Latest News Clips 2018.11.05

                      

1.      As Angela Merkel’s star dims, Europe is facing perhaps its biggest challenge since 1930s

Pragmatism and brave policies have sustained her so far, but her possible fall could have a dire impact on the whole EU

The Guardian    28 Oct 2018

      

Angela Merkel’s political obituary has been written many times since last year’s bruising federal election, when her centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) slumped to 33% of the vote. Since then, the fortunes of the CDU – and its sister party, Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU) – have continued to decline. If today’s state election in Hesse goes as expected, it will be seen as another crushing, possibly fatal, rebuff for Germany’s chancellor.

Merkel has survived this long because she stands head and shoulders above her rivals. In office since 2005, and serving a fourth term, she is widely regarded, inside and outside Germany, as Europe’s de facto leader. Clear political principles, exemplified by her brave, open-door migration policy and willingness to stand up to Donald Trump, coupled with a pragmatic sense of what’s possible, have sustained her this far.

The fracturing of the German party system has also helped keep her in power – but it could yet prove her undoing. Her main coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), recorded its worst post-war result last year, attracting only 20% of support, while the Greens, the Free Democrats, Die Linke (the Left), and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) all gained ground. The SPD faces a repeat meltdown in Hesse. If that does happen, rising pressure within that party to quit the ruling coalition may be irresistible.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the CDU general secretary, who is said to be Merkel’s preferred successor, warned last week the departure of SPD would trigger a general election. With the CDU polling at 26-27% nationally, the prospect of a drubbing in new federal polls could bring Merkel’s reign to an abrupt halt.

The end of the Merkel era could have dire implications for the future cohesiveness of Europe and the EU. The timing could hardly be worse, as political fragmentation and polarisation reach epidemic proportions. Of the two other leading regional powers, Britain, a traditional ally of Berlin, has become a liability, wholly preoccupied with a mutually damaging Brexit process that is setting a worrying EU precedent.

In France, meanwhile, the shine has come off Emmanuel Macron only 18 months after his insurrectionary electoral clean sweep. His unpopular labour market reforms have not produced the promised results: unemployment is rising again, towards 10%, and economic growth is falling. He has been damaged by high-profile resignations, his mishandling of an Elysée scandal, and his irksome, quasi-Napoleonic arrogance. His personal approval ratings are below 30%.

As a leader on the international stage, Macron is also proving a divisive figure, very different from Merkel. Casting himself as Europe’s champion against the rising forces of illiberalism and populism, he recently picked a fight with Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist leader, and Italy’s hard-right deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini.

Macron characterises the two men, and likeminded politicians in Poland and elsewhere, as a danger to cherished EU principles of open borders, open markets and open societies. “If they want to see me as their principal opponent, they are right. I will cede nothing to the nationalists and their language of hate,” he declared grandly.

As analyst Robert Zaretsky argues, Macron’s attempt to impose an either-or choice, in the manner of Charles de Gaulle, could engender even greater polarisation at a time when Europe’s established political order is breaking up. “Insisting upon the division between liberalism and illiberalism obscures the inconvenient truth that a range of alternatives exists between these ideological poles,” Zaretsky wrote. “As the French socialist Pierre Moscovici noted, ‘Not all pro-Europeans have the same ideas’.”

2.      Taiwan Train Accident Kills at Least 18 and Injures About 170 Others

         

The coastal Puyuma Express train was carrying more than 350 passengers when it derailed Sunday afternoon in eastern Taiwan, officials said.CreditCreditCentral News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The New York Times    Oct. 21, 2018

TAIPEI, Taiwan — At least 18 people were killed and 171 others injured after a passenger train derailed Sunday afternoon in northeastern Taiwan on a coastal route popular among tourists, railroad officials and local news reports said.

The Puyuma Express train was carrying 366 passengers to Taitung, a city on Taiwan’s southeast coast, from Shulin in New Taipei City in the north when it went off the tracks near Xinma Station in Yilan County about 4:50 p.m. local time.

Images on social media showed the mangled wreckage of the train carriages in a zigzag pattern near the tracks, and injured passengers lying on the ground. Five of the eight carriages were reported to have overturned.

Some passengers were crushed to death, a spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense, Chen Chung-chi, said, according to The Associated Press. “Their train car turned over. They were crushed, so they died right away,” he said.

About 120 soldiers were called to the site to help remove bodies so that they could be identified, he added, but nightfall was complicating rescue work.

Video footage showed emergency workers pulling people from the wreckage in Yilan County. Most of the deaths were in the first car, which flipped over, a government spokesman said, according to The A.P.

On Sunday evening, as many as 30 people were still trapped in the wreckage, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.

Local television reports said that passengers were trying to escape through train windows and that bystanders had gathered to help them before rescuers arrived, The A.P. said.

The country’s transport ministry said Sunday night that 22 people had died and 171 others were injured, but later revised the death toll to 18. It said a 43-year-old American woman was among those injured, CCN said.

The Taiwan Railways Administration said it had formed a disaster response team to investigate the cause of the crash. The injured were being treated at four hospitals.

A local official told United Daily News, a Taiwan newspaper, that the conductor said an unidentified object had been on the tracks and may have caused the train to derail.

Train accidents are fairly rare in Taiwan, with the last crash of a similar scale taking place in 2003, when a train serving the mountain tourist destination of Ali Mountain derailed, killing 17 people and injuring 156 others.

In 2011, at least six people were killed and more than 50 others injured after a tree collapsed into the path of a tourist train also serving Ali Mountain.

3.      Jin Yong, 94, Lionized Author of Chinese Martial Arts Epics, Dies

The novelist Jin Yong in 2002 with his book “Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge” at his office in Hong Kong. He was broadly popular with generations of Chinese readers.CreditCreditBobby Yip/Reuters

The New York Times   Nov. 2, 2018

HONG KONG — Jin Yong, a literary giant of the Chinese-speaking world whose fantastical epic novels inspired countless film, television and video game adaptations and were read by generations of ethnic Chinese, died on Tuesday in Hong Kong. He was 94.

His death, at the Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital, was confirmed by Ming Pao, the prominent Hong Kong newspaper that Jin Yong helped establish and ran for decades. Chip Tsao, a writer and friend, said the cause of death was organ failure.

Jin Yong, the pen name of Louis Cha, was one of the most widely read 20th-century writers in the Chinese language. The panoramic breadth and depth of the fictional universes he created have been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and have been studied as a topic known as “Jinology.”

Jin Yong received his start as a novelist in the mid-1950s while working as a film critic and editor for The New Evening Post in Hong Kong, which was then a British crown colony. He had moved there in 1948 and lived there for most of his life.

From 1955 to 1972, Jin Yong wrote 14 novels and novellas and one short story in the popular genre known as wuxia, which consisted mainly of swashbuckling martial arts adventures.

His first wuxia novel, “The Book and the Sword” (1955), drew its inspiration from a legend that held that the Manchu emperor Qianlong was in fact a Han Chinese who had been switched at birth. The novel was serialized in The New Evening Post and became an instant hit.

By the time he began writing, the Chinese Communist Party had banned wuxia literature, calling it “decadent” and “feudal.” The ban reflected a centuries-old view of wuxia as a marginal genre within the Chinese literary tradition.

But in Hong Kong and other parts of the Chinese diaspora, Jin Yong’s novels helped spearhead a new wave of martial arts fiction in the 1950s and ‘60s.

 “Legends of the Condor Heroes 1: A Hero Born,” by Jin Yong.

Jin Yong elevated what had been a rather formulaic genre by blending in poetry, history and fantasy to create hundreds of vivid characters who travel through a mirror underworld that operates according to its own laws and code of ethics.

In tales of love, chivalry, friendship and filial piety, his characters are flawed, with complex emotional histories, making them all the more appealing.

“Writing about heroes was very easy,” Jin Yong said in a 2012 interview. “But as I got older I learned that these big heroes actually had another, more contemptible side to them, a side that was not shown to others.”

Translated into many languages, his books have sold tens of millions of copies, fueling a sprawling industry of film, television and video game adaptations.

Jin Yong used martial arts fiction as a vehicle to talk about Chinese history and traditional culture, forging his own fictional vernacular that drew heavily on classical expressions. His stories were often set at pivotal moments in Chinese history, like the rise and fall of dynasties. They made reference to Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist ideas, and positioned martial arts as an integral part of Chinese culture, alongside traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture and calligraphy.

Jin Yong took a “marginal, even disreputable, form of popular fiction and made it both a vehicle for serious literary expression and something that appealed to Chinese readers around the globe,” John Christopher Hamm, an associate professor of Asian languages and literature at the University of Washington, said in a telephone interview.

Following the early success of his novels, Jin Yong established his own newspaper, Ming Pao Daily News, in Hong Kong in 1959. Soon he was publishing installments of his novels while writing daily social commentaries about the horrors of Mao Zedong’s

It was a subject he was intimately familiar with: In 1951, his father had been labeled a “class enemy” and was executed by the Communists.

In 1981, as China was beginning to open up economically and politically, Jin Yong traveled to Beijing to meet with Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor. Deng confessed that he was an avid fan of Jin Yong’s books.

Not long afterward, China lifted its ban on Jin Yong’s novels. At the time, many young Chinese were eager to read something other than the socialist propaganda they had become accustomed to under Mao.

“Reading his novels opened our vision,” Liu Jianmei, a professor of contemporary Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said in a telephone interview. “His way of thinking was so different from what was being cultivated in mainland China at the time. He helped us think beyond right and wrong, good and bad.”

In 1985, Jin Yong was appointed to a political committee charged with drafting Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the mini-constitution that would govern that semiautonomous city once Britain handed it over, ending colonial rule. He drew criticism for backing a conservative proposal to select the city’s leader without universal suffrage.

Jin Yong’s initial optimism about China’s political opening was dashed by the government’s bloody crackdown on the student-led democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

He resigned from the committee in protest. In a tearful interview, he said, “Students’ peaceful petitions should never be suppressed by military force.”

Cha Leung-yung was born the second of seven children on March 10, 1924, in Haining, in the central coastal province of Zhejiang. His father, Zha Shuqing, was an educated landlord. His mother, Xu Lu, was from a wealthy business family.

Jin Yong graduated from Soochow University’s law school in 1948. By then he had begun working as a journalist and translator for the newspaper Ta Kung Pao in Shanghai. In 1948 he moved with the newspaper to Hong Kong, which would become his home for the next seven decades.

He retired from writing novels in 1972. He stepped down as chairman of the Ming Pao Enterprise Corporation in 1993.

Jin Yong is survived by his third wife, Lam Lok Yi, and his children from his second marriage: a son, Andrew, and two daughters, Grace and Edna.

This year, the first installment of Jin Yong’s popular trilogy, “Legends of the Condor Heroes,” was translated into English, by Anna Holmwood.

Among readers of original Chinese versions, Jin Yong had no shortage of prominent fans. They include Jack Ma, the chairman of Alibaba, who at one point gave employees nicknames drawn from characters in the novels.