Road blocks loom for China’s great initiative

The current stand-off between China and the United States over trade presents a breathing space, and possibly an opportunity, for India to solidify its position in the Asian power game being played out between the two giant nations.

For the moment at least Beijing’s attention is fixed westward, angered by President Donald Trump’s increasingly protectionist stance, struggling to moderate its mercurial neighbour, North Korea, and with an inevitable eye on the manoeuvres of its ‘renegade province’, Taiwan.

This means that, for the moment at least, the momentum is off China’s much heralded Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which New Delhi believes is actually a not so subtle attempt to isolate it by turning its near neighbours into compliant client States.

In fact BRI is currently giving China more headaches than advantages. Clumsy attempts to cajole countries into paying for much of the infrastructure needed for the project have forced many into significant indebtedness to Beijing.

This has led to increased anti-China sentiment among local populations, a questioning of China’s real intentions and a growing feeling that Beijing is not the benevolent provider of largesse it has been trying to portray.

As Shahidul Haque, the Foreign Minister of Bangladesh, one of the BRI’s prime targets, pointed out: “There is a need to balance economic integration with sovereignty”.

As if to emphasise this, Bangladesh cancelled a Chinese project to develop a new port at Sonadia in favour of a Japanese offer of a similar project at Matarbari just 25 kilometres away.

This has delighted the Government in New Delhi which viewed Sonadia has a key part of the ‘string or pearls’ strategy to encircle India in its own maritime backyard, as well as threatening its position on the nearby Andaman and Nicobar islands.

However, Bangladesh is just one nation which is beginning to have doubts about the BRI. A report from the Washington-based Centre for Global Development says eight of the 68 countries involved in the project are in grave financial difficulties because of it, with another 15 “significantly or highly vulnerable to debt distress”. 

“Djibouti already owes 82 per cent of its foreign debt to China, while China is expected to account for 71 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s debt as BRI projects are implemented,” the report stated.

“There is concern that debt problems will create an unfavourable degree of dependency on China as a creditor. Increasing debt, and China's role in managing bilateral debt problems, has already exacerbated internal and bilateral tensions in some BRI countries,” the report continued.

These and other concerns are the subject of intense focus in New Delhi. Realists in the Government of Narendra Modi know that it will be many years before India has the economic and military strength to challenge China, and in the meantime it has to rely on others — and Beijing’s own missteps — while it gets on with the business of catching up. With a little help from its friends this strategy may produce the required results.  

Journalism will survive the digital age

I was surprised to see a series of reports on comments made by the Chief Minister of my old stomping ground, the Australian Capital Territory, dominating my news feed relating to international journalism issues the other morning.

Even more so when I found the CM, Andrew Barr, had launched a tirade partly against my old newspaper, the Canberra Times, and generally against mainstream journalism.

He described the Times as “a joke”, and that it would be only a matter of years before it closed, while the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was relevant only to old fuddy-duddies in their 60s and above.

In Barr’s new world, his message will be presented to the populace via social media channels “and that is the path we are going to be pursuing over the next few years”.

If the Chief Minister thinks he is on to some radically different idea that is going to change the world, he had better think again. For years, Local Government in the United Kingdom has tried to by-pass traditional media through its own in-house publications.

These ‘Town Hall Pravdas’, have been derided as “propaganda sheets designed solely to tell people how great the councils are”. In many cases they have been so one-sided that the UK Government’s Minister for Local Government pronounced them a waste of ratepayers’ money and ordered them restricted to no more than four editions a year.

Barr talks about the “cutting edge of communication” which presumably means his alternative platforms would be digital, given that he believes this is the news source of choice for all but a few old has-beens in his constituency, but while I am not comfortable with the brutality of his words, he does have a point.

To return to the UK, newspapers there are closing at the rate of one a week. Of the publications I have worked on around the world since the 1960s, two have disappeared and one has gone from daily to weekly.

If Barr is right when he says the circulation of the Canberra Times is now about 15,000, that is less than half of what it was when I began to work there in the 1980s.

There is no doubt that hard copy newspapers are facing a crisis, but that does not mean journalism is in crisis. Newspapers may disappear, but journalists will not. If the Chief Minister believes that he will get an open and uncritical route to the people of Canberra via cyberspace, he obviously does not know much about it.

Granted when it comes to news the internet is currently chaotic, but so was the dawn of the newspaper age in the 18^th century when consumers had to choose between solid reporting, satire and horrific scandal sheets that could and did, say what they liked about anyone and anything.

It took time (and libel laws) but eventually the more outrageous rags gave way to professional, well researched newspapers. People learned to tell the difference.

So it will be today. More and more people will switch from newspapers to the internet, but increasingly they will favour the sites that provide reliable, well-researched news and comment provided by independent professional journalists, over advertising puffs from organisations that have a barrow to push — either to sell a product or get re-elected.  

Barr may try to dodge his local newspaper, but he will never be able to ignore local journalists.

Hard to believe – but the world is getting better

A United Kingdom Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, once won a General Election — by a landslide — by telling the electorate ‘you’ve never had it so good’.

It would be a brave, or extremely foolish, politician who would dare to say anything like  that today in a world beset by random acts of terrorism,  increasing tensions between nations, a possible trade war and highly unpredictable  international diplomacy.

Yet Macmillan was right when he coined that slogan back in 1959, and continues to be right today.

I pondered this after listening to Canadian philosopher Steven Pinker who asked us to put aside the 24-hour news cycle and the so called counter-enlightenment of United States President Donald Trump and consider the fact that fewer people are dying of disease or hunger, fewer people are living in abject poverty and more are receiving an education than at any time in human history.

This has been a trend in progress at least since the medieval era and has actually been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution.

In a wide-ranging interview, the kernel of Pinker’s argument was this: “It’s just a simple matter of arithmetic. You can’t look at how much there is right now and say it is increasing or decreasing until you compare it with how much took place in the past.

“[Then] you realise how much worse things were in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. We don’t appreciate it now when we concentrate on the remaining horrors, but there were horrific wars such as the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the war in Vietnam, the partition of India, the Bangladesh war of independence , the Korean War, which killed far more people than even the brutal wars of today.  

“We ought to be aware of the suffering that continues to exist, but we can’t take this as evidence that things have gotten worse unless we remember what happened in the past.”

Pinker goes on to show that in historic terms  global inequality has decreased, democracy has advanced and Governments have become more aware of their responsibilities to the people they serve. The figures are there, and they are undeniable.

Of course this is a massively long-term view, something which is not appreciated by human beings who see the world only in the context of their own lifetimes and perhaps those of their children — and of their immediate environment.

It would be pointless to argue with the inhabitants of Ghouta that the world is steadily improving or, on another scale, remind the residents  of an Australian suburb of the inadequacies of Victorian sewerage systems when their homes are inundated by overflowing stormwater drains during unprecedented rainfall, possibly the result of climate change.  

So the horrors remain, and through the 24 hour news cycle (created by unprecedented advances in technology) we are fully aware for the first time in history of the massive forces at work in the world.

Of course this is daunting, but understanding it is the first step to solving — not to throw up our arms and walk away saying it is all too hard.

In 1959, Macmillan got away with his slogan due to a unique set of circumstances: Memories of World War II and the post-war austerity it created were fading; new schools and hospitals were being built; televisions were going into every home; the United Kingdom still seemed to be a major global player.

Finally ‘Supermac’ (a title he secretly adored) was able to run circles around a weak Opposition that had no answer to his unbounded optimism.   

The stars aligned for Macmillan’s benefit then. Today’s circumstances make it inconceivable they will do so in the short term again, yet that is no reason to abandon efforts to work for a better world, even if that world is one we will probably never see.