Results for “China” 2938 found
Facial recognition isn’t just about China and airports
The child labor activist, who works for Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, had launched a pilot program 15 months prior to match a police database containing photos of all of India’s missing children with another one comprising shots of all the minors living in the country’s child care institutions.
He had just found out the results. “We were able to match 10,561 missing children with those living in institutions,” he told CNN. “They are currently in the process of being reunited with their families.” Most of them were victims of trafficking, forced to work in the fields, in garment factories or in brothels, according to Ribhu.
This momentous undertaking was made possible by facial recognition technology provided by New Delhi’s police. “There are over 300,000 missing children in India and over 100,000 living in institutions,” he explained. “We couldn’t possibly have matched them all manually.”
Locating thousands of missing children is just one of the challenges faced by India’s overstretched police force in a nation of 1.37 billion people.
In spite of these practical benefits, I still do not favor facial recognition systems at the macro level. India seems to be planning a big one:
…India’s government now has a much more ambitious plan. It wants to construct one of the world’s largest facial recognition systems. The project envisions a future in which police from across the country’s 29 states and seven union territories would have access to a single, centralized database.
Here is the full article with much more detail about the plans.
Middlemen, China story of the day
Five hitmen have been jailed for attempted murder, after each one avoided carrying out the contract themselves so they could make a profit.
Chinese businessman Tan Youhui was looking for a hitman to take out a competitor, Wei Mou, and was willing to pay 2 million yuan (£218,000) to get the job done.
The hitman that Mr Youhui hired, decided to offer the job to another hitman, for half the original price.
The second hitman then subcontracted to another hitman, who then subcontracted to a fourth, who gave the job to a fifth.
However, hitman number five was so incensed at how much the value of the contract had fallen, that he told the target to fake his own death, which eventually led to the police finding out about the plot, Beijing News reported.
Here is the full story, via Yana.
China facts of the day
Sports Business Journal recently estimated that the NBA’s presence in China is worth $5 billion to the league.
And:
Nike, with [Lebron] James as a primary spokesman in China, received 17% of its $37.2 billion in brand revenue from Greater China in fiscal 2019…James also has served Tencent as a spokesperson, consultant and endorser of the NBA 2K League in China.
From a marketing expert who knows China:
“The NBA is nothing but good; it provides entertainment, keeps people busy, gives them something to talk and be passionate about, and if they’re doing all that, they’re not on the streets complaining about the government.”
And to close the joke:
Said [Bill] Bishop, referencing the pingpong diplomacy that initiated a warming of relations between the countries back in the early 1970s: “One of the jokes going around is U.S.-China engagement started with pingpong and ended with basketball.”
Link here.
PR advice for celebrities on how to deal with China
Starting with Lebron James, that is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
Third: Preface your “no comment” remarks with a patriotic platitude.
If someone asks James about the situation in China, it seems a little abrupt and dismissive for him to simply utter, “No comment.” Instead, it would be better for him to say something like this: “I am an American and I love my country. I do not have any comment on matters related to Chinese politics.”
At least then he or any other celebrity would be standing for something, albeit in a pretty empty way. They will sound less like vacuous money-grabbers and will provide some weak support for patriotic norms.
Granted, this may not be the most preferred response for the Chinese Communist Party. But the party won’t limit your shoe sales simply for saying you are an American patriot. It may even like the general idea of a celebrity promoting patriotism.
This is much more at the link, at least one part of the piece being tongue in cheek (though good advice nonetheless). This part is fully serious:
I do not think that corporations, or for that matter athletes, should be motivated by dollars alone.
In the meantime, I do not expect the Lakers to be a formidable force in the NBA this year.
China fact of the day
Any Chinese person who has gone to elementary school or watched television news can explain the tale of China’s 100 years of humiliation. Starting with the Opium Wars in the 19th century, foreign powers bullied a weak and backward China into turning Hong Kong and Macau into European colonies. Students must memorize the unequal treaties the Qing dynasty signed during that period.
There’s even a name for it: “national humiliation education.”
Here is more from Li Yuan at the NYT.
China estimate of the day
The estimates imply that trade with China increased U.S. consumer surplus by about $400,000 per displaced job, and that product categories catering to low-income consumers experienced larger price declines.
That is from a new paper by Xavier Jaravel and Erick Sager.
The real China shock came to Mexico
Mexican manufacturing job loss induced by competition with China increases cocaine trafficking and violence, particularly in municipalities with transnational criminal organizations. When it becomes more lucrative to traffic drugs because changes in local labor markets lower the opportunity cost of criminal employment, criminal organizations plausibly fight to gain control. The evidence supports a Becker-style model in which the elasticity between legitimate and criminal employment is particularly high where criminal organizations lower illicit job search costs, where the drug trade implies higher pecuniary returns to violent crime, and where unemployment disproportionately affects low-skilled men.
That is from a recent paper by Melissa Dell, Benjamin Feigenberg, Kensuke Teshima, forthcoming in AER: Insights.
The NBA, Daryl Morey, and China
I changed my mind on this issue after pondering it for a while, here is my Bloomberg column on the topic. Here is one bit:
True to form, I find myself in disagreement with the consensus: Morey committed a blunder, and deleting the tweet was the correct thing to do.
And more:
American politicians and leaders should offer greater support for the more liberal sides of the Hong Kong protest movement. But not all businesspeople are in the same position, especially if they are actively involved with China or other countries whose behavior is under consideration.
To provide a slightly more neutral example, the NBA is currently trying to market its product to India. In the meantime, I don’t think NBA executives should be tweeting or commenting about the status of Kashmir. Those strictures should hold even if the tweets or remarks are entirely correct.
There is simply too much tension between the fiduciary obligations of the potential speakers and the issues under consideration. For better or worse, the NBA is committed to a major expansion in China, and it is entirely normal for the association — like any other business — to demand that its executives do not conduct diplomacy, engage in negotiations or make political commentary on the side. The NBA’s mistake was simply to insist on this in far too clumsy and public a manner.
What they should do is simply pull the training camp out of Xinjiang, no squawking required. By the way, here are much better American corporate targets than the NBA. And the close:
As for the practical question of where things go from here, I’ll be watching to see what NBA players — most of all the stars, many of whom have contracts with Chinese companies — say next.
Finally:
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
There is much more at the link, more than usual. Many of you love the doux commerce thesis, namely that trade ties encourage peace among nations. Yes that is usually true, but sometimes the role of the corporations is to promote lies, or at least not speak the truth too loudly. That is part of the Montesquieu bargain, whether one likes it or not. You are installing an intermediary with incentives for cooperation and good will, not an arbiter of truth.
We are overreacting on this one because it is our main geopolitical rival — China — forcing a major American institution, namely the NBA, to eat crow, because of the sequencing of events. But in reality, there is nothing wrong with a sports league that steers its major executives away from commenting on external politics and that is very often the norm in the corporate world, in countries both nasty and nice.
The political business cycle, China style
He has pledged to achieve “national rejuvenation”, a goal that is supposed to include getting Taiwan under Chinese control by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. But analysts have warned that Mr Xi could be under pressure to demonstrate “progress” on Taiwan much earlier — in 2022, when the Communist party leadership is due to confirm whether to allow him to stay on beyond the end of his second term.
That is from Kathrin Hille at the FT.
China fact of the day
Despite the attempt to rely more on tunnels than bridges, Guizhou ended up with 40 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges, including the very tallest. Read that again. I didn’t say China had 40% of the world’s tallest (which would be a major achievement), I said a poor, small province in the interior with only 2.5% of China’s population has 40 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges.
Here is more from the Scott Sumner travelogue from Guizhou.
China-U.S. trade war insurance fact of the day
An increasing number of US universities are looking to buy insurance policies against a drop in revenue from international students, fearing they are overexposed to China at a time of mounting trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.
A 10 per cent decline in new international student enrolments at US universities — which rely heavily on revenue from Chinese and Indian students — over the past two academic years has already cost the US economy $5.5bn, according to a report from Nafsa, previously known as the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers.
Two colleges at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — the Gies College of Business and the College of Engineering — bought insurance in 2018 worth $60m from USI Insurance Services in Champaign, Illinois. The policy pays off if both the colleges suffer an 18.5 per cent decline in revenue from Chinese students year over year due to a government action such as visa restrictions or a “health event”.
The correct inference, I think, is that some of these colleges already have spent that supposedly forthcoming tuition money.
Here is more from Priyanka Vora at the FT.
Is the trade war with China a carbon tax?
I know that in my Twitter feed I am told a “carbon tax is GOOD” and the “Trumpian trade war with China is BAD.” But isn’t Trump’s trade war, at least indirectly, a tax on carbon emissions?
Most Chinese exports are manufactured goods, and they are produced in a fairly carbon-intensive manner. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem that Vietnam is able to pick up the slack, so it is not just a case of substituting from one dirty carbon emitter to another. It seems the trade war is genuinely restricting trade, and over time it will restrict the consumption and production of carbon-intensive goods. China is by far the exporter with the most to lose.
Of course the targeting of these new taxes is far from ideal from an environmental point of view, nor are they contingent on emissions in the proper manner (still, China is hardly on the verge of being able to switch into clean manufacturing, and in that sense contingent may not matter so much). And it is hardly the case that Trump has “green motives.”
Still, put aside all the imperfections — don’t we finally have a carbon tax — and a framework for improving it — that so many commentators have been wanting all along? Won’t this give Elizabeth Warren the chance to really fine-tune the apparatus?
On these points I am indebted to some remarks from Ray Lopez. And here is my earlier 2016 post “Tyrone on why Democrats should vote for Donald Trump.“
A countercultural take on China
That is what I serve up in my Bloomberg column, note it is a reminder more than a modal prediction. Here is one excerpt:
Is the rest of the world getting China wrong yet again? Maybe the country is not doomed to live out unending top-down rule. What is history, after all, but the realization of the wills of countless unpredictable human beings.
Past mistakes about China are too numerous to mention.
A list then follows. And:
But has China suddenly become so predictable? Are events there now no longer contingent on the exercise of human will? Modern China is one of the most unusual and surprising societies humankind has created. There are no good models for it, nor are there data from comparable historical situations.
There is, unfortunately, a tendency for Westerners to impose superficial narratives on China and the Chinese, often based on scant observation.
To close:
For myself, I don’t have a coherent story about how the Chinese might move to greater liberty in the next 10 to 15 years. But I do think the actions of the current regime can be read as signs of vulnerability rather than entrenchment. Taiwan and Hong Kong, despite its current crisis, remain strong examples of the benefits of liberalization. Meanwhile, the notion of the internet — even with censorship — as a liberalizing force has been too quickly dismissed, especially in an America that has fallen out of love with Big Tech.
Which leads to a reality even deeper than China’s unpredictability: people’s continuing capacity to respond to current events and shape their futures for the better. As you listen, watch and read about China, keep in mind this essential human quality.
There is much more at the link.
Singapore and China, in history
Chinese national identity has long been considered to have been an obstacle to Singapore’s nation-building efforts. This is mainly because China was suspected of using its ethnic links to encourage Singapore’s communist rebellions during the 1950s and 1960s as Lee Kuan Yew was working towards establishing the city state. This study reviews Lee’s exchanges with Beijing and argues that he gave China the impression that he was building an anticolonial, pro-China nation. Beijing therefore responded positively to Lee’s requests for support. Reiterating its overseas Chinese policy to Lee, Beijing sided with him against his political rivals and even acquiesced in his suppression of Chinese-speaking “communists.” In addition, China boosted Lee’s position against Tunku Abdul Rahman, supported Singapore’s independence and lobbied Indonesia to recognize the territory as a separate state. China thus actually played a helpful role in Singapore’s nation building.
That is from Philip Hsiaopong Liu, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What is the America-China trade war all about?
That is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column, and here are the closing bits:
So that means the trade war is really all about Huawei and Taiwan. If the U.S. persists in trying to eliminate Huawei as a major company, by cutting off its American-supplied inputs and intimidating foreign customers and suppliers for Huawei equipment, it will be difficult for the Chinese to accept. In this case, the reluctance to make a deal will be on the Chinese side, and the structure and relative power of the various American interest groups are not essential to understanding the outcome.
The question, then, is whether the U.S. national security establishment, and in turn Congress (which has been heavily influenced on this question), will accept a compromise on Huawei. Maybe that means no Huawei communications technologies for the U.S. and its closest intelligence-sharing allies, but otherwise no war against the company. That is the first critical question to watch in the unfolding of this trade war. The answer is not yet known, though it seems Trump is willing to deal.
The second major question, equally important but less commented upon, is Taiwan. China has long professed a desire to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, using force if necessary. If you belong to the U.S. national security establishment, and you think a confrontation with China is necessary sooner or later, if only because of Taiwan, you would prefer sooner, before China gains in relative strength. And that militates in favor of the trade war continuing and possibly even escalating, as the U.S. continues to push against China and there is simply no bargain to be had.
It is far from clear what a U.S.-China deal over the status of Taiwan could look like. How much Americans actually care about Taiwan is debatable, but the U.S. is unlikely to abandon a commitment that would weaken its value as an ally around the world. And unlike with Huawei, it is difficult to see what a de-escalation of this issue might look like.
So: If the Huawei and Taiwan questions can be resolved, then the trade war should be eminently manageable. Now, does that make you optimistic or pessimistic?
There is much more at the link.