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Presidential politics in Taiwan: Ma’s second stand

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:05:41 +0000

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

Presidential politics in Taiwan: Ma’s second stand

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

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:05:41 +0000

A Nasheed supporter fights her own battle

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

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

Banyan: Trading strategies

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:05:40 +0000

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

Banyan: Trading strategies

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

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:05:40 +0000

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

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

India’s parliament at 60: Badly drawn

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:05:40 +0000

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

India’s parliament at 60: Badly drawn

Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws: An inconvenient death

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:06:16 +0000

Mourning Uncle SMS

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

Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws: An inconvenient death

India-Pakistan relations: Make lolly, not war

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:06:16 +0000

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

India-Pakistan relations: Make lolly, not war

The Philippines: The family plot

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:06:15 +0000

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

The Philippines: The family plot

Banyan: An absence of architecture

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:06:15 +0000

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

Banyan: An absence of architecture

Australian politics: Another fine mess

The Economist: Asia — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:06:15 +0000

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

Australian politics: Another fine mess