China’s response to the suffering of cyclone survivors in Myanmar has exposed the limits of its ability — and arguably its willingness — to press even close allies to change set habits, analysts say.
With the junta in Myamnar refusing to admit foreign aid workers and curbing the distribution of emergency supplies, UN and other agencies warn the death toll could rise far higher than the official 60,000 dead or missing.
Only a quarter of the victims have received any help at all, triggering a race against time to reach more than a million critically short of food, water and other aid and stalked by hunger and disease.
That in turn has increased pressure on Beijing to convince the generals — long suspicious of the outside world — to change course.
While it is difficult to assess the scale or nature of any contacts between Beijing and the junta, analysts are skeptical as to how much China is able to do.
“China looks at what is beneficial to its own interests, not what is beneficial to other countries,” said Colonel Hariharan, of the Chennai Centre for Chinese Studies in India.
That view reflects decades of Cold War thinking in which China’s rulers were absorbed by their own economic and political problems, viewed the outside world with suspicion and followed a foreign policy based on reclaiming Taiwan, analysts said.
Beijing is slowly emerging with a more multi-dimensional outlook, but has a long way to go in intervening in situations such as Myanmar on a scale that is commensurate with its growing global profile, they said.
“They’re not at the point where they can really project positive power in the region,” said Bob Broadfoot, head of the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy. “There’s still an overwhelming tone of ‘what can we get out of it’ in their foreign policy. There isn’t that altruistic ‘how do we play a good global citizen?’”
The Chinese foreign ministry has called on the Myanmar junta to cooperate with the international community and Beijing has so far sent three planes packed with aid supplies to the country.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also asked her counterpart in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎), to have Beijing use its sway to convince the regime to open up to foreign help.
Broadfoot said the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami crisis, when China’s response was criticized as inadequate, was a “wake-up call” for Beijing, highlighting growing regional expectations of Asia’s biggest power.
However, “China just does not have much of a track record on humanitarian issues,” he said. “Just look at their handling of their own disasters. It’s not exactly a stellar record to brag about.”
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS