Pollution in China

Something in the air?

Sep 27th 2007 | HONGWEI
From The Economist print edition

Locals think they know why their children are sick

LIKE many other Chinese companies, PetroChina makes much of its eagerness to promote “harmonious communities”. The state-controlled oil giant listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000. Yet critics in China allege this has not always made it more responsible. Take the plight of one community in China's far north-east.

The Hongwei Petrochemical Park is just outside the city of Daqing. Celebrated in Maoist myth as the scene of heroic industrialisation, Daqing is still the fourth most productive oilfield in the world. Of the six companies operating in the park, the largest is Daqing Lianhua, a PetroChina subsidiary.

For eight years residents of Hongwei have been waging a fruitless struggle to find the cause of high rates of serious illness in their midst. Out of a permanent population of 3,400, at least ten children have been born with an affliction diagnosed by local doctors as cerebral palsy. It is unprecedented for the incidence of cerebral palsy to “cluster” in this way. Foreign experts think from the symptoms and clustering that the disease is akin to Minamata Syndrome, a neurological condition caused by exposure to mercury in the womb. Cancer rates are twice the national average.

Legal efforts to establish a link between the plant and the illness have failed. But in 2003 the local government acknowledged the seriousness of Hongwei's pollution and called on Daqing Lianhua to relocate the villagers. But nothing has come of this, nor of offers to find jobs at the firm for protesting locals.

America and Iran

The limits of free expression

A rough ride for Iran's president

NEW YORK is used to the drama (and the traffic) created by visiting dignitaries. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, caused more stir than most. He started by asking whether he could lay a wreath at Ground Zero as a show of respect. “Access of Evil” cried the tabloids; “Zero Chance”, and “Go to Hell”. Condoleezza Rice called the idea “a travesty”. Fairly swiftly, the visit was ruled out by the New York Police Department on security grounds. But Mr Ahmadinejad then prompted an even bigger ruckus when he appeared at Columbia University's World Leaders Forum on September 24th.

Politicians, from city councillors to presidential candidates, were appalled that an invitation had been extended in the first place. Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York State Assembly, threatened to withhold state support from Columbia. Mitt Romney, a Republican hopeful, released a television commercial condemning the visit. But Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president, refused to withdraw his invitation. It would offend against the principle of free expression, he said: a principle revered in America, but not in Iran. Perhaps to save face, he opened the forum by blasting Mr Ahmadinejad as a “petty and cruel dictator”, questioning his “intellectual courage”, and describing his take on the Holocaust as “ridiculous”.

The campus was plastered with posters both supporting and condemning Mr Ahmadinejad's appearance. A list of children supposedly on Iran's death row hung on the campus gates. Audience members challenged him over reports that more than 200 people have been executed in Iran so far this year. Members of an ad hoc student committee wore black T-shirts with a quotation from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Mr Ahmadinejad's remarks and answers drew applause in parts, but much of what he said was met with incredulity. He called for more research into the Holocaust as well as more investigation into the “root causes” of the September 11th attacks. When asked about the oppression of women in Iran, he retorted that they were exempt from many responsibilities “because of the respect culturally given to women”. His audience laughed out loud when he said that, in Iran, “we do not have homosexuals like in your country”.

The attention being paid to Iran, at Columbia and in Washington, is increasing pressure to do something about its fishy nuclear programme—though something short of war. The urge to turn the screws, combined with the meekness of UN sanctions, has led to new efforts to divest America's pension funds from companies—mainly foreign ones, or subsidiaries of American groups—that do business with Iran. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor, will soon sign a bill that will divest California's two main public pension funds (for civil servants and teachers) from all such companies. The funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, are the two biggest pension funds in the country; CalPERS alone manages 0 billion, of which about billion will have to be pulled out of companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Alcatel, a telecoms firm. The bill's backers hope that other states will follow suit, and that eventually the federal government will be persuaded to tighten its own sanctions.

World economy

Stronger China

Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Thanks to China, an American recession need not cause the whole world to crash

Illustration by Bill Butcher

ECONOMISTS have long warned that the world economy could not fly for ever on the single engine of American demand. A one-engined plane is more likely to crash. With its housing market blighted and its consumers growing fearful, America now faces a mounting risk of recession. The good news, however, is that the world has found some powerful new engines in China and other emerging economies. Even as credit markets seize up, a world economy that is less dependent on the United States is more likely to stay aloft.

The power of this new motor is startling. For several years, emerging Asian economies have accounted for more of global GDP growth than America has. This year China alone will for the first time accomplish the same feat all on its own (at market exchange rates), even if American growth holds up. American consumer spending is roughly four times the size of China's and India's combined, but what matters for global growth is the extra dollars of spending generated each year. In the first half of 2007 the increase in consumer spending (in actual dollar terms) in China and India together contributed more to global GDP growth than the increase in America did.

Of course, this silver lining has its cloud. A sharp slowdown in China now would have much nastier global consequences than in the past, and the Chinese economy has weaknesses. But it does not look like getting into trouble over the next couple of years (see article)—the period in which America looks as though it may be feeble. If China can keep flying high, it will help keep the world economy safe.

Of course, if America suffers a recession, then Asia's exports will weaken. But this should not hurt GDP growth too much because other factors should help offset the weakening. It helps that China and most other Asian emerging economies are now exporting more to the European Union than to America. China's exports to other emerging economies are growing even faster. It helps, too, that domestic spending has strengthened and is likely to stay strong: China, along with most of the rest of Asia, is one of few parts of the world without a housing bubble.

If emerging Asian economies start to look weak, their governments have some scope to strengthen them. Most, with the exception of India, have small budget deficits; some even have surpluses. So if exports collapse, governments also have ample scope to boost domestic demand.

Commodity prices, too, will continue to feel the effect of the emerging economies' increased importance. It is commonly assumed that an American recession would cause a sharp fall in the prices of oil and other commodities. But emerging Asia accounted for two-thirds of the increase in world energy demand over the past five years. So if Asia remains strong, commodity prices should too, and commodity-producing emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia and the Middle East will also continue to thrive.

Emerging Asia cannot pick up all the slack if America goes into recession. Average world growth will slow—and, arguably, it needs to. But Asia can help to keep the world chugging along. Indeed, a modest slowing in the American economy could even help Asia in the long run if it forces governments to switch the mix of growth from exports to consumption and so make their future growth more sustainable.

Not so long ago, the rich world used to regard emerging economies as risky and unstable. That view needs to change: emerging economies now look like a force for stabilising the world economy.

Revolution in Myanmar

The saffron revolution

Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

If the world acts in concert, the violence should be the last spasm of a vicious regime in its death throes

Reuters

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“FEAR”, the lady used to say, “is a habit.” This week, inspired in part by the lady herself, Aung San Suu Kyi, partly by the heroic example set by Buddhist monks, Myanmar's people kicked the addiction.

Defying the corrupt, inept, brutal generals who rule them, they took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to demand democracy. They knew they were risking a bloody crackdown, like the one that put down a huge popular revolt in 1988, killing 3,000 people or more. In 1988 Burma's people were betrayed not just by the ruthlessness of their rulers, but also by the squabbling and opportunism of the outside world, which failed to produce a co-ordinated response and let the murderous regime get away with it. This time, soldiers are once again shooting and killing unarmed protesters (see article). Can the world avoid making the same mistake twice?

In New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Western leaders, led by George Bush, harangued the junta, and threatened yet more sanctions. They have probably already shot their bolt. Western sanctions have been tried and have failed, in part because Myanmar's neighbours have for years followed a different approach. Its fellow members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations waffled about “constructive engagement” while making economic hay in Myanmar from the West's withdrawal. India, too, anxious about China's growing influence, and hungry for oil and gas, has swallowed its democratic traditions and courted the generals.

China itself has built an ever-closer relationship. The two countries, after all, have a lot in common beyond a shared border. Since the 1980s a wave of “people-power” revolutions has swept aside tyrannies around the world. Mercifully few regimes, and few armies, are willing to kill large numbers of their own people to stay in power. Two big exceptions have been Myanmar and China, whose government in 1989 likewise stayed in power through a massacre.

Yet it is China that now offers the best hope the outside world has of changing Myanmar for the better. Admittedly, it is a thin hope. There are plenty of reasons to doubt China's willingness to upset Myanmar's generals. China's traditional posture, heard again this week, is to oppose any “interference in the internal affairs of another country”. It trots out this formula so often when foreigners criticise its own behaviour that, even if it supports change, it is hard for it to utter more than platitudes, as it has this month, about the desirability of a “democracy process that is appropriate for the country”.

China has also been the chief beneficiary of the partial Western boycott. Myanmar offers two of the prizes China values most in its foreign friends: hydrocarbon resources and a friendly army, willing to give it access to facilities on its coast on the Bay of Bengal. China has become the junta's biggest commercial partner and diplomatic supporter.

Nevertheless there are two reasons why China might now see its own interests as best served by assisting a peaceful transition in Myanmar. The first is that China wants stability on its borders, and it is becoming obvious that the junta cannot provide it. The generals' economic mismanagement has helped reduce a country blessed with rich resources to crippling poverty. Fleeing economic misery as much as political oppression, up to 2m migrants from Myanmar are in Thailand. And it was an economic grievance—a big, abrupt rise in fuel prices—that sparked the present unrest.

The junta has at least succeeded in cobbling together ceasefire agreements with most of the two dozen armed insurgencies lining its borders. But the price has been lawless zones where banditry and illegal-drug production are rife. Myanmar's slice of the “Golden Triangle” on its Thai and Lao borders was for a while in the 1990s the world's dominant heroin producer. It has been largely priced out of that market by Afghan competition. But it has successfully diversified into methamphetamines. The business relies on precursor chemicals coming from China, but, just as heroin from Myanmar brought China addiction and, through shared needles, HIV and AIDS, so “ice” can wreak havoc. Nobody expects any transition to democracy to be trouble-free. But, Chinese leaders must be asking themselves, can it be any worse?

China must also be wondering nervously how all this will affect next year's Olympic games in Beijing. Already, protests about China's support for the government of Sudan, larded with comparisons to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, have shown that its foreign policy as well as its human-rights record at home is under scrutiny. Myanmar is justifiably a popular cause in the West. If China proves actively obstructive to international efforts to bring the junta to book, it may provoke calls for a boycott of the games.

It is of course wrong to assume that China can dictate to Myanmar. In the generals' deluded world-view, only they can preserve Myanmar's independence. They will take orders from no other country. China's role is crucial, nonetheless. It must not blunt the impact of measures taken by other countries and provide the junta with a shield to fend off demands to do what it should.

That, at least, is easy to prescribe. It should stop shooting protesters; free all political prisoners, including Miss Suu Kyi; scrap the constitutional guidelines drawn up by its farcical “national convention”; and start serious talks with all groups, including Miss Suu Kyi and her party. The aim of those talks should also be clear: to arrange a transition to civilian, democratic rule. For their part, provided free and fair new elections are held, Miss Suu Kyi and her party should not insist on the results of the election they won in a landslide in 1990 being honoured. And, unpalatable as it is, they should offer the generals whatever incentive they need to go quietly. This all sounds a pipedream. It will certainly remain so if the outside world does not unite around a set of demands, and agree on the sticks and carrots that might make deaf old soldiers listen.

Myanmar's protests

On the brink

Sep 27th 2007 | BANGKOK AND YANGON
From The Economist print edition

Reuters

How Myanmar's people rose up against its regime—and the regime rose up against its people

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THERE are reckoned to be 400,000 monks in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), about the same as the number of soldiers under the ruling junta's command. The soldiers have the guns. The monks have the public's support and, judging from the past fortnight's protests, the courage and determination to defy the regime. But Myanmar's tragic recent history suggests that when an immovable junta meets unstoppable protests, much blood is spilled. In the last pro-democracy protests on this scale, in 1988, it took several rounds of massacres before the demonstrations finally subsided, leaving the regime as strong as ever. By September 27th, with a crackdown under way, and the first deaths from clashes with security forces, it seemed hard to imagine that things would be very different this time.

One genuine difference is that, in the age of the internet and digital cameras, images of the spectacular protests in Yangon, the main city, have spread at lightning speed across Myanmar itself, encouraging people in other towns to stage demonstrations of their own; and around the world, bringing the crisis to the attention of leaders as they gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. The remarkable images from Myanmar have meant that, for a while at least, a country that has been brutalised and pauperised by a callous and incompetent regime for 45 years has the attention it deserves.

The latest round of protests began last month, after the government suddenly imposed drastic fuel-price rises. At first, the demonstrations, organised by veterans of the students' movement that led the 1988 protests, were fairly small. The regime arrested many leaders and sent plain-clothed goons to beat up demonstrators. It looked as if the protests might fizzle until, earlier this month, soldiers fired over the heads of monks demonstrating in the central town of Pakkoku. Some reports said monks were also beaten and arrested.

In Buddhist tradition, monks are rather different from in the West: large numbers of young men don russet robes for just a few years. So they are more integrated into the wider society, and more influential.

The clergy demanded an apology, setting a deadline of September 17th. The next day, their demand having been ignored, they took to the streets. They also, in effect, excommunicated the military and their families by announcing they would refuse to accept alms from them—a serious matter in a devout country.

Setting out at 1pm each day from the golden Shwedagon pagoda—Myanmar's most sacred shrine—a seemingly endless line of shaven-headed monks, many barefoot, has passed through the streets of Yangon. At first the monks limited themselves to chanting prayers and discouraged the public from joining them. But on September 22nd a hitherto unknown group, the All Burma Monks' Alliance, called on people to “struggle peacefully against the evil military dictatorship”. After this, large numbers of ordinary Burmese joined in, many linking hands along the route of the monks' procession. The monks' chants became overtly political, including the cry, “democracy, democracy”.

At first, the regime dithered. It fired tear-gas canisters at one of the first monks' protests, in the western town of Sittwe. But for the next few days, its forces stayed out of sight. On September 22nd, to their astonishment, a group of monks and laymen was allowed to pray outside the normally heavily guarded home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) and icon of Myanmar's struggle for democracy. Though Miss Suu Kyi is under house arrest, she was able to walk to her gate and, in tears herself, greet the tearful protesters.

Miss Suu Kyi's public appearance—her first since she was detained four years ago—proved a boon to the demonstrators. On Monday (September 24th) the protest in Yangon was said to be 100,000-strong. Monks waved the red “fighting peacock” flag, the emblem of the students who led the 1988 protests.

That night the regime broke its silence at last. On state television and radio, it warned of unspecified action “according to the law” if protests continued. The next day the protesters defied the threat, staging a demonstration at least as big as Monday's. As on previous days, the young monks were marshalled along the route by older ones with megaphones, followed by a vast throng of ordinary Burmese, and the odd government spy.

Those taking part were enormously moved by the defiance they achieved, as if that were an end in itself. Yet no one The Economist spoke to believed the government would yield; they were marching less in hope than in anger and despair. “I don't think we can defeat the government; I can't imagine what will happen,” said one young woman, “But we hope. We hope for the success of our revolution.”

Soon after Tuesday's march ended, troops and riot police moved in to positions around Yangon. The junta hunkered down for talks in Naypyidaw. That is the remote new capital the paranoid regime has built itself in the centre of the country for obscure reasons (perhaps on the advice of its soothsayers, or in fear of an American invasion, or of just this sort of popular uprising). Britain's ambassador, Mark Canning, went there and met two deputy ministers. He said they were under the illusion that the protests had been stoked by “meddling” foreign powers. Miss Suu Kyi was reported to have been moved to the regime's dreaded Insein prison.

On Wednesday the authorities announced a two-month night-time curfew and troops surrounded monasteries in Yangon. But swarms of protesters again poured on to the streets, defying tear-gas, warning shots and baton charges. The first deaths, including of monks, were reported. On Thursday, troops burst into monasteries around the country to make arrests but, again, this did not stop monks and laymen from hitting the streets, where riot police shot at them.

EPA

Dream on

In 1988, when protests also had an economic basis, monks took an active part. They did so again in 1990, after the regime called an election and ignored the result (a landslide victory for the NLD). But this time they are in the vanguard. Given the reverence they are accorded by the predominantly Buddhist public, they will be harder for the regime to dismiss as criminals and subversives.

It is unclear who is leading the monks' protest movement, says Aung Naing Oo, a political analyst and veteran of the 1988 student movement. But, he says, they seem well organised. Some of the clergy's top leaders on the State Sangha Council have been bought off by the regime. Others, though, seem sympathetic to their young disciples. At the very least, says Mr Oo, it can be assumed that the protesting monks have the blessing of the abbots in charge of the monasteries. The raids on the monasteries seem designed to smash this source of resistance.

The tatmadaw (armed forces) did not hesitate to arrest, beat and jail monks in 1988 and 1990. But this time, not only are the monks (and many Buddhist nuns too) leading the protests, but the numbers taking part are also far larger than before. Furthermore, the army has changed. In 1988 it was mostly professional and had recent experience of waging war against Myanmar's sizeable ethnic-minority militias. Since then its numbers have been greatly expanded through conscription, which means many of today's soldiers are ill-trained peasant boys, whose families will have suffered from the regime's colossal incompetence. Ironically, the army's success in forcing many of the armed ethnic insurgencies to accept ceasefires has left it with few soldiers with much real experience of fighting.

The regime may be trying to calibrate its response to the protests, using limited force at first to quell opponents. That said, it still has elite disciplined units which would be unlikely to flinch if ordered to open fire on unarmed monks and nuns.

If there are any cracks in the junta's unity, nobody outside knows about them. General Than Shwe, the 74-year-old paramount leader, is rumoured to be gravely ill but it is assumed that, when he goes, his replacement will be just as thuggish. Taking account both of the expanded army and of the sizeable ethnic militias, Myanmar is one of the world's most militarised countries, notes Martin Smith, a writer on the place. The junta's leaders, pointing to the country's chaotic period of parliamentary democracy between independence in 1948 and the military takeover in 1962, sincerely believe the army is the only institution capable of holding Myanmar together. They are determined to cling to power whatever the cost.

It is just possible, however, that the regime may match violence with concessions. Earlier this month, it wrapped up, after 14 years, a national convention to draft the guidelines for a new and supposedly democratic constitution. In fact, the new charter would leave the army in charge and political rights severely curtailed. But its precise wording has not yet been decided and the next steps towards implementing it are uncertain. This leaves scope for promises of progress, in the hope that this will weaken the protests.

Few demonstrators would trust such promises. But, combined with a stranglehold on the monasteries, and other repressive measures aimed at whittling down the numbers of protesters, they might be enough to show, once again, that resistance is futile. Back in 1988, at the peak of the protests, even as soldiers were mowing down the crowds, many Burmese felt sure the rotten regime was ready to collapse under the unstoppable force of “people power”, as the Marcos regime in the Philippines had two years earlier.

Even if the regime does crumble and the junta stuffs its bags with gemstones and heads for exile, Myanmar's troubles would still be daunting. Many of the ethnic minorities continue to distrust the majority “Burmans”, even including the democrats. And the NLD has been gutted by years of oppression. Miss Suu Kyi, inspiring figure though she is, is an untested leader who has perforce been woefully out of touch with events.

As in 1988 and 1990 the Burmese people have shown they want to choose their own leaders. In the past they did not fully reckon on the ruthlessness of the people they were up against. One day, as with all tyrannies, Myanmar's will fall. But much blood may flow before that day dawns.

What will the junta do?

AFP
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DEMONSTRATIONS led by Buddhist monks in military-ruled Myanmar (formerly Burma) gathered force over the weekend and, on Monday September 24th, the biggest protest yet seen was staged in the main city, Yangon. Up to 100,000 people took part, among them perhaps 20,000 red- and orange-robed monks. The website of Irrawaddy, a newspaper run by Burmese exiles from Thailand, reported an equally huge monk-led protest on Monday in the western town of Sittwe.