Air pollution in China’s capital is so bad that executives are turning down jobs, people are dying prematurely, gas masks have become fashionable and the smog can even be seen from space. At the end of March local media reported that the country would spend 100 billion yuan ($16.3 billion) over three years to clean up Beijing.
Nawaz Sharif is back in Pakistan’s top job—for the third time. Sluggish economic growth, widespread crippling power cuts, daily political violence and a possible IMF bailout are all big problems he will have to deal with. So what can we expect from this wealthy steel tycoon?
The inquest into the death of Shane Todd, a 31-year-old American electronics engineer, heard from its first witnesses on Monday May 13. At stake is more than just his family’s peace of mind. Todd, who was found dead in his Singapore apartment on June 24 last year, may have committed suicide; or, as his parents believe, he may have been murdered because he got caught up in a battle (paywall) about whether an advanced semiconductor technology could fall into Chinese hands.
China and India are once again at each other’s throats over an unmarked border in the Himalayas. But this time, oddly, nobody seems to know why.
Bo Jiang, a Chinese research scientist who worked at a NASA facility and was suspected of stealing secrets, is expected to plead guilty today–not for espionage, but for downloading porn on his work computer.
The outsize profits of Goldman Sachs have been a political hot potato in the United States ever since the financial crisis. But now the firm known to its detractors as the “vampire squid” has landed right in the middle of Sunday’s bitterly close Malaysian election.
Weighty threats, harsh words. As the death toll from a collapsed building outside Dhaka tops 400, the European Union warned Bangladesh that it may face trade sanctions and Pope Francis condemned the practice of paying a pittance to factory workers as “slave labor.”
Nuclear war? Stepped up sanctions? For all the rhetoric and drama of the past few months, for Chinese traders at the border with North Korea, it’s still business as usual.
A minor pedestrian collision in a small town in Myanmar led to rioting and nine injuries on Tuesday, proof that Myanmar’s fraught religious and ethnic relations are still at a boiling point. Police were quick to intervene, but the event is a stark reminder that while the new government gets praise for reform, liberalization can have unintended consequences.
Manufacturing in China is not what it used to be. Struggling to break even in the face of rising wages, companies are eyeing up China’s neighbours for a better alternative, and Wednesday’s official manufacturing figures show the sector struggling to maintain even modest levels of growth.
As Beijing signals a tightening of the leash in Macau, the only place in China where gambling is legal, casino operators are signing up characters from Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar to burnish their family-friendly reputation. Sands China, the world’s biggest casino operator, announced on Tuesday that it would partner with DreamWorks Animation to attract more middle class mainland Chinese families to the gaming tables.
China has long played a delicate game in Myanmar’s vast eastern region, secretly arming a rebel ethnic group known as the United Wa State Army. But according to a report by Jane’s Information Group, the stakes just got higher: In February and March, the UWSA took delivery of Chinese military helicopters armed with air-to-air missiles for the first time.
Japanese manufacturing activity ticked upward in April, according to new data from Markit, a promising sign that the government’s radical economic policy agenda is taking effect. But as a weaker yen makes Japanese exports more affordable, South Korea’s own exporters are struggling to hang on.
In Bangladesh, grief over a collapsed factory has swiftly turned to anger. Rescue workers are still pulling bodies out of the ruins in the outskirts of Dhaka, the death toll has topped 275, and garment factory workers blockaded highways and attacked factories for refusing to give workers a day off to mourn. Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the protesters, who numbered in the tens of thousands.
Bangladesh’s political unrest is taking a heavy toll on its flagship garment industry—only recently lauded as a lower-cost alternative to China but now decimated by debilitating protests and foreign companies scared off by violence.
China conditionally approved the $5.6 billion purchase of US grain supplier Gavilon by the Japanese trading house Marubeni Corp on Wednesday, but only after delaying the process by nearly a year and imposing severe restrictions on how the combined company can sell soybeans. The ultra-cautious approach betrays an age-old Chinese preoccupation with securing enough food to feed its more than 1.35 billion people.
No sooner does one threat to peace in Asia recede than another rears its head. We thankfully haven’t heard much bellicose posturing from Kim Jong-un recently, but the nerve-wracking diplomacy over North Korea’s nuclear belligerence has given way to another round of muscle-flexing between Japan and China over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands
Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni handed over a plain white sack containing a personal cash donation of 250 million shillings ($100,000) to a local youth group.
It seems there’s no stopping Dhanin Chearavanont, Thailand’s richest man, in his hunger for acquisitions. His company CP All, the world’s third-biggest operator of 7-Eleven convenience stores, said on Tuesday it has agreed to acquire cash-and-carry wholesaler Siam Makro for $6.6 billion.
China may now be able to call itself the world’s biggest trading nation, but the news on Tuesday of an unexpected slowdown in its gigantic manufacturing sector has rekindled worries that its second quarter growth will be slower than hoped, taking a toll on Asian stocks.
The massive scholarship program to bring students from around the world to Beijing’s Tsinghua University, unveiled at the weekend by Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, is being billed as the 21st-century version of the Rhodes Scholarship, endowed by the 19th century mining magnate Cecil Rhodes. Both programs are the product of controversial and immensely wealthy men who are concerned about the future balance of global power, and the future leaders who will wield it.
To the people of China’s south-western Sichuan province, the knowledge that Saturday’s earthquake was less severe than the one they experienced five years ago is little consolation. This is particularly true in Ya’an, nearest the quake’s epicenter, where much of the city and surrounding villages have been flattened and over 180 people have died. Rebuilding will take time, but most analysts expect that the impact on China’s economy will be slight.
