Acá van tres noticias que tienen que ver con China, publicadas recientemente en Asia Times Online. Ilustramos la nota con una serie de pinturas del reconocido artista plástico chino Yue Minjin, cuyo estilo ha sido designado como "realismo cínico".
Título:
Beijing-Vatican ties on the mend?
Epígrafe: The
consecration of the new Bishop Joseph Zhang Yinlin in Anyang on August 4 may
signal a positive change in Beijing-Vatican ties. / This time, the Catholic
Church in China ordained a Bishop approved by the Vatican.
Texto: While the
official Catholic Patriotic Association, linked to the party, had elected him a
few months ago, Zhang had received the papal approval as early as 2009,
Stefania Falasca noted in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops.
So for the first
time in many years, the ordination ceremony of a Bishop was held without
controversies. Dozens of
noncontroversial bishops and priests attended the ceremony.
In the past, such
ceremonies were marred by the presence of some bishops whose selection had
created controversy as they were hand-picked by Beijing.
Vatican was not
happy with the way such ordinations were conducted as they ran against its
religious beliefs while Beijing failed to see or did not care about these
ancient sacred practices.
This time,
however, no shadow was cast during the ritual in Anyang as Beijing had taken
extra care in the religious details of the appointment.
Over the past
years, there has been a growing cultural interest in Christianity even among
the upper echelons of the Communist Party close to President Xi Jinping
The details of
Catholic practice, however, are extremely complicated and it is hard to predict
whether they will be respected and followed during every such ceremony to be
held in the future.
Many people in
Beijing and Vatican are eager to scuttle the ties between China and the Holy
See. Against this background, the recent ceremony in Anyang came as a clear
sign of “parallel consensus”, as Falasca noted in Avvenire.
This consensus
seems to be hinging on a growing mutual recognition of the principles each
stands for.
The consecration
comes just a month before Xi Jinping and the Pope are likely to be present in
New York.
On several
occasions, Pope Francis had expressed his willingness to meet Xi Jinping. If
such a meeting takes place, the ordination of China’s new Bishop could help in
reducing the tension which had begun after Communist China snapped ties with
the Vatican.
While nothing can
be said about a possible improvement in ties between the two, the extra care
taken by Beijing this time might signal a paradigm shift in its approach
towards the Catholic Church.
The Vatican’s
focus is not on numbers – China’s 12 million Catholics. It is more concerned
about the well-being of the faithful and, more importantly, the missed
opportunity since the 18th century when it disbanded the very successful Jesuit
mission in China.
China,
conversely, considers the Catholic Church only from the point of view of
numbers. Christians constitute less than
1 percent of the population and they are not troublemakers. In their priority
list, Catholics come way below issues like economic development, ties with the
United States and Japan, and unemployment.
In the past, many Chinese intellectuals had
underlined ties with Vatican which, they argued, could help the world,
especially the West, understand China better.
The next few
months will be very crucial for this extremely important relationship.
Título:
Pipelineistan — the Iran-Pak-China connection (por Pepe Escobar)
Texto: Iranian
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has just been to Islamabad to talk serious
business with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. And the serious business
had to be Pipelineistan – as in what next for the Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas
pipeline.
Zarif essentially
said that IP is a go – again – as soon as sanctions against Iran start to melt,
by late 2015 or early 2016. Iran has already invested $2 billion in the Iranian
stretch of IP, and China will finance the Pakistani stretch.
This is a major
Pipelinestan gambit, as Asia Times has previously reported. And as a side note,
as soon as IP goes online, all those years of incessant harassing by successive
Bush and Obama administrations will finally come down to nought.
Even before Zarif
hit Pakistan something serious was going on in … Karamay. You may have not
heard of Karamay, but this town in Xinjiang is right at the center of the
Eurasian action; it has just hosted the 2015 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor
Forum.
As we all know,
the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is an absolutely key component,
worth $46 billion, of the China-driven New Silk Roads. CPEC will link Kashgar
in Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar via highways (essentially an
upgrade of the fabled Karakoram Highway), railways, industrial parks, fiber
optic networks and – eventually – a pipeline.
And that pipeline
will be no less than an extension up north of IP.
As part of CPEC,
for instance, last month TBEA Xinjiang SunOasis — a Chinese company — finished
the biggest solar power plant in Pakistan, for $215 million, in only three
months.
At Karamay, China
and Pakistan signed 20 CPEC-related cooperation agreements. They even issued a
Karamay manifesto, stressing the political/economic importance of the Silk Road
Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road. CPEC is the largest
China-Pakistan joint project since the construction of the Karakoram highway in
1979. And CPEC is only one among six economic corridors to be developed as part
of the New Silk Roads.
Yet the full
impact of CPEC will only be noted by the next decade. That’s when the New Silk
Road for the bulk of China’s energy imports from the Middle East will be cut
short by no less than 12,000 kilometers.
Ashgabat wakes up
Meanwhile,
Turkmengaz — Turkmenistan’s national gas company — has taken a 51% stake in a
consortium still seeking to build the perennially troubled TAPI
(Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline, a serious competitor to
IP if it ever gets built.
That’s a
game-changer because the Turkmen will now be in charge of the construction and
operation of TAPI Ltd. The cost is a whopping $10 billion (IP will cost three
times less); investment to the tune of $4 billion and $6 billion in debt.
Still it all
comes back to the same problem; who wants to invest in a steel umbilical cord
prone to all sorts of sabotage traversing a war zone — western Afghanistan all
the way to Kandahar? In theory, “host countries” should be responsible for
TAPI’s security; in the case of Afghanistan, that qualifies as black humor.
For the moment,
Turkmengaz can only count on the Manila-based but Japan/US-controlled Asian
Development Bank (ADB). That’s not much. The notoriously opaque regime in
Ashgabat says it’s seeking other backers — but no one knows where and how.
TAPI is still a
pipe dream. Pakistan and India are not seriously considering it viable even in
the medium term. So it’s back to IP.
Even after
sanctions are lifted, Iran will need to find an ocean of investment — at least
$180 billion — to upgrade its energy infrastructure and be able to start
exporting natural gas to Europe, in competition with Gazprom.
So Iran’s
privileged Pipelineistan play for the near future will be Asia – from Southwest
Asia (Iraq and Oman) to South Asia (Pakistan). With China ready to instantly
capitalize on every surge of Iran’s natural gas production.
(Copyright 2015
Asia Times Holdings Limited, a duly registered Hong Kong company. All rights reserved.
Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Título: China’s
comparative devaluation dabble: The emerging markets impact
Texto: China’s
recent 2% renimbi reset against the dollar, while the first formal devaluation
in two decades, was nonetheless negligible against emerging market currencies’
20% drop this year turning benchmark
local debt and equity indices negative, in part due to waning Chinese
commodities and funding appetite. The uniform depreciation has been the most
severe since the Asian financial crisis, and units in Indonesia, Malaysia,
Thailand, Korea and the Philippines have again suffered, and even traditional
safe havens like the Singapore dollar have retreated while India’s rupee has
softened after its post-Modi surge. Frontier markets like Pakistan, Sri Lanka
and Vietnam, with more restricted trading, have also felt a combination of
greenback strength and weaker growth and reform prospects and debt and
political instability pressuring exchange rates. However the region has not
been battered as badly as Latin America where China’s pre-devaluation footprint
and competitive and fiscal policy missteps wreaked havoc.
China’s foreign
reserves have fallen for consecutive quarters, but two dozen other developing
economies have stopped accumulating as well due to current and capital account
stagnation. In dollar terms the number was flat to negative for most countries
in the second quarter, with portfolio investment outflows as tracked by EPFR
international fund data. According to the Washington-based Institute for
International Finance, all cross-border capital flow components — stocks,
bonds, commercial loans and FDI — will be down this year for a $1 trillion
total, reversing improvement from the
immediate post-2008 financial crisis through 2014’s initial Federal Reserve
rate scare. Over $20 billion fled emerging market equities through July, while
dollar and euro-denominated sovereign debt was a positive draw for that asset
class offsetting local currency aversion. Reflecting meager trade growth,
export credit volume was also off 25% compared with 2014, at $75 billion in the
latest quarter, according to Reuters statistics. Asian banks have been big in
the space, but standards have tightened in the latest surveys as they grapple
with souring corporate and consumer exposure more generally.
Brazil’s real has
been the biggest loser with a 30% plunge, and is on track to retest its 2002
low of 4/dollar. One-fifth of exports, especially iron ore, go to China and state
oil monopoly Petrobras had to borrow from the Chinese Development Bank when it
no longer could tap global bond markets after a downgrade and lingering
scandal. President Rousseff’s approval rating is below 10% and recession will
last into next year as 9.5% inflation exceeds the central bank target. Another
interest rate hike to 14% has not
steadied the currency, and a dollar swap program was pared as a drain on
reserves also reeling from a chronic current account deficit and decreased
foreign direct investment. Moody’s just lowered the sovereign ratings a notch
to near junk, which could lead to billions of dollars in forced selling from
debt fund managers, including in Japan with its cultural ties where retail
products for the country have long been popular.
China’s sovereign
wealth fund reportedly holds Mexican paper, as the peso crashed through 16 to
the dollar compelling the central bank to launch a 2-month $50 billion
intervention facility. Beijing’s oil companies may be interested in Pemex’s first
exploration block auctions, but for now bilateral petroleum deals concentrate
on Colombia and Venezuela whose currencies have also plummeted. The latter has
amassed $50 billion in Chinese infrastructure project for natural resource debt
over the years it can no longer service, as default on sovereign and government
petroleum company obligations is widely anticipated in bond and derivative
spreads. The bolivar is in free fall at 600 to the dollar in the parallel
market, one hundred times the controlled rate, as hyperinflation rages before
end-year elections.
Outside the
region South Africa and Turkey have also reached exchange rate bottoms amid
Asian commodity, construction, and banking linkages exacerbating
direction. Negative commercial and
monetary relations between major emerging economies are mutually-reinforcing,
and with rumors that yuan internationalization was a factor in the 2% shift as
it mirrors previous market openings, the prevailing pattern suggests repeated
rather than one-off depreciation.
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