Tag Archives: asia

Tokyo train stations

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I have never been to Tokyo, unfortunately. I had a trip planned there in 2011, but the earthquake and nuclear meltdown that year intervened. My condolences to everyone who lost loved ones or was otherwise directly impacted by that event, and I am not suggesting the minor disruption to my vacation plans that year was comparatively important.

Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing Tokyo firsthand and I didn’t get to. But I guess pictures are the next best thing. This article has some nice pictures of railway stations. Now, I spent some time in Singapore recently, and the railway stations there are pretty new and very modern looking. The first thing that strikes me about these Tokyo stations is they are not brand new, and they look pretty similar to older train stations here in the U.S. But the comparison ends there, because they are clean, well maintained, the service is reliable and the population is proud of their public transportation system. I also note that these older stations have been successfully retrofit with barriers so that people can’t fall/be pushed/intentionally jump onto the tracks and die. In the United States, at least here in my home city of Philadelphia, we “can’t afford” these barriers. Meaning of course that human life is not worth enough to us to make this a priority compared to other things we spend enormous amounts of money on, like highways and bombs.

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/

“nuclear capable states”

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I knew Japan was considered a nuclear capable state, meaning they have the technology, raw materials, and expertise to produce nuclear weapons if they so choose. I recently heard this claim about Taiwan, which was news to me. Now I have heard it about South Korea.

The risk of nuclear war is getting unacceptable. The U.S., Russia, and China could be leading on this issue, but are instead fanning the flames.

Puerto Rico

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Another serious hurricane has hit Puerto Rico, and the response is inadequate. I continue to see this as an indicator of U.S. decline as a competent modern nation. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the response was incompetent, and we were horrified. Our collective reaction to the inadequate response (can we say incompetent when there wasn’t even much effort) in Puerto Rico last time around was more of a shrug. This time, it gets maybe half a day of national media coverage and we barely notice. (Or maybe it was because I was listening to BBC World to find out about the world, and they were somewhat understandably focused on their queen’s passing? A significant historical figure to be sure, but Mikhail Gorbachev just passed away for crying out loud and even THAT only got a couple days of coverage.) We are coming to just accept mediocrity and incompetence as disasters keep hitting us, and our complacency will lead to decline as we do not demand anything better.

Speaking of horrific hurricane disasters, I was perusing this article about Myanmar, where things are pretty awful, and was then struck by the figure (nice tree map!) near the bottom showing the number of displaced people in the Philippines. That seems like a really bad situation, and it has gotten very little media coverage in the U.S., at least that I noticed.

The rare earth rush

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Rare earths. They’re in all our electronics and mining them has been called the new “gold rush”. They’ve also been called the new conflict minerals, as in peasants are brutally massacred and driven off their land for them, and mining them irresponsibly is an environmental nightmare. Way too nightmarish for China, apparently, but not for Myanmar. And what is mined brutally and irresponsibly in Myanmar can be passed through companies in China and along to major household name electronics manufacturers who do not ask too many questions.

Ramping up recycling would seem to be an obvious answer. These minerals are valuable, and extracting them from existing products where they are already concentrated should be a no-brainer. There should be viable business models to get this done. And if that is not easy enough, recycling should be considered from the very beginning of the design and manufacturing process. If amoral companies aren’t interested, you can regulate them or tax them, at international borders and by international agreement. Easy peasy right?

What was Abenomics

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Bloomberg has a long article on the economic policies of Shinzo Abe. Basically, the Japanese economy stopped growing after the 1990s economic crisis. Not just low growth, but no growth in GDP for about a decade followed by a sharp contraction during the 2000s financial crisis. Deflation or declining prices were a symptom of this. At the same time, Japan had very low unemployment throughout. Part of the story is that the economy is starved for workers due to an aging economy, political resistance to immigration, and low participation in the work force by women. Some “Abenomics” was basically a policy of massive government borrowing and spending aimed at shocking the system back into a growth mode. It sort of worked, but it seems to be reverting to the mean now.

I think there are a few lessons. This helps me understand why central banks want to have a low but positive inflation rate. You don’t want to money supply to constrain growth. You want to have rational immigration and guest worker policies that allow in the workers with the skills your economy needs that your native population is unable or unwilling to fulfill. This can be politically difficult, obviously, and you want to do it humanely for the people involved. Governments can borrow and spend with reckless abandon in times of crisis, and then they need to be able to ratchet back quickly when the economy picks up and the private sector is able to pick up the slack. Also politically very difficult. Rational child care and health care policies to remove barriers to working women would help.

But finally, it does not seem like life in Japan is all that bad. So another lesson might be that there is a path to a low-growth economy where life is not that bad, people have meaningful work and their basic needs are met.

China and Taiwan

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What would a China-Taiwan military conflict look like, and could it happen in 2021 or in the relatively near future? Would the U.S. necessarily get dragged in?

I don’t really trust what I read in the media about China. It’s not that I assume everything I read is outright lies, but I assume there are layers of misunderstanding and intentional bias along with facts. For one thing, we know the U.S. military-industrial complex needs enemies to continue sucking in a quarter or so of our tax payments and our government’s spending. Then there is just the general American lack of ability to see things from other peoples’ and countries’ points of view. It can help to read accounts from international sources, although they will also have biases. Anyway, this particular account is from The Diplomat, which seems to be a reputable news source from what I can tell, and the author is a Taiwanese academic. So exercise your own judgment in evaluating the source, but here is my summary:

  • China’s official stated goal is “peaceful unification”.
  • China is engaged in propaganda, disinformation, and putting pressure on other countries in the region. (I would imagine this is true of both sides, and in fact most countries in any kind of conflict.)
  • China’s goal in a military conflict would be for any conflict to be over quickly, before other countries have much chance to react.
  • China is currently engaged in what the author calls a “gray zone strategy”, in which it uses ships and aircraft to harass and threaten Taiwan without actually attacking. It might also be doing things underwater in “blind spots that Taiwan’s surveillance and reconnaissance systems fail to cover.”
  • Further escalation could be to blockade offshore islands claimed by Taiwan, and possibly occupy them.
  • The next major escalation could be stopping ship traffic to and from Taiwan, which would cut off energy supplies and trade.
  • China would likely amass a large number of troops nearby, whether or not it had immediate plans to use them. The initial goal would be to intimidate politicians in Taiwan in hopes they would agree to negotiate.
  • The Taiwan military and leadership would have to decide at this point whether to defend itself militarily, which could launch an all-out war.

This article doesn’t quite hold together for me. A protracted blockade seems like exactly the thing that would give Taiwan time to appeal internationally for help, and other countries time to decide what to do.

24 million people live on Taiwan, and they have many more people who care about them all over the world. The human cost of any military conflict would be horrific. Let’s hope none of this ever comes to pass!

India and China

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Soldiers from India and China literally fought with sticks and stones – in June 2020 – and reports are that at least 20 were killed. What appears to happen is that both sides undertake construction projects close to the disputed border. Troops occasionally encounter each other – or attack each other on purpose, who knows?

This just seems dangerous when it’s two large, powerful countries with powerful militaries, including nuclear weapons, and nationalist politics. Isn’t the UN Security Council supposed to help mediate in these cases? I haven’t heard a word about that – maybe one more sign the UN has weakened to the point of irrelevance.

Belt and Road

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The Council on Foreign Relations has a primer on China’s Belt and Road initiative here.

Xi’s vision included creating a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and streamlined border crossings, both westward—through the mountainous former Soviet republics—and southward, to Pakistan, India, and the rest of Southeast Asia. Such a network would expand the international use of Chinese currency, the renminbi, while new infrastructure could “break the bottleneck in Asian connectivity,” according to Xi. (The Asian Development Bank estimates that the region faces a yearly infrastructure financing shortfall of nearly $800 billion.) In addition to physical infrastructure, China plans to build fifty special economic zones, modeled after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which China launched in 1980 during its economic reforms under leader Deng Xiaoping.

Xi subsequently announced plans for the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road at the 2013 summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia. To accommodate expanding maritime trade traffic, China would invest in port development along the Indian Ocean, from Southeast Asia all the way to East Africa.

The Wild Boars

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BBC has a good story on the whole saga of the boys who got trapped in the cave, located and eventually rescued. The videos, pictures, and letters really humanize the story. I have to admit that while it was actually going on, I was reading about it but purposely avoiding the pictures and especially videos because I didn’t think it was going to turn out well. Maybe this will help us all to have more compassion for children whether they are close to home and not.

how chili peppers got to Asia

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There were no chili peppers in China or Southeast Asia until at least the 1500s according to this article. Chilis are native to South America.

The first mention of the chili pepper in the Chinese historical record appears in 1591, although historians have yet to arrive at a consensus as to exactly how it arrived in the Middle Kingdom. One school of thought believes the pepper came overland from India into western China via a northern route through Tibet or a southern route across Burma. But the first consistent references to chili peppers in local Chinese gazettes start in China’s eastern coastal regions and move gradually inland toward the West—reaching Hunan in 1684 and Sichuan in 1749—data points that support the argument that the chili pepper arrived by sea, possibly via Portuguese traders who had founded a colony near the southern Chinese coast on the island of Macao…

The article also suggests that it might have been Columbus himself who was responsible for calling this plant “pepper”. Because he thought he was in India, and had a habit of naming people and things using words already assigned to other people and things.