Latest News Clips 2012.11.22

                     Bengo’s Latest News Clips              2012.11.22

1.      A Star in China Both Rises and Sets

The New York Times      November 16, 2012

BEIJING — Peng Liyuan, China’s most enduring pop-folk icon, is beloved for her glass-cracking soprano and her ability to take on such roles as a coquettish Tibetan yak herder, a lovelorn imperial courtesan, even a stiff-lipped major general — which in fact she is.

But as the nation begins to absorb the reality that its newly anointed top leader, Xi Jinping, is coming to office with a wife who happens to be a big-haired brassy diva known for her striking figure, palace watchers are daring to ask the question: has China’s Carla Bruni-Sarkozy moment finally arrived?

Ms. Peng, 49, certainly has what it takes to revolutionize China’s stodgy first lady paradigm, in which the spouses of top leaders are usually kept well out of sight or, at best, stand mute behind their husbands during state visits.

For more than two decades she was a lavishly costumed fixture on the nation’s must-see Chinese New Year variety show, often emerging from a blur of synchronized backup dancers to trill about the sacrifices of the People’s Liberation Army, which bestowed on her a civilian rank equivalent to major general. More recently, she has extended her celebrity to public service, comforting survivors of the Sichuan earthquake and gently scolding young people about the dangers of smoking and unprotected sex.

“Peng Liyuan could be an enormously positive thing for China, which really needs female role models,” said Hung Huang, publisher of a fashion magazine. “Just imagine if she turned out to be a first lady like Michelle Obama.”

But experts here agree that there is a major obstacle to Ms. Peng playing a more prominent role on the national stage: Chinese men. Despite Mao Zedong’s feel-good dictum that “women hold up half the sky,” they are barely visible in the inner sanctum of the granite-clad colossus on Tiananmen Square where Communist Party elders selected a new club of leaders.

While there was hopeful, unsubstantiated talk earlier this year that Liu Yandong, a woman, might be named to the seven-seat Politburo Standing Committee, the lineup revealed to the world on Thursday was an unrelieved row of dark suits, drab ties and black hair without a touch of gray. The party did throw out a bone: they added Sun Chunlan to the Politburo, which means the 25-member advisory committee now contains two women.

Chinese women — at least those who dare to speak out — are not pleased. “It’s unhealthy and unfair to have so few women within the Chinese political system,” said Guo Jianmei, director of the Women’s Legal Research and Service Center in Beijing, a nonprofit group. “It just reinforces the traditional cultural view that women are less capable than men.”

By all accounts, Chinese male chauvinism and the fear of the power-hungry vixen has been percolating for a few thousand years. Until the last century, women were kept uneducated and barred from the imperial bureaucracy. In times of famine, boys ate first. A lucky girl might have her growing feet bound so tightly she could barely walk by the time she was married off to the groom’s family as little more than chattel.

Even today the gender imbalance — with 118 men for every 100 women — is a testament to Chinese favoritism toward boys, expressed through targeted abortions or abandoned baby girls. Many of the nation’s best schools give male students a leg up by requiring higher marks for women. The discriminatory scoring system, according to the Ministry of Education, is designed to “protect the interests of the nation.”

2.      Ma the bumbler

A former heart-throb loses his shine

The Economist     Nov 17th 2012

  

WHEN he was first elected in 2008, Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, offered Taiwanese high hopes that the island’s economy would open a new chapter. He promised ground-breaking agreements with China to help end Taiwan’s growing economic marginalisation. At the time, Mr Ma’s image was of a clean technocrat able to rise above the cronyism and infighting of his party, the Kuomintang (KMT). He was a welcome contrast to his fiery and pro-independence predecessor, Chen Shui-bian, now in jail for corruption.

Five years on, and despite being handily re-elected ten months ago, much has changed. In particular, popular satisfaction with Mr Ma has plummeted, to a record low of 13%, according to the TVBS Poll Centre. The country appears to agree on one thing: Mr Ma is an ineffectual bumbler.

Ordinary people do not find their livelihoods improving. Salaries have stagnated for a decade. The most visible impact of more open ties with China, which include a free-trade agreement, has been property speculation in anticipation of a flood of mainland money. Housing in former working-class areas on the edge of Taipei, the capital, now costs up to 40 times the average annual wage of $15,400. The number of families below the poverty line has leapt. Labour activists have taken to pelting the presidential office with eggs.

Exports account for 70% of GDP. So some of Taiwan’s problems are down to the dismal state of rich-world economies. Yet Mr Ma’s leadership is also to blame. He has failed to paint a more hopeful future, with sometimes hard measures needed now. Worse, he frequently tweaks policies in response to opposition or media criticism. It suggests indecisiveness.

Public anger first arose in June, when Mr Ma raised the price of government-subsidised electricity. Few Taiwanese understood why, even though Taiwan’s state-owned power company loses billions. In the face of public outrage, Mr. Ma postponed a second round of electricity price rises scheduled for December. They will now take place later next year.

People are also worried that a national pension scheme is on course for bankruptcy in less than two decades. Yet Mr Ma cannot bring himself to raise premiums sharply, because of the temporary unpopularity it risks. When Mr Ma does try to appeal to Taiwanese who make up the island’s broad political centre, it often backfires with his party’s core supporters. Following public grumbles that retired civil servants, teachers and ex-servicemen were a privileged group, the cabinet announced plans to cut more than $300m in year-end bonuses, affecting around 381,000. The trouble was, veterans are among the KMT’s most fervent backers. Now some threaten to take to the streets in protest and deprive the KMT of their votes until the plan is scrapped. Meanwhile, Mr. Ma’s clean image has been sullied by the indictment of the cabinet secretary-general for graft.

Cracks are starting to grow in the KMT façade. Recently Sean Lien, a prominent politician, criticised Mr Ma’s economic policies, saying that any politician in office during this time of sluggish growth was at best a “master of a beggar clan”—implying a country of paupers.

But the next election is four years away, and presidential hopefuls will not try to oust or even outshine Mr. Ma anytime soon. After all, they will not want to take responsibility for the country’s economic problems. Nothing suggests Mr. Ma’s main policies will change (or that they should), but his credibility is draining by the day.

3.      Patience, Consciousness and White Lies

The New York Times      NOVEMBER 21, 2012

The author, far left, standing next to his mother, newly married son and daughter-in-law, and his in-laws. In the second row, from left, are the author’s wife and their younger adult children.

My wife and I are blessed with having three "semi-independent" parents in their mid-80s living within a few blocks of us. Our children grew up knowing their grandparents as integral parts of our nuclear family, within walking distance for most of their childhoods. But now that our nest is empty, we find ourselves reliving many of the parenting issues we faced when our children were little -- now in geriatric versions, at close range. As it turns out, parenting was good practice for the issues we face with our own parents.

What exactly does semi-independence mean as applied to elderly parents? Among our three, we have two canes, five walkers, one wheelchair (for long walks), four artificial joints, a pacemaker, four hearing aides and a knee brace. The list of medical conditions is long, and the list of medications even longer, requiring different color pill box organizers for morning, afternoon and evening.

Our parents all live in the same homes they have been in for many years. Keeping them safe and healthy there, as well as when they leave the house, has become a big part of our day-to-day work these days. Therein the yin and yang of parenting has returned -- independence versus helicoptering.

Children's yearning for independence begins in toddlerhood: "I can do it myself!" It escalates through childhood, accelerates with the driver's license, and crescendos, with pomp and circumstance, at high school graduation.