The Economist: Asia
Asia



China and North Korea: Greetings, comrades (Sep 2)
What lies behind the Dear Leader’s latest trip to China?NORTH KOREA’S leader, Kim Jong Il, must have been on an urgent mission when he boarded his bulletproof train and headed to China for the second time in less than four months on August 26th. With America’s former president Jimmy Carter in town, devastating floods in the north and a rare conclave of his ruling party only days away, Mr Kim had much to keep him at home. But buttering up China appears to be a new priority. Both China and North Korea, as is their wont, kept quiet about the visit until after Mr Kim’s return on August 30th. By then Mr Carter had left with an American, Aijalon Gomes, who had been serving eight years’ hard labour for entering the country illegally in January. Mr Gomes’s release was a rare gesture of conciliation to America after months of heightened tension caused by the sinking in March of a South Korean naval vessel. ...


Football and Korean reunification: Dreaming of 2022 (Sep 2)
The South waves sticks and dangles footballs at the NorthSOUTH KOREANS are unsure precisely how best to respond to the uncertain changes in the regime to the North. A hardline approach to its neighbour has been the official stance ever since the Cheonan, a Southern military corvette, was torpedoed in March. Sanctions, a diplomatic freeze and military exercises with the Americans all suggest that the authorities in Seoul are in no mood to back down.Yet this week, the South Korean Red Cross said that it would send emergency aid, mostly food and medicine, worth $8.4m to help the North cope with floods. This would be the first aid to flow north since May, but the South’s government insists it is merely a temporary humanitarian measure. ...


India's disappointing government: Much less than promised (Sep 2)
The economy is powering on, but the Congress-led coalition is squandering an opportunity to improve IndiaTHE weightlifting auditorium has a leaky roof. The athletes’ village has no kitchen. Stagnant monsoon water, abuzz with dengue-carrying mosquitoes, collects at most of the stadiums being hurriedly built for the Delhi Commonwealth games, which are due to begin on October 3rd. The security arrangements, in terrorism-stricken India, are shot to pieces because of 24-hour processions of workmen at most venues. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, reiterates the official line that these will be the “best games ever”. That may depend on how you define “best”.This shambles, for which corruption, feuding ministries, sapping bureaucracy and shoddy workmanship are all to blame, does not matter to many Indians. Athletics is not cricket. And few know much about their country’s image abroad. Yet it is depressing, not least because it mirrors how large parts of India are run. ...


Nalanda university: Ivory pagodas (Sep 2)
An ancient pan-Asian university might yet open againNALANDA is an unlovely place in the poorest state in India. Yet, as in much of Bihar, a prosaic present belies a poetic past. It is the site of one of the first great universities which, half a millennium before the founding of Oxford, flourished with some 10,000 students and monks from all over Asia. Mango groves and lotus pools circled its halls, and an 8th-century inscription touted its “row of pagodas the spires of which touched the clouds.”If some scholars and diplomats have their way, a new generation of students will be enrolled. A bill has just snaked through India’s parliament calling for Nalanda’s revival, at a likely cost of several hundred million dollars. The Nalanda Mentor Group, led by Amartya Sen, an economics Nobel laureate, has overseen the project since it was first proposed in 2006. The Bihar state government has agreed to provide 500 acres for a new campus and India’s Planning Commission has proffered 1 billion...


Vietnam's economy: Plus one country (Sep 2)
Cheap labour will not yield gains for ever. But what comes next is unclearON THE edge of Hanoi brick-walled factories lie abandoned, weeds sprouting in their ruins. Surprisingly, this is a sign of progress. The land is slated for new housing; the state-owned textile firm that operated there is moving to an industrial park, where it can better meet booming demand for Vietnamese garments. Exports of textiles and garments rose by 17% in the first seven months this year, to $5.8 billion, suggesting that investors still favour Vietnam as a base for cheap manufacturing. Its advantages have been amplified by recent labour unrest and rising costs in southern China’s factories. In Hanoi there is renewed talk of “China Plus One” as a strategy for multinationals keen to spread their bets. Vietnam could gain handsomely, thanks to its labour which is cheaper than China’s and its neighbours’ (see chart). Even after a pay rise, the monthly wage for a textile worker starts at $84, says Nguyen Tung ...


Parliamentary polls in Afghanistan : Bloody democracy (Sep 2)
Elections this month should not be quite as awful as last year’s presidential oneTHE presidential poll in Afghanistan is still the stuff of nightmares for the technicians, diplomats and officials who had the misfortune to be involved in it. They shudder at the orgy of Taliban violence unleashed across the country on voting day, August 20th 2009, the most violent day in recent years. Voters stayed away from many polling stations, leaving corrupt supporters of the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, to stuff ballot boxes with perhaps 1m votes. And during the months of ballot auditing and recounts that followed, the business of government ground to a halt.Relations between Afghanistan’s Western backers and Mr Karzai also sank to a wretched low after the West dared to point out the extraordinary level of electoral fraud. “God, it was just terrible,” says one shaken foreign election expert. “It just can’t happen again.” ...


Banyan: Afloat on a Chinese tide (Sep 2)
China’s economic rise has brought the rest of emerging Asia huge benefits. But the region still needs the WestWITH markets still on edge after the worst financial crisis in decades, and fears of renewed recession stalking the West, this week seemed a poignant moment for China’s People’s Daily to detect a “golden age of development”, for Asia at least. Yet developing Asia, led by China itself, is booming. China’s GDP barrelled along in the first half of the year, growing by 11.1% compared with a year earlier. The newly industrialised little tigers—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—as well as most of South-East Asia seem to have fully recovered from the downturn. Even Thailand, mired in political turmoil, grew by 9.1% in the second quarter.The dream is that this gilded future is now insulated from rich-world downturns: that China—now having, after all, officially overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy—can drive growth for the whole region. One day, maybe. Not...


Nepal's perilous politics: Summer reruns (Aug 26)
Bovine politicians fail to pick a prime ministerTHE monsoon brings Nepal’s annual cow festival, a chance for ordinary people to mock their rulers in traditional street performances. This year the comedians were blessed with plenty of material. Two months after the prime minister resigned, on the grounds that he was unable to advance the country’s peace process, Nepal remains without a leader. As a result, the tenuous peace stands in dire need of some process.Five rounds of voting in the democratically elected Constituent Assembly, which also serves as a parliament, have failed to produce a new prime minister. A sixth round, scheduled for September 5th, is unlikely to do any better. ...


Jam tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow (Aug 26)
A booming economy and middle class means painfully slow roads.Drivers beware: a booming economy and middle class may result in painfully slow roads. One traffic jam this month, along a highway leading to Beijing, stretched over 100km and lasted for nine days. Some 248,000 additional cars were registered in Beijing in the first four months of this year alone, snarling up the streets. Lots of roadworks are causing short-term grief. But the main problem seems to be demand for goods and energy, as lorries carrying coal crawl endlessly towards the city. Beijing is said to be spending 80 billion yuan ($11.8 billion) this year on transport infrastructure. It might be wiser to invest in alternative forms of power generation. ...


Talking about reform in China: Change you can believe in? (Aug 26)
The prime minister calls frankly for political reformCHINA is enjoying its new status as the world’s second-largest economy, but the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is refusing to relax. During a visit to a southern boomtown he declared that economic gains could yet be lost without reforms to the political system. One official newspaper called his speech one of “extraordinary importance”, but sceptics abound.His remarks on August 20th and 21st in the city of Shenzhen have been compared by some optimists to those made by the late Deng Xiaoping during a tour of the same city in 1992. Deng’s calls for market-oriented reforms sent central-planners scurrying and unleashed the entrepreneurial energy that has helped China to grow at giddy rates since. During his trip Mr Wen laid flowers before a statue of Deng, who turned Shenzhen into a test bed for economic change exactly 30 years ago. ...