Latest News Clips 2016.12.12

                    

1.      Is Taiwan a bargaining-chip for Trump on China?

BBC News   7 December 2016

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Donald Trump's dispute with China over Taiwan has refocused attention on his combative approach to Beijing.

The president-elect upset almost 40 years of US practice in the region by taking a call from the Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen.

It was an unprecedented breach of the protocol that undergirds the One China Policy, which says Taiwan is part of China and not an independent country.

And it raised questions about whether Mr. Trump would follow through on campaign pledges to take a tougher line with Beijing.

China has identified Taiwan as its most important core interest. Since the Kuomintang retreated to the island in 1949 following defeat in the civil war, China has insisted Taiwan is a renegade province that will eventually be reunited with the mainland.

In 1979 the US agreed to go along with this approach, deciding to recognize Beijing instead of Taipei. The One China Policy remains the foundation of that relationship.

Was Taiwan phone call planned?

Given what's at stake some China experts and politicians have suggested that Donald Trump blundered unknowingly on to sensitive territory with his penchant for improvised diplomacy.

"I don't think there was any strategy behind it and I think the effort to push out a story line or a narrative that this was actually a well-thought-about change in direction is highly dubious," the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, told the BBC, saying conflicting accounts made the exchange sound haphazard.

Mr. Trump's transition team did send mixed messages. His Vice President-elect Michael Pence initially played down the conversation as a courtesy call initiated by Taiwan that was not about policy.

But Mr. Trump followed up with a confrontational flurry of tweets criticizing Beijing's economic and security practices. He showed no remorse and made no gestures to reaffirm the One China Policy.

Numerous reports since have detailed the influence of China hawks and Taiwan proponents amongst his advisors. And it's emerged that the call was brokered by the lobbyist and former republican senator Bob Dole, who Taipei has been paying to gain access to Mr Trump's inner circle.

"I think it was prearranged and deliberate and Donald Trump knew what it was about," says Walter Lohman, Director of Asian Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The meaning of the call

So what was it about? In and of itself, the call is not a policy shift.

The One China agreement doesn't specifically prohibit contact between American and Taiwanese leaders, although past US presidents have refrained from picking up the phone so as not to upset China.

And right from 1979, there was criticism in Washington over US treatment of Taiwan, says Robert Daly, Director for the Kissinger Institute on China at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

That's especially so among Republicans, who have longstanding personal and in some cases business ties with the democratic country that seems a more like-minded ally than Beijing.

The talk among Mr. Trump's advisers is not about recognizing Taiwan, but regularizing the way the US interacts with it, says Mr. Lohman, which does not mean overturning the One China Policy.

Its doubtful Beijing would see it that way.

2.      Italian PM Matteo Renzi resigns after referendum defeat

High voter turnout, the rise of the populist Five Star Movement and Northern League and the unpopularity of Renzi were all factors

The Guardian   5 December 2016      Comments 4379

Matteo Renzi will resign as Italian prime minister after being roundly defeated in a referendum to change the constitution, marking a major victory for anti-establishment and rightwing parties and plunging the eurozone’s third largest economy into political chaos.

The prime minister conceded defeat in an emotional speech at his residence, Palazzo Chigi, and said he would submit his resignation to Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, on Monday afternoon.

“My experience in government ends here … I did all I could to bring this to victory,” Renzi said. “If you fight for an idea, you cannot lose.”

It was a not an unexpected defeat but it was nevertheless a humiliating one, with 59.1% of Italians voting against the proposed reforms, which would have made sweeping changes to Italy’s constitution and parliamentary system. Pointing to the high voter turnout – 65% of eligible voters cast ballots in the referendum – Renzi said the vote represented a “feast of democracy”.

The 20-point margin was a major victory for the populist Five Star Movement, which led opposition to the reform, and the xenophobic Northern League. The parties are not traditional allies but locked arms to take on Renzi in the hope – now realised – of driving him out of office. Weeks ago both party leaders, Beppe Grillo and Matteo Salvini, were exuberant in the face of Donald Trump’s victory in the US, with Grillo claiming it represented a big “fuck you” to the political establishment.

Indeed, just moments after the exit polls established that Renzi was heading to an embarrassing loss, Salvini took to Twitter to heap praise on Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and “La Lega”, as the Northern League is known.

The victory for no could have profound consequences for Italy and could rattle European and global markets because of concerns about the country’s economic future and evident support of populist and Eurosceptic parties. It may also prompt worries about plans by a consortium of banks to rescue Banca Monte dei Paschi of Siena, as some investors said they feared that a victory for no could destabilise the banking sector.

Market reaction was however calm on Monday with the euro largely recovered from 20-month low against the dollar hit on Sunday night.

The result will be seen as a clear rejection by voters of establishment politics in favour of populist and anti-immigrant forces, much as the UK’s vote in June to leave the European Union and the election last month of Donald Trump in the US were. But that could be an oversimplification of the results. Many voters interviewed by the Guardian in the weeks leading up to the vote – including those who said they were to the left of Renzi and not supporters of Grillo or Salvini – expressed concern about the proposed changes to the constitution. The proposed reforms, in effect, neutered the senate and would have given much more power to Renzi and future prime ministers.

The prime minister, who started his political career as the mayor of Florence and was the youngest-ever prime minister when he assumed office in 2014, made constitutional reform a central plank of his premiership and argued for months that the changes would make Italy more stable and likely to adopt tough-but-needed economic and labour policies.

But the prime minister did not overcome the steep decline in his own popularity and the mistrust of voters who were disappointed that he could not or did not do more to improve the economy and cut unemployment. For many the plebiscite ultimately became a vote of no confidence in the premier. Renzi’s personality – jovial but verging on arrogance – made him seem far removed from the worries of ordinary Italians, some said.

3.      Castro’s legacy: how the revolutionary inspired and appalled the world

The man who led a revolution and strode the world stage for half a century left Cuba with free healthcare, food shortages – and not a single street in his name.

The Guardian in Havana   26 November 2016   

No street bears his name and there is not a single statue in his honour but Fidel Castro did not want or need that type of recognition. From tip to tip, he made Cuba his living, breathing creation.

Children in red neckerchiefs scampering to free schools, families rationing toilet paper in dilapidated houses, pensioners enjoying free medical treatment, newspapers filled with monotonous state propaganda: all in some way bear the stamp of one man.

  

Historians will debate Castro’s legacy for decades to come but his revolution’s accomplishments and failures are on open display in today’s Cuba, which – even with the reforms of recent years – still bears the stamp of half a century of “Fidelismo”.

The “maximum leader” was a workaholic micro-manager who turned the Caribbean island into an economic, political and social laboratory that has simultaneously intrigued, appalled and inspired the world.

“When Fidel took power in 1959 few would have predicted that he would be able to so completely transform Cuban society, upend US priorities in Latin America and create a following of global proportions,” said Dan Erikson, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank and author of The Cuba Wars.

The most apparent downside of his legacy is material scarcity. For ordinary Cubans things tend to be either in short supply, such as transport, housing and food, or prohibitively expensive, such as soap, books and clothes.

These problems have persisted since Fidel handed the presidency to his brother Raúl in 2008. Despite overtures to the United States and encouragement of micro businesses since then, the state still controls the lion’s share of the economy and pays an average monthly wage of less than £15. This has forced many to hustle extra income however they can, including prostitution and low-level corruption. The lucky ones earn hard currency through tourism jobs or receive dollars from relatives in Florida.

Cubans are canny improvisers and can live with dignity on a shoestring, but they yearn for conditions to ease. “We want to buy good stuff, nice stuff, like you do in your countries,” said Miguel, 20, gazing wistfully at Adidas runners on a store on Neptuno street.

Castro blamed the hardship on the US embargo, a longstanding, vindictive stranglehold which cost the economy billions. However, most analysts and many Cubans say botched central planning and stifling controls were even more ruinous. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” goes the old joke.

Thanks to universal and free education and healthcare, however, Cuba boasts first-world levels of literacy and life expectancy. The comandante made sure the state reached the poorest, a commitment denied to many slum-dwellers across Latin America.

Idealism sparkles in places such as Havana’s institute for the blind where Lisbet, a young doctor, works marathon shifts. “We see every single one of the patients. It’s our job and how we contribute to the revolution and humankind.”

Castro continued to hold a place in people’s hearts and minds despite largely withdrawing from public life in the last decade of his life. Increasingly infirm, he mostly tended his garden in Zone Zero (the high security district of Havana), rebutted frequent premature rumours of his death with photographs showing him holding the latest edition of the state-run newspaper Granma, and wrote the occasional column, including grumpy criticism of Cuba’s drift towards market economics and reconciliation with the United States.

But his influence was clearly on the wane. Although he met Pope Francis in 2015, he spent a lot more time with his plants than with national and global power brokers. Even before his death, he had become more of a historical than a political figure.

“Fidel was the dominant figure for decades, but Raúl has been calling the shots,” observed a European diplomat based in Havana, who predicted the death would have more symbolic than political significance. “Has his presence been a block to reforms? Possibly. There could be an impact on young Cubans, but we won’t see a huge shift of Cuban politics after Fidel’s death. More significant would be if Raúl dies because he put his leadership on the line for reform.”

Cuba had already begun the move away from Fidel’s era in a similar series of gradual steps to that taken in China after the the death of Mao Zedong or Vietnam after the demise of Ho Chi Minh.

Under the Economic Modernisation Plan of 2010, the state shed 1m jobs, and opened opportunities for small private business, such as paladares – family-run restaurants – and casas particulares, or home hotels. Farmers have been given more autonomy and price incentives to produce more food. The government has eased overseas travel restrictions, loosened pay ceilings, ended controls on car sales and tied up with overseas partners to build a new free-trade zone at the former submarine base in Mariel. The biggest changes have been in the diplomatic sphere, where Cuba strengthened ties with the Vatican and signed a historic accord with the United States to ease half a century of cold war tension.