A Split in the Party? Contradictory reports raise questions on China's economic direction

Ed Bithell

When asked to name a country with a lively political debate in its newspapers, few would name China. And so, when even indirectly expressed, political tensions in the leadership may indicate serious fault lines.

An anonymous but "authoritative person" was interviewed on Monday in Communist Party standard bearer the People's Daily, playing down expectations of any imminent economic upswing. The source leaned heavily on "supply-side structural reform" and reduced state intervention in markets, as well as debt-led growth, rather unlike the emphasis from Premier Li Keqiang in March that failing to meet growth targets was "impossible for me to say". 

It is thus easy for the editorial to be interpreted as an attack on Li and the State Council's management of the economy, with inflationary measures in place throughout early 2016 for growth that is now flagging. However, it can also be read as instead supporting the wider message of the key reform meeting of the 3rd Plenum in 2013, with its commitment to market-driven growth. Whichever the true intent (and it may well be a combination of the two, if not more, factors), the article has widely been taken as a move by actors loyal to President Xi Jinping, who has made further moves towards greater overall control of the Party with proposals to abolish the powerful Politburo Standing Committee by 2017.

"You can’t have both 6.5 percent growth and painless reform, even in China" - Michael Every, Rabobank HK

In its phrasing, the article ties in closely to recent policy statements by Xi himself, who the same day hosted a meeting in which he emphasised again "supply-side structural reform", a policy dedicated to state-sponsored improvement of the economy through efficiency, quality and cutting excess capacity - and explicitly not neoliberal in its outlook. Last week, he outlined his vision for improving Chinese economic performance, bemoaning that "the problem in China is not about insufficient demand or lack of demand, in fact, demands in China have changed, but supplies haven’t changed accordingly". In managing private companies and state-owned enterprises to meet the new demand, says Xi, supply-side structural reform will be achieved.

However, commentators both within and without China have been questioning this official narrative, that until now has been consistent from all parties - that the economy will be both radically transformed and also continue to comfortably grow. "We have the promise of a painless reform process with no mass bankruptcies or layoffs, and without radical liberalisation of the services sector to boost growth there," said Michael Every, head of financial markets research at Rabobank Group in Hong Kong, back in March. "You can’t have both 6.5 percent growth and painless reform, even in China." It appears that despite Li's recent promises of a "win-win" growth projection, Xi is determined to make sure his reform agenda remains the top priority.

The State Council, however, issued a rebuttal the same day, asserting that growth remained stable, and Li personally hit back with a statement framing the economic future in terms of necessary evil, declaring that the reforms "must be endured for the country, for the good of the people". While these comments hardly seem to be the inflammatory rhetoric we expect of political rivals in the West, even before the most recent personal politics of the EU referendum and US presidential election, such subtle variations in official policy statements can reflect major differences in viewpoint, especially between the marked ideologue Xi and his reserved and technocratic premier. In a time marked by the anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, and state galas hailing Xi as the heir of Mao, such tensions in the Chinese leadership may merely be the beginning of major storms to come. 

What About the Children?

Nilen Patel

This is Europe’s quiet crisis. The lives of children are depicted as the most precious. They are meant to be lives to be protected and nurtured. They are supposed to be the future of our societies after all.

However, 96,500 unaccompanied children applied for asylum across Europe in 2015. Over 10,000 of these are unaccounted for or missing.

Europol, the EU law enforcement agency, believes many of these children are working as slaves, on construction sites and farm land or as sex workers. How can we let these children, the most vulnerable and valued members of society, be the ones to be let down by our European politics? In a society governed by numbers, the extent of human trafficking has long since passed the stage in Europe where it should demand attention and response.

Perhaps this is just further evidence of Europe’s ineffective strategy to cope with refugees. UNICEF found that children currently have to wait up to 11 months between registration and transfer to a country that has agreed to accept them. In Sweden up to 10 children are reported missing each week and in Slovenia more than 80 per cent of unaccompanied children went missing from reception centres. The situation is a complex and emotional one, but traffickers are taking advantage of the waves of migrants and operating across Europe due to the weakness of Europe’s child protection system.

Even on a national scale, we are far from rising to the challenge. Just last month the House of Commons defeated an amendment to an immigration bill that would have seen the UK accept 3000 child refugees. The Home Office argued that they were doing enough already to help child refugees in Syria and neighbouring countries. David Cameron maintains that we must ensure that refugees don’t have the incentive to travel across Europe. Yet the National Crime Agency identified that the number of children being trafficked in the UK increased by 46% from last year, so this is a problem that is clearly not diminishing or going to disappear.

What the Home Office failed to acknowledge is that a significant number of these refugees were under 14 years of age, and travelling alone without the protection of adult family members or guardians. As a means to pacify protestors to the UK stance, the government has agreed to fast-track child migrants who have family members in the UK as well as take in children registered in Greece, Italy or France before the refugee deal was created with Turkey. Yet is a fast-track modification of a notoriously slow process actually helpful? Furthermore, this is another act of ostracising the children who need help the most - the ones without parents or guardians. Smugglers and traffickers, meanwhile, are presenting these migrants with “solutions”, an escape route to a better life, far exceeding what the asylum jungle currently offers them.

It is this internal conflict of how to respond that is symbolic of the EU attitude towards this ever-growing crisis. Unaccompanied children just aren’t valued enough by a society hypocritically putting children in that vulnerable and important societal position.

The fact is that the conflict driving this migration isn’t disappearing, meaning it has become a question of humanity to acknowledge the situation and respond as best as possible. We need to counter the “offer” of smugglers and traffickers rather than restricting our borders. The situation they are fleeing from will always provide a greater incentive to migrate than any disincentive David Cameron could ever create.

The crisis of child refugees is a quiet one, but it shouldn’t be this way. There is an incongruence of what we as a society place value on and what our policies place value on. By reassessing what we believe is important and then crucially protecting these values, we can hope to better the situation in Europe.

Just How Special? Brexit leads to new questions on Anglo-American relations

Ed Bithell

Barack Obama is a man used to having his voice heard. 

And yet, when he came to the UK, often referred to as the US’s closest ally, to express his views on our biggest foreign policy decision in forty years (in fact, since the one we might be about to reverse), that didn’t quite happen. The irony, of course, is that it was the very Eurosceptics who tout our “special relationship” with the with the US as more important than Europe that dismissed his statement that a post-Brexit UK would be at the “back of the queue” in US trade priorities (a statement which clearly showed his pro-British sentiments with its concessions to the word “queue”, whatever Boris Johnson says). 

Suddenly, Obama was irrelevant, his views on Brexit an intrusion on our decision as a nation, despite his government’s policy being the cornerstone of Brexiteers’ trade plans. He was also accused of having bias against the UK informed by his Kenyan ancestry, an accusation that combined the unpleasant tactic of deemphasising his American nationality with a possible admission that the narrative of strong links and trust with former colonies being a somewhat rose-tinted view of the past.

But the cat was out of the bag. Despite what Boris thinks, the elected president of the United States doesn’t think that the UK is more of a priority than the EU - and even if he did, the least active Congress in the history of the United States would be unlikely to hammer out a brand new trade agreement in the foreseeable future for him anyway. On the other side of the political spectrum, Brexit has only been championed by Ted Cruz with even Donald Trump, whom even Boris Johnson found himself dismissing as talking xenophobic nonsense, declining to endorse the Leave camp. 

However, the main reason that nobody else’s views can really be examined is that Barack Obama is pretty much the only politician in the entire United States who has time to spend more than a sentence at a time discussing something other than the next presidential election. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have expressed support for the EU and Ted Cruz has attacked it, both because it stands for big government and because it was an opportunity to contradict Obama, but these are merely facets of their overall statements on US foreign policy - because that is, and will remain, their priority until November, by which time the EU question will be long decided. It is further symptomatic of Donald Trump’s general attitude to politics that he did not express a view - after all, it might find itself in conflict with a more important view that he wishes to hold later on. Presidential candidates aside, prominent members of the US Congress have uniformly declined to express any view. In fact, politicians in the US are remarkably unified in their opinion that it is the decision of the British people alone.

As a result, we see more from the response of the rest of the USA’s political heavyweights (and Ted Cruz) than we do from President Obama. It isn’t that the top flight of American politics are anti-British, or in cahoots with the Eurocrats. It’s simply that our relationship with the EU isn’t their priority. And when we notice that, perhaps we can re-evaluate our relationship with them.

Photo from the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

Bull in a China Shop: Trump's Frightening Take on Asia

Taylor Yu

Videos like this are why the internet is a great, great thing. For those of you too lazy to click the link, it’s a three-minute clip of Donald Trump - the billionaire/reality TV star/’politician’ whose unbearable personality and equally unbearable hairdo have somehow propelled him into the forefront of the US elections race – just saying the word ‘China’. Over and over again.

I’ve no shame in saying that I found this way funnier than I should’ve, but it did get me thinking: what does this man actually want from China? Beyond all the jokes and the weirdly hilarious video-compilations that currently constitute the only media coverage of Trump that I actually care about, was there much substance or practicality behind Trump’s very much explicit dislike for China? Would China-bashing make America great again?

No, not really. In fact, it’s so unlikely to help the United States that the China Press, a Chinese-language newspaper based in the States, recently referred to Trump as ‘China’s secret agent in America’.

Let’s start with the 45% tariff on exports that Trump has proposed as part of his campaign. In theory, this would protect American jobs and promote American business; in reality, the implementation of such a drastic measure would set in motion an avalanche of global economic consequences. Basic economic intuition suggests that higher import taxes equate to higher prices, especially in a large open economy like that of the United States. Shrinking sales of Chinese products would not only hurt the average American consumer, but also damage American businesses who are actually heavily involved in the production and distribution process of goods that are ‘made in China’. Hufbauer and Lowry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics studied the impact of a 35% tariff imposed on Chinese tire imports by Washington in 2009 and discovered that for American consumers had to spend $900,000 dollars more on tires for every job saved - a trade-off scary enough to keep policymakers up at night.

If Trump’s wish is to strengthen the United States by weakening China, then this policy might work in an alternate universe in which the major economies weren’t connected in any way – one only needs to look at the relationship between the recent performance of the financial markets and China’s declining growth to comprehend the influence that China’s economic downfall may have the global economy. All of this, in addition to the fact that there would be nothing to stop the notoriously impulsive and unpredictable Chinese government to set up tariffs of its own on American goods and services, clearly suggest that Trump’s proposed tariff would only serve to undermine the United States.

What about in the wider context of the Wild Wild East arena? As a recent article in The Diplomat suggested, ‘the United States simply cannot be made great again by defining its closest global relationships purely in transactional terms or by insisting on going it alone while making others pay’. For years, Trump has argued for colder relations with Japan, who currently serves as the United States’ fourth-largest trading partner’, as well as South Korea, claiming that the United States should consider withdrawing its troops if Japan and South Korea don’t pay more for their upkeep. I don’t know what’s more concerning: the fact that the $2 billion Japan pays annually toward the upkeep of U.S. troops isn’t enough, or the fact that Trump cannot see that withdrawing from Asia would only play to China’s favour, giving it more leverage in future negotiations and allowing it to dictate terms in the Asian sphere.

The United States have spent years trying to build up a strong presence in Asia – with Trump at the helm, all of this may potentially vanish for the sake of ‘making America great again’ and at the expense of stability between two of the world’s great powers. It’s a thought that makes the video linked above a little less funny and a lot more frightening.

Photograph: Donald Trump via photopin (license)

Sudan: ongoing international repercussions

Sophie Dowle

Sudan’s internal conflicts were splashed across the front pages of leading international newspapers in 2011 when the country split in two, becoming Sudan and South Sudan. The tensions that produced this split are far from resolved, even if they no longer make front page news. 

Sudan has long suffered conflict. In 1955, just prior to Sudan gaining independence, the South began a war for liberation. The South, predominantly Christian and Animist, fought for independence from the Arab Muslim North in a war that lasted 17 years. Civilians were caught in the violence and thousands were killed, raped, and enslaved. Juba, now the capital of South Sudan, was set alight. Peace followed in the 1970s, but in 1983 the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military wing, the SPLA, rekindled the fight. Soon after, an Islamist military junta took over in Khartoum, the northern capital. The junta aimed to subjugate the South, and full scale civil war resumed from 1983 to 2005. By the time peace was secured, at least 1.5 million people had died in fighting or resulting displacement, famine, or disease. Many thousands of others fled to neighbouring countries or the West. 

But the North-South divide was not the only conflict to manifest itself in Sudan. In the South there was bitter fighting between Dinka and Nuer factions, and it is this that led to the further fighting in South Sudan once the country split away. These ethnic tensions culminated when in 2013 the Dinka president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayardit, sacked his entire cabinet and accused vice-president Riek Machar, a Nuer, of instigating a failed coup. This led to the 2013-2015 civil war in the South, which displaced another two million people, and saw further bloodshed and famine from disrupted agriculture. 

The North has also failed to create a peaceful state following the decision to let the South split away. Violence continues in the western region of Darfur, which has displaced two million people and killed over 200,000 people. Human Rights Watch describes the ongoing conflicts in the North as “characterised by unnecessary and avoidable civilian deaths and injuries; sexual violence against women and girls; unlawful destruction of civilian property, and have forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee their homes.” President Omar al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes in Darfur and was re-elected in 2015 in a poll that, according to Human Rights Watch, did not meet standards for free and fair elections.

Furthermore, the split has not enabled the two countries to settle their differences. Tensions continue over issues such as border demarcation and shared oil revenues. It was only in January of this year that Sudan first opened its border with South Sudan.  

This conflict has not only left a trail of destruction across the two countries, but also has ongoing international consequences. There are over 5.5 million Sudanese refugees worldwide. Nearby states, such as Chad, Uganda and Egypt, are struggling with the increased pressure that thousands of refugees place on their resources and fragile political systems. 

Some Sudanese refugees travelled to places such as Jordan. However, Jordan, already struggling with the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees combined with Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, decided to forcibly deport hundreds of Sudanese refugees in January this year. More than 100 of these deportees were detained by the Sudanese authorities upon their return, and some are still missing.  

This issue has impact yet further afield. Many of the inhabitants of the refugee camp in Calais are Sudanese. While the French and British authorities leave those in the camp in limbo, while they try to decide how to deal with the residents in the camp, the numbers of people arriving, having fled war-torn Sudan, ever increases, and the hope of being able to repatriate them to a safe Sudan dwindle rapidly. Many in the West congratulated themselves for brokering the peace in 2011, following the creation of South Sudan. However, with the resumption of fighting and sustained tensions in both the South (where the 2013-15 civil war has supposedly ended) and the North, the congratulations have quickly turned to panic among the international community, as famine looms and further bloodshed and another generation lost to war looks evermore inevitable.