Kyrgyzstan - even the neighbours don't care

Does anyone care what is happening in Kyrgyzstan? Well, obviously we don’t much, as it’s a jolly long way away and ethnic conflicts rarely make much sense. But what about the countries rather closer to the action, like Russia and China? All three countries are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which, consisting of four little ‘stans plus the Big Two, looks at first glance like one of those “Fox & Chickens Co-Partnership Agreements”. In reality, of course, the foxes are the governments, all of them, and the chickens are their peoples.

While horrible things happen to the Uzbeks of Osh, the mighty neighbours are showing considerable restraint. Russia has so far shown no sign of responding to the new interim Kyrgyz Government’s invitation to Russia to send troops in to keep the peace. Does it matter that they asked Russia rather than China? Well, Russia has a military base in Kyrgyzstan already, and makes no secret of regarding the Central Asian ‘stans as part of its extensive backyard. Also I can imagine the Russians having rather a tough time working out who the goodies and baddies are from that point of view: this is no longer a sound post-Soviet government against CIA-backed rebels, as both the post-Soviet government and its replacement have now been overthrown. And the government of Uzbekistan, a sound post-Soviet government if ever there was one, is showing little sympathy for its persecuted brothers across the border, which it has closed to Uzbek refugees.

Unlike Russia, China actually has a border with Kyrgyzstan. But all they have done is organise a fairly efficient airlift to extract their own citizens from the killing zone. Intervention outside the borders is something China just does not do, at least not since having its butt kicked by the Vietnamese in 1979. On the surface Russia and China are both firm adherents of the absolute-sovereignty-no-interference-in-internal-affairs brigade. But Russia is inclined to make exceptions for the countries of the former Soviet Union, which it would secretly like to reincorporate. China, on the other hand, is not interested in direct control, which implies responsibility, at all; China just wants to make sure the natural resources are flowing in the right direction, which is east. Not that Kyrgyzstan has much in the way of natural resources (apart from a certain amount of gold); but that whole region is pipeline country, and thus will bear watching. And, of course, if any unrest were to spill over into Xinjiang, that would be an entirely different matter; one more reason for getting Chinese nationals, who are mostly Muslim businessmen from Xinjiang, out of Kyrgyzstan sharpish.

So poor old Kyrgyzstan is going to have to sort out its own problems – I don’t think there’s much chance of their getting the UN peacekeepers they’re hoping for. And they’ll have to make sure they sort them out in a way that doesn’t annoy anybody important. Not an easy proposition for a new and wobbly government.

BP dispute: Bend over and assume the position, Mr Cameron

So the Prime Minister is going to Washington on July 20th, at which time it is safe to assume that the sub-oceanic gusher is still gushing away and that one will still be able to fill up one’s Buick from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not often I can drum up real sympathy for my former FCO colleagues, but I do feel just a bit for the poor chaps and chapesses in Washington and King Charles Street currently (and I do mean currently, this being Sunday lunchtime) working on the visit preparation.
As a diplomatic imbroglio, this one might have defeated Talleyrand. How to maintain and restore the worn fabric of the “special relationship” while causing justice to be seen to be done for the misdoings of a US/UK company with a British-derived name? No-one can blame the American people for being angry. But managing that anger seems as difficult as capping the oil leak. Thank heaven we didn’t exacerbate it by winning the footy.

Americans are always keen, where possible, to reduce any issue to one they can chant “USA! USA!” about. And the problem is that, though BP is an international company owned by shareholders all over the world (with US and UK holdings almost equivalent), everybody knows what the “B” originally stood for. The USA doesn’t have that much history, but what it has focuses understandably on the nation’s genesis and resisting King George’s redcoats. It’s an easy button to press. President Obama assures us he is not anti-British and has no wish to lay the blame on Britain: but his frequent references to the company’s former name are a bit disingenuous. Over here we recognise the sound of a dog-whistle when we hear one.

Furthermore, the President has also lapsed into the kind of down-home language everyone likes to hear, by talking about “kicking ass”. The trouble with that is the usual trouble with politicians’ promises: pretty soon people are going to be asking for evidence of ass duly kicked. Saying that he would have sacked Tony Hayward if Hayward had worked for him won’t do: a hypothetical ass-kicking is not enough. Not only can Obama do nothing meaningful about BP: he wouldn’t even want to. As Cameron has been rightly pointing out to him, serious damage to BP would be serious damage to both UK and US economies.

Threats to prevent the payment of dividends would also be an own goal (or a “Robert Green” as they are now known). There are as many pensioners over there who would be affected as over here. A ban on any BP employee being paid more than $100,000 this year would be a far better symbolic gesture, but it ain’t going to happen. In any case, Americans believe the sky would fall in if “executives” were not “compensated” according to their “status”.

This means that the circle will have to be squared diplomatically. If ass is going to be kicked without lousing up economic recovery, a sop will have to be thrown to the spirit of George Washington. The Southern States will not forgive Obama for missing such a fine opportunity to apply the shoe-leather. Somehow the impression has to be given that the limeys have got what was coming to them. I hope that the FCO furnishes the Prime Minister with a couple of nice thick files to insert in his trousers.

Farmer Yang's wheelbarrow cannon shows that the spirit of freedom is not dead in China

There’s always something new and surprising coming out of China. Yesterday the Telegraph related the tale of a farmer whose land is located on the edge of the rapidly expanding city of Wuhan. On being told, as farmers on the edge of Chinese cities frequently are, that his land was being requisitioned by local government for development, Mr Yang Youde did not simply submit. He mounted a metal pipe on a wheelbarrow and, using explosives extracted from China’s ubiquitous fireworks, improvised a cannon capable of firing a rocket more than 100 yards. He claims that he has fought off two attempts to evict him and move the bulldozers in.

There are two ways to look at this. On one hand, it’s an example of the lengths to which people can be pushed by an oppressive state apparatus which takes scant notice of the individual rights of its citizens. We know this happens in China, and sometimes we rather admire it. Think of the speed with which the Olympic stadia and their supporting infrastructure were prepared; half a dozen new underground lines, thirty or forty miles long and going right through the centre of Beijing (eat your heart out, Boris Johnson); the fact that, as people in Hamburg were always complaining to me, a new Chinese container port can be operative within 18 months of groundbreaking, whereas no-one in Europe can do it in less than ten years.
And we know there is a human cost to this, just as there is to the population control policy. Planning permission is not subject to delays or appeals. For the last twenty years people have been receiving instructions from the local authority to be out of their homes by a week on Friday. Resistance is futile.

But of course it is not always a question of major infrastructure projects of which everybody sees the point. In Mr Yang’s case, he was told by the local authority that the land was required for government buildings. Mr Yang is not so sure. By his calculations the market value of his land is about five times what the authorities are offering him. He suspects that, once he has been evicted, something rather more lucrative than government buildings will go up on his land, and that the local authority has been handsomely bribed to use its coercive powers to ensure that the developers acquire the land for a fraction of its real value. That is why he is putting up such spirited resistance.

Another view might be to admire the way in which the old buccaneering spirit of the Wild West is re-emerging in this otherwise strictly regimented country. The developers (assuming the argument of my last paragraph is correct, and I do) are behaving like old-style robber barons. As for Farmer Yang, what a splendid example of active citizenship. Just imagine if anyone tried to resist compulsory purchase in such a way in the UK. You’d be monstered, not only by the Old Bill but by Elf ‘n’ Safety too. You wouldn’t last two hours. Let us hope that Mr Yang avoids the slammer (the fact that this story was carried in the local media suggests some sympathy for him in high places) and that his spirit proliferates in China.

Bertie at the Bilderberg

Spring was doing its thing, the snail on the wing, the lark on the thorn, and morning was about quarter past eleven, as I trickled into the old Bilderberg for a snifter. But all was not as of old. Jeeves had warned me, on sending me forth into the wide world with my whangee and my yellowest shoes, that the old security had been stepped up a smidgeon. So I was about two-thirds prepared for the chappie who stopped his bullet-proof limo alongside me and invited me to hop in. “You can’t be too careful, Mr Wooster”, he said.

Now, I’m as aware as the next man that a certain amount of pre-prandial bread gets bunged about at the Bilderberg, especially when Catsmeat Potter-Putin is in attendance. But I could hardly credit that it was necessary to employ the horny-handed to protect the Wooster bonce from the odd ballistic baguette. “But no,” said my charioteer, “it is the oiks below who are feared by the gentlemen of your esteemed society.”

Well, if that’s the case, then your humble narrator asks no further questions. Indeed, when I entered the club, nothing seemed to be amiss. Oofy Prosser sat in his usual corner, his pimples flashing angrily at anyone who looked likely to try to touch him for a couple of billion. Conky Kissinger was holding forth at his usual table, with Boko Bush, Barmy Berlusconi, Sheepface Sarkozy, and the usual crowd hanging on every word. By the window an old fossil called Rockmetteller sat in a leather chair in an attitude I swear hadn’t altered one iota since the 1973 world oil crisis.

I ordered myself a convivial whisky-and-splash, and sat down with “Fruity” Cholmondeley-Friedman.

“Skin off your nose, Fruity, old robber baron,” I said.

“Mud in your eye, old fleecer of the widow and orphan,” he replied.

“So what’s all the jolly old manning-of-the-ramparts and battening-down-the-hatches about?”

“Why, Bertie, where have you been for the last few aeons?”

“Oh, you know, Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom, whatever...”

“Well, these days the great unwashed have got the idea that we’re running some kind of alternative World Government up here. All nonsense, of course; who on earth could be bothered with all that effort? No money in that sort of thing, anyway. Mind you, it’s true that some of the younger members find it rather a lark to be thought of as movers and shakers and Men of the Future; the only future the rest of us are interested in is when they’re going to buy their bally rounds. And the old jossers are just delighted that they can find someone who’s still prepared to take them seriously.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I’d hate to have anyone thinking that good old B. Wooster was important enough to warrant bumping off.”

“My dear chap, when have you ever heard of any of this lot being prepared to take responsibility for anything?”

“My dear old bean, you haven’t half taken a weight of my mind. Have another?”

China's Three Gorges Dam: a disaster takes shape

In China, cracks are appearing – in the neighbourhood of the massive Three Gorges Dam, the country’s great prestige project, and also in the Great Firewall of China, enabling the ominous news to leak out. Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks. A Sunday Times report tells of a series of landslips, minor earthquakes and cracks appearing in roads and buildings along the central section of the Yangtse, between the dam and the city of Chongqing. Almost 10,000 “dangerous sites” have been identified, but many of the people living near them cannot be relocated for lack of money. Two years ago thousands of children died in Sichuan Province because their schools were not resistant to the earthquake which hit the area; in the town of Badong near Chongqing children are attending school in buildings which have been recognised as far more vulnerable. What else can they do? The local authorities can’t afford a new one.

Like many such megaprojects, the Three Gorges was always driven as much by politics as by economics. Its rationale covered irrigation and flood control in the lower Yangtse plain, hydroelectric power generation, which sounds sensible: but objections were bulldozed in the tense political atmosphere of the late 1980s, when the final decisions were made.The dam was the pet project of then prime minister Li Peng, who was involved in the party split which led to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, in which he was the triumphant prime mover. In this context he was not going to back down on the dam, and the debate was closed down.

So the construction was forced through without even what passes in China for proper debate. The number of local people who had to be relocated came to 1.4 million – equivalent to the obliteration of Birmingham. Now it looks like another 300,000 will have to be shifted – add Coventry to that. This, in China, means getting a few weeks’ notice to quit and putting up with wherever the authorities see fit to put you. On top of that a large number of historic sites from one of the most ancient cradles of Chinese civilisation had to go. Yes, China has vast numbers of people to feed and cannot afford sentimentality, but perhaps a bit more care might have been taken to ensure that the costs and benefits had been properly calculated.

But even three years ago, with Li Peng and his family safely out of the way, official Chinese sources were admitting that things had gone horribly wrong. In the official media references were made to landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae. The Chinese aren’t unworldly and irresponsible greenies. When they point things like this out it’s because it’s causing real damage. Of course the authorities are careful not to promote mass panic, but so far the incidents are far enough apart to prevent collective protest; local complaints can still be suppressed without too much trouble.

Meanwhile, at the centre, it would appear that there is no great enthusiasm to see this all hushed up. The current supremo Hu Jintao has always taken care not to associate himself with the project. Hu’s faction of the Communist Party is broadly opposed by the “princelings’ faction” – i.e. the rich-kid offspring of the post-Mao leadership – and appears disinclined to pull Li Peng’s chestnuts out of the fire.

German President resigns: when are the Germans going to grow up?

President Horst Köhler, the generally well-respected German head of state, has felt compelled to resign, only a year into his second term. In a refreshing contrast to our own shenanigans, it had nothing to do with any dubious personal enrichment strategies, on which the Germans are much tougher than we are. It was a genuine political issue. What Dr Köhler appears to have said was that Germany’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan is motivated by a wish for economic as well as physical security; the security of supply lines, trade routes etc.

Well, derr. How could such a statement of the obvious have caused such a furore? Only in Germany. It’s something you’re not allowed to say, see, unless you’re a lefty activist denouncing warmongering capitalism, in which case you say it all the time. But you can’t say it if you’re the state President. You have to keep parroting the line that NATO is protecting the German people from Afghan-trained terrorists, and is there FOR NO OTHER REASON. Protecting economic interests means that you’re working solely in the interests of the rich (who, as we know, are the only people who need an economy).

But the fact that this sort of issue cannot be discussed in public without causing resignations just shows how infantile the level of debate frequently is in Germany. If they outdo us in personal financial rectitude, they knock spots off us when it comes to political correctness. A chap I knew slightly – the new partner of an old friend – once expressed incredulity when informed that I, a fellow leftie, owned some shares. How could I support capitalism in such a way? Investing in capitalist companies just enabled them to rationalise their operations, which always led to downsizing and people losing their jobs. I admitted that this might happen, but surely it was equally likely that the companies might use the investment to expand their operations and create jobs. He hadn’t thought of that. This was a man around 40 with a university degree and a job of commensurate status.

And when it comes to war the reactions are equal and opposite to what they were in 1939. It’s just bad. It sucks. Which of course is true, but grown-up nations recognise that one does have to prepare for it happening occasionally. All right, you may feel that Afghanistan is one war which doesn’t need fighting; but it can hardly be denied that it began with a clear act of aggression on 11th September 2001. And Germany is a democratic country, with a perfectly good army, bound into a military alliance: surely in principle they ought to be able to fight a war on a reasonably logical basis.

But no. Yes, we will send troops to Afghanistan, they say; but you must put them in a part of Afghanistan where they won’t get shot at, and you mustn’t expect them to kill anyone either. Any involvement of the Bundeswehr in actions in which someone dies, and the Germans hit the roof. On a previous visit to Germany I found the nation caught up in a very ugly media witch-hunt against a senior German officer who had been working with UK/US special forces and got involved in some rather messy stuff.

Yes, the Germans have a better excuse than most for all this. But their position is hopelessly illogical. Either you declare yourselves institutionally pacifist, do a Costa Rica and abolish the armed forces altogether, and rely on others to defend you; or you take your share of defence responsibilities, build an army and try to use it as sensibly as possible. But you have to acknowledge that if war does prove inevitable, people are going to kill and get killed. And that wars are always going to have an economic rationale as well as a political one.

I think you’re well out of that job, Dr. Köhler. You can’t lead people who aren’t prepared to think, and will lynch you if you try to.

China’s missing babies re-emerge: is this the beginning of the end for the one-child policy?

Chinese demographer Liang Zhongtang has recently revealed that something like 3 million Chinese babies a year may be unregistered at their birth, as a means of circumventing the country’s one-child family policy. The evidence seems fairly compelling: census returns record 23 million births in 1990 and 26 million ten-year-olds in 2000, figures which don’t really allow of any other conclusion. So is the one-child policy fraying at the edges, and could another Chinese population explosion be on the horizon?

First, a couple of words of caution regarding the stats. They relate to births in 1990, which by my arithmetic is twenty years ago. By then the universal one-child policy had only been in operation for ten years, and was still being fairly rigidly enforced, at least in the cities. This has since changed. For one thing, the state no longer has all the enforcement methods at its disposal that it had in 1990. Then, your job, your housing, and your access to healthcare and education were all provided by state entities; people who didn’t conform could be deprived of any or all of them. Now that the state has withdrawn from so many of these areas it doesn’t have the leverage; provided you can pay for these things yourself – and you probably have to do so anyway – you don’t need to worry about official regulations so much, though people are generally careful not to flout them too openly. Party spies have disappeared, but nosy and mean-spirited neighbours haven’t.

Secondly, with the remarkable economic growth of the past thirty years, the one-child policy has largely institutionalised itself, at least in the cities. The new bourgeois, who have the money to thumb their noses at the State if they wished to, now exercise voluntary restraint. Everyone is busy, nearly all mothers work, larger flats and houses are expensive, the best education costs a fortune; who wants extra kids? Access to abortion (entirely without moral stigma in China) is easy in case of accidents. The economic boomers regard a single child as perfectly natural, not to mention extremely convenient. Nor do the urban middle classes get hung up about gender as their peasant contemporaries do: small wonder, as China really is an equal opportunity society and a girl has every bit as much chance of being successful as a boy (rather more, in my experience).

So it may be that the one-child policy has done its job and had its day. After all, running such a policy for thirty years – one generation – cannot but have a lasting effect on population growth, as the current generation of child-begetters are far less numerous than their predecessors were. The Chinese population problem really arose in the fifties and sixties, when Mao called upon his people to keep cranking them out, in order to give China a better chance of surviving nuclear war than its putative opponents. Now it would seem that vigilance can be relaxed a little; especially as a huge demographic time bomb is going to hit China in about twenty years’ time, when Mao’s mass-produced battery chickens qualify for their non-existent old age pensions, and somebody will need to keep the fires burning….