008, two events in quick succession signalled the end of the New World Order. In August, the US client state of Georgia was crushed in a brief but bloody war after it attacked Russian troops in the contested territory of South Ossetia.

The former Soviet republic was a favourite of Washington's neoconservatives. Its authoritarian president had been lobbying hard for Georgia to join Nato's eastward expansion. In an unblinking inversion of reality, US vice-president Dick Cheney denounced Russia's response as an act of "aggression" that "must not go unanswered". Fresh from unleashing a catastrophic war on Iraq, George Bush declared Russia's "invasion of a sovereign state" to be "unacceptable in the 21st century".

As the fighting ended, Bush warned Russia not to recognise South Ossetia's independence. Russia did exactly that, while US warships were reduced to sailing around the Black Sea. The conflict marked an international turning point. The US's bluff had been called, its military sway undermined by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. After two decades during which it bestrode the world like a colossus, the years of uncontested US power were over.

Three weeks later, a second, still more far-reaching event threatened the heart of the US-dominated global financial system. On 15 September, the credit crisis finally erupted in the collapse of America's fourth-largest investment bank. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers engulfed the western world in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.

The first decade of the 21st century shook the international order, turning the received wisdom of the global elites on its head – and 2008 was its watershed. With the end of the cold war, the great political and economic questions had all been settled, we were told. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to history. Political controversy would now be confined to culture wars and tax-and-spend trade-offs.

In 1990, George Bush Senior had inaugurated a New World Order, based on uncontested US military supremacy and western economic dominance. This was to be a unipolar world without rivals. Regional powers would bend the knee to the new worldwide imperium. History itself, it was said, had come to an end.

But between the attack on the Twin Towers and the fall of Lehman Brothers, that global order had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent, of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned supreme for a generation had crashed.

It was the reaction of the US to 9/11 that broke the sense of invincibility of the world's first truly global empire. The Bush administration's wildly miscalculated response turned the atrocities in New York and Washington into the most successful terror attack in history.

Not only did Bush's war fail on its own terms, spawning terrorists across the world, while its campaign of killings, torture and kidnapping discredited Western claims to be guardians of human rights. But the US-British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq revealed the inability of the global behemoth to impose its will on subject peoples prepared to fight back. That became a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies.

This passing of the unipolar moment was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the world – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from the crash of 2008 and the crisis of the western-dominated capitalist order it unleashed, speeding up relative US decline.

This was a crisis made in America and deepened by the vast cost of its multiple wars. And its most devastating impact was on those economies whose elites had bought most enthusiastically into the neoliberal orthodoxy of deregulated financial markets and unfettered corporate power.

A voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and environmental degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the greatest state intervention in history. The baleful twins of neoconservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction.

The failure of both accelerated the rise of China, the third epoch-making change of the early 21st century. Not only did the country's dramatic growth take hundreds of millions out of poverty, but its state-driven investment model rode out the west's slump, making a mockery of market orthodoxy and creating a new centre of global power. That increased the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states.

China's rise widened the space for the tide of progressive change that swept Latin America – the fourth global advance. Across the continent, socialist and social-democratic governments were propelled to power, attacking economic and racial injustice, building regional independence and taking back resources from corporate control. Two decades after we had been assured there could be no alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, Latin Americans were creating them.

These momentous changes came, of course, with huge costs and qualifications. The US will remain the overwhelmingly dominant military power for the foreseeable future; its partial defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for in death and destruction on a colossal scale; and multipolarity brings its own risks of conflict. The neoliberal model was discredited, but governments tried to refloat it through savage austerity programmes. China's success was bought at a high price in inequality, civil rights and environmental destruction. And Latin America's US-backed elites remained determined to reverse the social gains, as they succeeded in doing by violent coup in Honduras in 2009. Such contradictions also beset the revolutionary upheaval that engulfed the Arab world in 2010-11, sparking another shift of global proportions.

By then, Bush's war on terror had become such an embarrassment that the US government had to change its name to "overseas contingency operations". Iraq was almost universally acknowledged to have been a disaster, Afghanistan a doomed undertaking. But such chastened realism couldn't be further from how these campaigns were regarded in the western mainstream when they were first unleashed.

To return to what was routinely said by British and US politicians and their tame pundits in the aftermath of 9/11 is to be transported into a parallel universe of toxic fantasy. Every effort was made to discredit those who rejected the case for invasion and occupation – and would before long be comprehensively vindicated.

Michael Gove, now a Tory cabinet minister, poured vitriol on the Guardian for publishing a full debate on the attacks, denouncing it as a "Prada-Meinhof gang" of "fifth columnists". Rupert Murdoch's Sun damned those warning against war as "anti-American propagandists of the fascist left". When the Taliban regime was overthrown, Blair issued a triumphant condemnation of those (myself included) who had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and war on terror. We had, he declared, "proved to be wrong".

A decade later, few could still doubt that it was Blair's government that had "proved to be wrong", with catastrophic consequences. The US and its allies would fail to subdue Afghanistan, critics predicted. The war on terror would itself spread terrorism. Ripping up civil rights would have dire consequences – and an occupation of Iraq would be a blood-drenched disaster.

The war party's "experts", such as the former "viceroy of Bosnia" Paddy Ashdown, derided warnings that invading Afghanistan would lead to a "long-drawn-out guerrilla campaign" as "fanciful". More than 10 years on, armed resistance was stronger than ever and the war had become the longest in American history.

It was a similar story in Iraq – though opposition had by then been given voice by millions on the streets. Those who stood against the invasion were still accused of being "appeasers". US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted the war would last six days. Most of the Anglo-American media expected resistance to collapse in short order. They were entirely wrong.

A new colonial-style occupation of Iraq would, I wrote in the first week of invasion, "face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has gone" and the occupiers "be driven out". British troops did indeed face unrelenting attacks until they were forced out in 2009, as did US regular troops until they were withdrawn in 2011.

But it wasn't just on the war on terror that opponents of the New World Order were shown to be right and its cheerleaders to be talking calamitous nonsense. For 30 years, the west's elites insisted that only deregulated markets, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy could deliver growth and prosperity.

Long before 2008, the "free market" model had been under fierce attack: neoliberalism was handing power to unaccountable banks and corporations, anti-corporate globalisation campaigners argued, fuelling poverty and social injustice and eviscerating democracy – and was both economically and ecologically unsustainable.

In contrast to New Labour politicians who claimed "boom and bust" to be a thing of the past, critics dismissed the idea that the capitalist trade cycle could be abolished as absurd. Deregulation, financialisation and the reckless promotion of debt-fuelled speculation would, in fact, lead to crisis.

The large majority of economists who predicted that the neoliberal model was heading for breakdown were, of course, on the left. So while in Britain the main political parties all backed "light-touch regulation" of finance, its opponents had long argued that City liberalisation threatened the wider economy.

Critics warned that privatising public services would cost more, drive down pay and conditions and fuel corruption. Which is exactly what happened. And in the European Union, where corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded into treaty, the result was ruinous. The combination of liberalised banking with an undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics (on both left and right in this case) had always argued risked breaking apart was a disaster waiting to happen. The crash then provided the trigger.

The case against neoliberal capitalism had been overwhelmingly made on the left, as had opposition to the US-led wars of invasion and occupation. But it was strikingly slow to capitalise on its vindication over the central controversies of the era. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given the loss of confidence that flowed from the left's 20th-century defeats – including in its own social alternatives.

But driving home the lessons of these disasters was essential if they were not to be repeated. Even after Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror was pursued in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks from Pakistan to Somalia. The western powers played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Libyan regime – acting in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with intervention and Iran with all-out attack.

And while neoliberalism had been discredited, western governments used the crisis to try to entrench it. Not only were jobs, pay and benefits cut as never before, but privatisation was extended still further. Being right was, of course, never going to be enough. What was needed was political and social pressure strong enough to turn the tables of power.

Revulsion against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily deepened after 2008. As the burden of the crisis was loaded on to the majority, the spread of protests, strikes and electoral upheavals demonstrated that pressure for real change had only just begun. Rejection of corporate power and greed had become the common sense of the age.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm described the crash of 2008 as a "sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall". It was commonly objected that after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy, the left had no systemic alternative to offer. But no model ever came pre-cooked. All of them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven improvisation in specific historical circumstances.

The same would be true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to reconstruct a broken economy on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis began to dictate the shape of a sustainable alternative. Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions.

The upheavals of the first years of the 21st century opened up the possibility of a new kind of global order, and of genuine social and economic change. As communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered 20 years later, nothing is ever settled.

This is an edited extract from The Revenge of History: the Battle for the 21st Century by Seumas Milne, published by Verso. Buy it for £16 at guardianbookshop.co.uk


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Chinese navy conducts military exercise in East China Sea amid raging tussle with Japan

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 05:09 PM PDT

The Chinese navy conducted a military exercise in the East China Sea on Friday in the midst of a raging tussle with Japan over the Diaoyu islands in the area. The exercise, which is bound to intensify the conflict, involved 11 ships, eight aircraft and 1,000 naval personnel.

Houses swept away as levee on Yangtze collapses in Jiangsu

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 03:22 AM PDT

A levee on the Yangtze in the city of Zhenjiang in eastern China's Jiangsu province collapsed on Monday, pulling down 28 houses and forcing hundreds of residents to evacuate. Locals blamed the inciden...

China's mighty microblog search for a lost boy's parents

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 03:22 AM PDT

A lost boy picked up two years ago by the Shiyan Public Security Bureau in Hubei province might have new hope in finding his original parents, thanks to the advancement of China's microblogging world....

Local rail projects in China revived with ministry's blessing

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 03:22 AM PDT

Many local governments in China view railway projects as a priority for investment, if they are able to raise enough funds, a source at a municipal railway bureau has told the China Business News. T...

China's efforts to beat poverty hit the buffers

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 02:26 AM PDT

With Oct. 17 marking the 20th International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the China Association of Poverty Alleviation & Development together with the UN World Food Programme called on members ...

Chunghwa prefers Hon Hai's 60-inch LED TV

Posted: 20 Oct 2012 02:26 AM PDT

Chunghwa Telecom, the largest telecommunications company in Taiwan, is considering directly purchasing 60-inch LED TVs from Hong Hai, the world's largest electronic product contractor, following the a...

Chairman Seen as Lame Duck

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 03:34 PM PDT

Uyghurs in northwestern China are increasingly questioning the effectiveness of Xinjiang governor Nur Bekri, as petitioners find their grievances go unaddressed and see the regional leader's orders ignored by local officials.

The 51-year-old ethnically Uyghur chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was appointed to his current post in January 2008, replacing Ismail Tiliwaldi, who resigned in December 2007 to become a Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of China's parliament, the National People's Congress.

But a number of sensitive incidents, including deadly Urumqi violence between the ethnic Uyghurs and the Han Chinese in June 2009 which left 200 dead according to official figures, have marred Nur Bekri's tenure and called his authority into question, according to sources in the region.

The chairman is now being commonly referred to as "Nol Bekri," a play on his name which means "Zero Bekri" in the Uyghur language, because of his inability to lead, a female Uyghur petitioner told RFA's Uyghur service on condition of anonymity.

When asked if she had submitted her grievances to Nur Bekri, the petitioner said she had not, because "he can do nothing at all."

"People are saying that his grievances are worse than ours. He cannot make anybody do anything," she said.

"That is why everybody calls him 'Zero Bekri'."

Order ignored

Members of a Uyghur family from Yengisar county in western Xinjiang's Kasghgar prefecture petitioning for compensation from local officials over the death of one of their sons and the severe injuring of another said Nur Bekri's assistance had done little for their cause.

The young boys had been playing in a local field when they accidentally exploded a grenade left there by Chinese soldiers during a drill in an incident that occurred about 20 years ago, family sources said.

The surviving son, Tursun Ghopur, said he lost one of his eyes in the aftermath of the explosion and maintains that surgeons who treated him at the Chinese military hospital took his eye out and sold it to another patient.

After decades of petitioning regional officials in vain, the family was informed in March that Nur Bekri had personally taken up the case, ordering relevant government officials to award them 1.75 million yuan (U.S. $278,915) in compensation for their loss and suffering.

The family was given a document of the order signed by Nur Bekri and told that the directive had been issued to both Kashgar prefectural officials and officials at the Yengisar county level.

But one of the family members told RFA that when they took the signed document to the Yengisar county petitioners' office, officials there "laughed in our faces."

"The head of the petitioners' office told us that Nur Bekri should be the one to give us the money. He laughed at us and laughed at the document signed by Nur Bekri," the family member said.

"He also said, 'Instead of giving you 1 million yuan, we'd rather pay 5 million yuan to party officials to make this case disappear."

The family member said that Nur Bekri avoided the issue when the family spoke with him after the incident.

Calls to Nur Bekri's office for comment on the claims went unanswered.

Regional ineffectiveness

According to sources in the region, Uyghurs are secretly circulating a poem about the embattled leader called "Salaam, Nur Bekri," which details his ineffectiveness as a leader, and calling him a "puppet" of Beijing.

The poem laments his failure to protect Uyghur as the official language in regional schools and his support of a policy which sends young Uyghur girls to jobs outside of Xinjiang, high unemployment amongst Uyghurs in the region, and the influx of Han Chinese for resources in Xinjiang under his watch.

Uyghurs in Xinjiang often complain of policies favoring Han Chinese migration into the region and what they call the unfair allocation of resources to Chinese residents.

Members of the Uyghur exile community have called for the removal of Nur Bekri ahead the 18th National Party Congress—a crucial leadership meeting of the ruling Chinese Communist Party—to be held in Beijing next month.

In September, Dolkun Isa, head of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), said that for real change to be seen in the region, the current leaders in Xinjiang—regional chairman Nur Bekri and party secretary Zhang Chunxian—would have to be replaced with representatives elected by Uyghurs.

"If a new, more democratic leadership came to power, then Zhang Chunxian and Nur Bekri should be removed and the Uyghur people should have the opportunity to elect the Uyghur representatives they want."

Publicly questioned

Following the 2009 Urumqi unrest, Nur Bekri delivered a televised address in which he singled out those he believed to have orchestrated the violence, including overseas Uyghur exile groups and outspoken Uyghur economics professor Ilham Tohti.

Ilham Tohti, who had published several articles critical of the Chinese government's policies in Xinjiang on his website Uyghur Online, responded by calling Nur Bekri "unqualified" for his position.

"He doesn't care about Uyghurs," Ilham Tohti said at the time. "He's always stressed the stability and security of Xinjiang and threatened Uyghurs."

"Xinjiang has developed, but the people are living in poverty, especially Uyghurs. Laws that should have been applied in the Uyghur Autonomous Region haven't been implemented."

Nur Bekri had earlier served as the region's deputy chairman since 2005 and as mayor of Urumqi before that.

Reported by Shohret Hoshur for RFA's Uyghur service. Translated by Mamatjan Juma. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

China News Broadcast, October 19, 2012: Military Drills, Wingsuit Flying Competition

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 03:47 PM PDT

The Chines regime conducts military exercises in the East China Sea. Four students die in bus crash. NTD's International Vocal Competition kicks off.

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