Jared Mitchell

China's seminal change

2009-07-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday marked one of those momentous moments in China's economic revolution. It wasn't a damage control measure responding to a disaster like the credit crisis. It was the Communist Party chief for Guangdong province, the place where that nation's economic emergence began. How important is Guangdong? Eighty per cent of the world's microwave ovens are churned out in factories in the Pearl River delta. The province set the pace for the rest of the country in the 1980s and 1990s, turning out cheaply produced goods that fuelled China's rise. While the policy is about a year old, its articulation came yesterday. Wang Yang, the Communist Party chief, declared that the province must begin its ascent up the value chain. "Since last year we've been calling on people to free theeir minds of the old growth patterns," Wang told foreign reporters. Freeing minds isn't something one associates with a Communist state, but China's economic growth testifies to the contradictions in running the country. If business does free its mind of low-cost, low-value production it will emerge in the next two decades as the world's technological leader, emulating the path of Japan after the post war. This will benefit China, the world and, almost overlooked in the current economic revolution, Chinese workers. Officials are keen to avoid unrest among the vast new middle class by fostering better-quality jobs and greater worker protection, replacing the 80-hour-a-week sweatshops. This would be a positive development.

Cyber-attacks and diplomacy

2009-07-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

Who hacked the website of the Melbourne International Film Festival. Organizers have suggested that the cyber attack came out of China. It was said tohave been launched either by independent hackers or someone working at the behest of the Chinese government. The reason: the festival's insistence on shaowing The 10 Conditions of Love. The film is about a Uyghur dissident, Rebiya Kadeer, from China's far northwest Xinjiang region. If it's true that Beijing ordered the attack, what response should the Australian government make? Diplomatic responses to this new kind of sovereign aggression have yet to be worked out. But it is just as hostile an act as planting a bomb, and in today's interconnected world of computers, potentially just as devastating. This time is was only a film festival, but in the future it may be a nation's military establishment, or its emergency-response network. These kinds of sovereign cyber attacks need to be taken as seriously a physical ones.

Zero emissions aren't enough

2009-07-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

Electric automobiles are coming. In the millions their presence will reduce carbon dioxide and toxic emissions from the world's air. But there are other problems associated with automobiles that will not change: their sheer numbers crowd our city streets and encourage resource-wasteful suburban sprawl. And why is noise pollution perennially ignored? Electric cars should reduce the amount of urban noise produced by automobiles but at least one government, Japan, is considering forcing manufacturers to create noise-making devices. This is out of fear that electric cars, which would be nearly silent at low speeds, would prove a menace to pedestrians. Surely there is a better way.

Decoupling doesn't mean good bye

2009-07-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

In a smart examination of portfolio diversification and its failure to protect investors during the past year's economic tumult, Dan Richards in today's Report on Business out of Toronto makes a passing reference to "decoupling." There have been many attempts to debunk decoupling in the last couple of years. Decoupling is said to take place when economies break away from tight relationships. Think Canada and the United States and their closely intertwined economies. Before last year's meltdown, there was a belief that a recession in the United States would be neutralized in the global economy because of decoupling. Other countries, especially China, would pick up the slack. But because all major economics have seen their economies contract or growth severely curtailed, debunkers say that decoupling was an illusionary concept. But by examining the different rates at which economies contract, there remains evidence of some decoupling. Why hasn't the Canadian economy contracted at the same rate as the United States? Why didn't China's booming economy sink with the American one? (It grew by 7.9 per cent in the first quarter.) I suggest there is decoupling going on, it's just that the concept is not a binary state, neither true or false.

Burma's sponsor

2009-07-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

Despite world revulsion at the cruelty of the Burmese military junta's ways, it hasn't budged from power in 37 years and there's little reason to expect that to change soon. Foreign pressure on Burma's military to change its ways has done nothing and so long as Burma causes the rest of the world little trouble no one is inclined to do much about it. But now, Burma's chief sponsor, China, is growing uncomfortable. According to Irrawaddy Magazine, Beijing is increasingly embarrassed with its name constantly dragged into bad press about Burma. As the Irrawaddy writes:

"The press coverage on the bizarre trial of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s secret missions to Pyongyang and Burma’s unsettled issue with ethnic insurgents along the Sino-Burmese border are all part of China’s concerns."

Because China buys so much of Burma's raw resources, provinding the junta with foreign income, and because sponsoring a Burmese client state keeps regional neighbours off balance, China so far saw gain from supporting the junta. But if Beijing does put pressure on Nyapidaw (as the new capital is called), it may find the junta unwilling to come to heel. One of the original reasons why the military came to power in 1962 was to take economic domination of the economy out of the hands of the Chinese.

Social media builds elites?

2009-07-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

Over late-night Chinese food in the Swatow Restaurant on Toronto's Spadina Ave. last night I had a talk with a friend in public affairs about the value and popularity of social media such as Twitter. I had no argument with him over Twitter's popularity or even its potential for communicating among like-minded groups. I do wonder, though, if short bits of exchanges such as Twitter on on-line chat groups, don't encourage many people to think and process ideas in very small amounts. There will always be a need for people to think in long form, to build complex ideas and communicate them in long form. What we may yet see emerge is an over-class of long-form communicators who will guide society's thinking while a swelling under-class of otherwise educated people reduces their thinking to fewer than 200 characters at a time.

Buying up the chain

2009-07-14T14:04:00.000-07:00

The Boeing Co. has decided to buy one of the manufacturers participating in its B787 Dreamliner program. Beoing last week said it would pay US$1 billion for a plant belonging to Vought Aircraft Industries Inc. in North Carolina. The decision to buy one of the plants is a troubling sign for Boeing's vision of distributing production of the new widebody airliner among other firms. The plan had been to reduce Boeing's need to built its own production lines for aircraft. Big plane makers have relied on subcontractors for years, but the 787 program was a great leap forward, with non-Boeing plants being responsible for complete sections of the aircraft. (Vought was responsible for putting together the rear fuselage, which would then be married up with other manufacturers' bits at Boeing's Everett, Wa. plant.) Boeing's move to buy one of the plants is a sign that the distributing manufacturing concept has failed. It has been a supply-chain disaster.

The Dangers of Quarantine

2009-07-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

The death of a healthy 43-year-old man in rural Manitoba from swine flu is the latest tragedy in the slow roll-out of H1N1. Could governments be making matters even worse? Medical experts have suggested that one reason health men and women between 20 and 45 are being especially hard hit is that they have no allied immune responses from the previous influenza pandemic in 1968. In May I changed planes at Tokyo Narita airport. Because my flight was coming from Canada, a flu-affected country, the aircraft was met at the gate by medical technicians in surgical gowns, taped to white rubber boots. They wore plastic goggles and breathed through advanced respirators. Satisfied that none of us had a fever we were allowed to deplane. I wonder, though, if the Japanese authorities, by preventing H1N1’s arrival on their islands, may be depriving their population of future immune protection from subsequent influenza pandemics. Perhaps H1N1 may mutate again soon, stepping up its virulence and further endangering people who thought they’d been protected.

Your nurse as a machine

2009-06-30T07:10:00.000-07:00

There's an extraordinary video of the development in Japan of a robotic health care worker. There are bugs to work out. The video shows the robot, which resembles a giant child's toy, picking up a mannequin that stands in for an elderly patient. Once in its arms, the robot refuses its masters command to put the mannequin back down again. There are indications that the robot has developed independent thought. Had it grown attached to the mannequin? Technical glitches like these aside, it now seems inevitable that robots will fill the professional health care shortfalls expected as the ranks of the elderly grow rapidly. The Japanese seem to welcome this development. It is a country with no cultural hang-ups about human-like machines. It grew up on cartoons of the benign Robot Boy. But in the west, and in the U.S. in particular, robots are seen as menacing at worst and creepy at best. Will that cultural resistance prevent the introduction of health care robots?

Not welcome in the nursing home

Progress in an aging world

2009-06-30T06:59:00.001-07:00

Much is being made of the future liability advanced nations will have in caring for their exploding ranks of the elderly. Over the next 30 years Germany’s population will decline by 10%. Pensions and healthcare will strain younger workers’ ability to pay for it. By mid-century in Japan there are only 1.5 workers for every pensioner (currently, developed nations average four workers per pensioner). Beyond funding pensions and health care, much more profound long-term economic and environmental issues must be addressed. As the world’s population tops out at between eight and 10 billion over the next half century, fewer people will be contributing to global wealth creation in the latter half of this century. Barring a change of mothers’ hearts and a return to bigger families, humanity will have either have to achieve a quantum improvement in productivity or face a equivalent decline in affluence. Will we see a fall in the number of people working the in world’s laboratories and research centres? Or will we see a decline in menial jobs? Substantial educational, economic and social-engineering policies – plus popular willpower – will determine whether humanity continues its ascent or enters a new epoch of torpor and stagnation.

From geniality to genocide

2009-06-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

How do nice people give rise to heinous crimes against humanity? At the trial this week of one of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge's worst henchmen, a former prisoner described how desperate and cruel incarceration under the communists was. "I even thought eating human flesh would be a good meal," Vann Nath recalled during the trial of Comrade Duch, who ran the nightmarish Tuol Sleng Incarceration Centre under the Khmer Rouge regime, which terrorized Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. And yet if you've ever met Cambodians, they are sweet, gentle and genial. How do sweet, gentle, genial people become cruel butchers? Elizabeth Becker, in her 1986 study of the Khmer Rouge, Whe n the War Was Over, wrote:

"...ultimately Cambodians were the victims of their own leaders and their own tradition and history. The shimmering patina of a tropical paradise masked a country with a deep sense of wounded pride, a fear of racial extinction, and a corollary belief in its cultural if not racial superiority. It is a country long accustomed to quarrelsome, despotic rulers who treated their subjects, or citizens, like children and saw Cambodia as one of history's great victims."

Cambodians are far from unique in this flaw, but this week's testimony in Phnom Penh reminds us of just how drastic the consequence of that flaw can be.