euractiv.com | Dec 17, 2009

An attempt by developing and emerging countries to create “a new world order” in which Western industrialised nations are no longer dominant is threatening to scupper an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen, warned EU delegates. EurActiv reports from the Danish capital.

As more than 130 world leaders arrive in Copenhagen for the final two days of the UN climate conference – US President Barack Obama is due to arrive tomorrow (18 December) – negotiators have warned that the risk of failure has never been higher.

“The final negotiations will be tense and strenuous,” said Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who is chairing the conference after Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard resigned from the role to move the negotiations up a notch.

‘New world order’

Jo Leinen, who leads the European Parliament’s delegation in Copenhagen, told EurActiv that the conference has been rigged with mistrust between rich and poor nations over emissions reduction targets and aid to the developing world (EurActiv 16/12/09).

Leinen’s interpretation of the current state of play is that developing countries were trying to use the conference as a way to force a new world order in which industrialised countries are no longer the dominant power.

“I think we are at the beginning of a new world order,” the MEP said. But he warned that it would be “a pity to sacrifice the climate conference for unsolved global governance problems”.

His alarm was echoed by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who said on Wednesday (16 December) that negotiators were set for an “uphill struggle” to bridge the gap in the negotiations. “If you don’t get an agreement this week, people will doubt whether you can get an agreement at all,” Brown told the BBC.

Rich-poor divide

Tensions have tended to concentrate on emissions reduction targets for industrialised countries.

On Monday, the G77-China bloc, encompassing 130 developing and emerging nations, suspended the talks for a few hours in protest against the Danish host government, which they said was favouring the interests of developed countries.

The EU expects other developed nations to make firm commitments on emissions reductions targets in order to raise its own target of reducing greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020 to 30%.

But Jo Leinen, the European Parliament’s negotiator, cautioned that this would be a last-minute decision which now seemed unlikely due to insufficient commitments from other parties.

Killing Kyoto?

The Group of 77 and China yesterday warned against attempts to dismantle the Kyoto Protocol, which binds nearly 40 rich nations to limit carbon emissions.

The United States in particular has never ratified Kyoto due to concerns over the economy.

But developing countries want rich nations to be held to their Kyoto obligations, and sign up to a second round of tougher commitments from 2013.

“We have seen that developed country parties to the Kyoto Protocol are seeking to dismantle the protocol itself,” said NafieAli Nafie, head of the Sudanese delegation, who spoke on behalf of the G77 and China at the high-level segment of the conference.

Industrialised countries are in favour of a “single undertaking” which is much weaker than the protocol and would undermine and reinterpret the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, Nafie said.

He said developed countries intended to undermine the principles of “equity, common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” by throwing away the Kyoto Protocol.

Negotiations to extend the Kyoto pact have stalled, India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh warned on Wednesday. He said many developed countries were “vehemently opposing” the protocol and some of them wanted a single new accord obliging all nations to fight global warming. “The sense we get is that [the] Kyoto [Protocol] is in intensive care if not dead,” Ramesh told reporters.

Two-track approach

But developing countries want to maintain Kyoto as an essential part of the negotiations. “The G77 wishes to stress the need to maintain the two-track outcome of which the Kyoto Protocol is an essential instrument,” Nafie said.

The two-track negotiation mechanism was established in the Bali Action Plan, adopted two years ago. According to the action plan, developed countries should come up with emissions reduction targets for the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol after the first period expires in 2012, and discuss how to help developing countries with their mitigation and adaptation efforts under the UNFCCC.

Jo Leinen MEP, head of the European Parliament’s delegation in Copenhagen, told EurActiv that what he had seen so far “is not very encouraging”. He said he was still hoping that the US, Russia, Canada and Australia would up their offers.

“Without a deal on reduction targets, then probably in this conference there will not be a deal on long-term financing,” Leinen said. He warned that the question of financing now seemed to be pushed back until after Copenhagen, which would signal a failure for the conference.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso was still confident that an ambitious deal with targets “is within our grasp”. “If, as I hope, everybody is now ready to overcome the procedural obstacles, I believe we now have a basis for a real negotiation in the closing days towards a meaningful and ambitious deal, which we must transform into a binding legal agreement next year,” he told the high-level segment in Copenhagen yesterday.

Back from Copenhagen, MEP Lena Ek (Sweden, ALDE) stressed the need for action from all sides. “To reach a deal we need three things above all: China must start reporting; America must start financing; and the EU must be committing to a 30% cut in emissions by 2020. No muss, no fuss – just real action now,” she said.

Green MEP Rebecca Harms (Germany) urged European leaders to realise that there is no longer any time to waste. “Reports that EU is preparing to abandon its 30% reduction target by 2020 are extremely worrying at such a crucial stage in the negotiations. The EU has waved this promise under the noses of all other negotiating parties for two years: to revoke it now could jeopardise the talks irreparably. The EU presidency must drop any draft ‘back-up’ plan that would abandon former promises,” she said.

WWF, the global conservation organisation, warned that there was little substance in the texts that are to be presented to heads of states upon their arrival. “In many ways the final sessions have produced more disagreement rather than less on key issues as national negotiators dig in,” said Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF’s global deal. “As the really hard decisions go forward to higher levels, it becomes more likely we will end up with high words on principal and less likely we will get detailed words that will work in tackling climate change.”

Oxfam, the development NGO, called on developed countries to deliver financing, reminding them that poor countries are ready to act on their side. “Like court magicians rich country negotiators are conjuring up a deal for their political masters which provides the illusion of action but delivers next to nothing of substance. Poor countries will not be fooled by spin – as they have already made clear they will not sign a suicide pact in Copenhagen,” said Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International.

Telegraph | Dec 8, 2009

By Gerald Warner

Who needs tanks on the lawn when you have the Environmental Protection Agency? Barack Obama’s use of the EPA to pressurise the Senate to pass his climate change Nuremberg Decrees shows his dictatorial mentality. He wants to override Congress, which is hostile to his climate gobbledegook because it is representative of the American electorate, and sideline the nation’s elected Senators by ruling by decree, courtesy of the EPA. This is a coup d’état.

And what is the justification for this undemocratic action? The allegedly imminent threat from “Anthropogenic Global Warming”. There is always a supposed threat, when tyrants take the stage. The President of the United States has just reduced his moral authority to the level of any Third World dictator heading a “Government of National Emergency”. Fortunately, the world’s leading democracy, which he is trying to subvert, has guarantees of liberty so deeply embedded in its Constitution that US citizens are well placed to fight back.

In the first place, regulation can be challenged in a way that laws cannot. So the EPA’s proposed ruling on so-called “Greenhouse Gases” can be opposed extensively with litigation, to the point that the ruling might not yet be in force when Obama demits office. In the second place, the EPA is funded by Congress. So, if the Agency is being used to bypass or neuter Congress, why should legislators not play hardball and retaliate by cutting off its funding? The EPA may look formidable, but its situation is rather as if Rommel were buying the fuel for his tanks from the Allies.

But what is of compelling interest on this side of the pond is the way in which the bullets to shoot down American democracy were made in Britain. The trail is not hard to follow. When the EPA published its “Endangerment Finding” on greenhouse gases and proposed rule, back in April, almost every paragraph of the text (Federal Register, April 24, 2009, pp 18886-18910) cited as authority the IPCC’s 2007 Report, which the Agency acknowledges it “relies on most heavily”. And whence came the main input on climate change to that report?

Yes, that’s right! You’ve got it: from Phil Jones, Michael Mann and the rest of the lads at the CRU, East Anglia. From the innovative, creative “scientists” who wanted to “beat the crap” out of a climate change sceptic; who “just completed Mike’s Nature trick”; who “can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”; who deleted e-mails in the interests of science; who tried to prevent publication of dissenters’ views; who coined the historic phrase “hide the decline”.

Those jokers are the main authority for the extravagant claims in the IPCC report and, by extension, for the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding”. That is the authority that is being invoked to overturn the principles of 1776 in the United States. The Protocols of the Elders of Norwich are the justification for EPA tyranny. It is with that weighty evidence at his back that Barack Obama is going to Copenhagen to sell out American taxpayers to Third World subsidy junkies, profiteering “green” corporations and the ever entrepreneurial Al Gore. This is the steal of the millennium: forget the Great Train Robbery and the Brinks Mat caper – these hoodlums are targeting $45 trillion.

Obama hates America and, increasingly, that sentiment is being reciprocated. This is a socialist, World Government putsch. Have the American people the resolution to resist it? We shall soon know.

Fresh from defending Carlos the Jackal, Hugo Chavez managed to upset Ugandans on Sunday by claiming that Idi Amin was not as brutal as everyone made him out to be.

Telegraph | Nov 26, 2009

“We thought he was a cannibal,” the Venezuelan leader said, referring to Amin, whose regime was notorious for torturing and killing suspected opponents in the 1970s. “I have doubts. … I don’t know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot.”

Mary Karoro Okurut, spokeswoman for the ruling National Resistance Movement, said Amin was not worthy of such consideration.

“Anybody who says that Amin was good has something wrong with him,” she said on Sunday. “Amin was brutal. He killed many Ugandans and made many run into exile. There is something wrong with whoever praises Amin.”

There is no exact figure for the number of people killed during Amin’s 1971-1979 regime but estimates range up to 500,000 people.

Ugandan officials did not say whether they would take any formal diplomatic action. Venezuela has no embassy in Uganda.

On Saturday Mr Chavez described Carlos the Jackal, real name Ilich Sanchez Ramirez, who is serving a life sentence in France, as a “revolutionary fighter”.

CNN | Nov 18, 2009

By Tom Cohen

Washington (CNN) — The federal government made $98 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2009, and President Obama will issue an executive order in coming days to combat the problem, his budget director announced Tuesday.

The 2009 total for improper payments — from outright fraud to misdirected reimbursements due to factors such as an illegible doctor’s signature — was a 37.5 percent increase over the $72 billion in 2008, according to figures provided by Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

In an evening media briefing, Orszag was unable to provide an overall figure for what percentage of the bad payments was due to fraud. He also lacked a breakdown on how much of the total improper payments involved spending on Obama’s $787 billion economic recovery package passed in February.

Orszag said the executive order coming in the next week will promote transparency, strengthen accountability and provide incentives to improve the government payment process, Orszag said.

Full Story

In this Oct. 29 2009 file photo, Belgium’s Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy participates in a meeting prior to an EU summit in Brussels. Very soon, Europeans from Denmark to Bulgaria will wake up to the reality of having their very first president, one person world leaders can call when they want to talk to Europe. AP Photo

“New resources will be necessary for the financing of the welfare state. Green tax instruments are a possibility.”

Top candidate debates EU tax at elite dinner

EU Observer | Nov 16, 2009

by ANDREW RETTMAN

Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, a top candidate for the new European Union president job, laid out his views on future EU financing at a dinner of the secretive Bilderberg group last week.

The event took place at Val Duchesse, a former priory on the outskirts of Brussels, on Thursday (12 November), with guests including Belgian industrialist and Bilderberg chairman Etienne Davignon, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and luminaries from the worlds of international politics and business, according to Belgian broadsheet De Tijd.

The Belgian leader is reported to have said in a speech that: “New resources will be necessary for the financing of the welfare state. Green tax instruments are a possibility, but they are ambiguous: This type of tax will eventually be extinguished. But the possibilities of financial levies at European level must be seriously examined and for the first time the large countries in the union are open to that.”

Mr Van Rompuy’s official spokesman later told the Belga news agency that: “The Prime Minister … indicated that it is necessary to carry on thinking about structural financing at the European level.”

The leak to De Tijd, coming just days before the EU aims to choose its first permanent president, could damage Mr Van Rompuy’s chances.

Proposals about imposing fees on environmentally-damaging behaviour or skimming small levies off financial transactions have been mooted before. But the suggestion that the new EU president might interfere in national taxation policy is anathema to anti-federalists in EU countries such as the UK or Denmark.

Mr Van Rompuy’s participation at the Bilderberg dinner will also give ammunition to critics of the EU top job selection process, which takes place via confidential consultations between EU leaders and informal social events.

The Bilderberg group is an elite club of aristocrats, politicians and businessmen dating back to 1954, which likes to meet away from the public eye and which is widely disliked by pro-transparency campaigners.

EU parliament chief shows his cards

Meanwhile in a related development, European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek over the weekend backed former Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar to take the EU president post.

“As far as I know, Aznar is not currently interested in this kind of position. But I think it would be good for the EU if he changed his mind and submitted his candidature,” Mr Buzek told Spanish daily ABC in an interview published on Saturday.

Mr Buzek met Mr Aznar along with the current Spanish government on a trip to Madrid ahead of Spain taking up the rotating EU presidency in January.

The conservative Spanish politician is from the correct political family according to the prevailing wisdom that the centre-right will take the EU president job while the centre-left will take the EU foreign minister position. But he was a firm advocate of the Iraq war, which remains a highly-divisive topic in the EU.

The speculation is set to see an end on Thursday (19 November) when EU leaders gather in Brussels to decide the top appointments. Other names in line for the presidency post include Dutch leader Jan Peter Balkenende and his Luxembourg counterpart, Jean-Claude Juncker.

Liu Mingjie (C) and a customer discuss Liu’s bag and t-shirt ‘Oba Mao’designs in which he superimposed the face of US President Barack Obama over that of China’s late revolutionary leader Mao Zedong for sale at his shop in the tourist Houhai district of Beijing on September 23, 2009. The entrepreneur who goes by the English name Stefan is a former engineer who worked for Germany’s Siemens AG and US-based Cisco Systems before starting his business three years ago, according to state media, introduced the Oba Mao design bags and t-shirts, including coin purses, earlier this summer and says the shirts have been selling well. Getty Images

China’s Role as U.S. Lender Alters Dynamics for Obama

NY Times | Nov 15, 2009

by Helene Cooper, Michael Wines and David E. Sanger.

When President Obama visits China for the first time on Sunday, he will, in many ways, be assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker.

That stark fact — China is the largest foreign lender to the United States — has changed the core of the relationship between the United States and the only country with a reasonable chance of challenging its status as the world’s sole superpower.

The result: unlike his immediate predecessors, who publicly pushed and prodded China to follow the Western model and become more open politically and economically, Mr. Obama will be spending less time exhorting Beijing and more time reassuring it.

In a July meeting, Chinese officials asked their American counterparts detailed questions about the health care legislation making its way through Congress. The president’s budget director, Peter R. Orszag, answered most of their questions. But the Chinese were not particularly interested in the public option or universal care for all Americans.

“They wanted to know, in painstaking detail, how the health care plan would affect the deficit,” one participant in the conversation recalled. Chinese officials expect that they will help finance whatever Congress and the White House settle on, mostly through buying Treasury debt, and like any banker, they wanted evidence that the United States had a plan to pay them back.

It is a long way from the days when President George W. Bush hectored China about currency manipulation, or when President Bill Clinton exhorted the Chinese to improve human rights.

Mr. Obama has struck a mollifying note with China. He pointedly singled out the emerging dynamic at play between the United States and China during a wide-ranging speech in Tokyo on Saturday that was meant to outline a new American relationship with Asia.

“The United States does not seek to contain China,” Mr. Obama said. “On the contrary, the rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations.”

He alluded to human rights but did not get specific. “We will not agree on every issue,” he said, “and the United States will never waver in speaking up for the fundamental values that we hold dear — and that includes respect for the religion and cultures of all people.”

White House officials have been working for months to make sure that Mr. Obama’s three-day visit to Shanghai and Beijing conveys a conciliatory image. For instance, in June, the White House told the Dalai Lama that while Mr. Obama would meet him at some point, he would not do so in October, when the Tibetan spiritual leader visited Washington, because it was too close to Mr. Obama’s visit to China.

Greeting the Dalai Lama, whom China condemns as a separatist, weeks before Mr. Obama’s first presidential trip to the country could alienate Beijing, administration officials said. Every president since George H. W. Bush in 1991 has met the Dalai Lama when he visited Washington, usually in private encounters at the White House, although in 2007 George W. Bush became the first president to welcome him publicly, bestowing the Congressional Gold Medal on him at the Capitol. Mr. Obama met the Dalai Lama as a senator.

Similarly, while he was campaigning for the presidency, Mr. Obama several times accused China of manipulating its currency, an allegation that the current Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, repeated during his confirmation hearings. But in April, the Treasury Department retreated from that criticism, issuing a report that said China was not manipulating its currency to increase its exports.

While American officials said privately that they remained frustrated that China’s currency policies lowered the cost of Chinese goods and made American products more expensive in foreign markets, they said that they were relieved that China was fighting the global recession with an enormous fiscal stimulus program to spur domestic growth, and added that now was not the time to antagonize Beijing.

China is not viewed as a trouble spot for the United States. But this administration, like its predecessor, has had difficulty grappling with a rising power that seems eager to avoid direct clashes with the United States but affects its interests in many areas, including currency policy, nuclear proliferation, climate change and military spending.

In that regard, two members of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy team said that the United States’ interactions with the Chinese had been far too narrow in past years, focusing on counterterrorism and North Korea. Too little was done, they said, to address China’s energy and environmental policies, or its expansion of influence in Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa, where China has invested heavily and used billions of dollars in aid to advance its political influence.

One hint of the Obama administration’s new approach came in a speech this fall by James B. Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, who has deep roots in China policy. He argued that China needed to adopt a policy of “strategic reassurance” to the rest of the world, a phrase that appeared intended to be the successor to the framework of the Bush era, when China was urged to embrace a role as a “responsible stakeholder.”

“Strategic reassurance rests on a core, if tacit, bargain,” Mr. Steinberg said. “Just as we and our allies must make clear that we are prepared to welcome China’s ‘arrival,’ ” he argued, the Chinese “must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not come at the expense of security and well-being of others.”

The Chinese reaction has been mixed, at best. The official China Daily newspaper ran a column just before Mr. Obama’s arrival suggesting that the United States needed to provide some assurance of its own — to “respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” code words for entirely backing away from the issues of how China deals with Taiwan and Tibet.

In the United States, the phrase “strategic reassurance” has been attacked by conservative commentators, who argue that any reassurance that the United States provides to China would be an acknowledgment of a decline in American power.

In an op-ed article in The Washington Post, the analysts Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal argued that the policy had echoes of Europe “ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony” a century ago. “Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America’s inevitable decline,” they wrote. White House officials shot back, insisting that it is China that needs to do the reassurance, not the United States.

In China, Mr. Obama will meet with local political leaders and will host an American-style town hall meeting with students in Shanghai. He will then spend two days in Beijing meeting with President Hu Jintao.

It seems unlikely that Mr. Obama will get the same celebrity-type reception in Beijing that he received in Cairo, Ghana, Paris and London. China seems mostly immune to the Obama fever that swept other parts of the world, and the Chinese are growing more confident that their country has the wherewithal to compete with the United States on the world stage, analysts say.

“Obama is still a positive guy, and all over the world most people think he’s more energetic, more sincere, than Bush, more a reformist,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor and an expert on United States-China relations at People’s University in Beijing. “But in China, Obama’s popularity is less than in Europe, than Japan or Southeast Asia.” In China, he said, “there is no worship of Obama.”

For instance, during the Bush and Clinton years, China might release a few political dissidents on the eve of a visit by the president as a good-will gesture. This time, American officials say, they do not expect any similar gestures, although they say that Mr. Obama will raise human rights issues privately with Mr. Hu.

“This time China will agree to have a human rights dialogue with the U.S. on some cases,” Mr. Shi said, but “the arguments have changed compared to the past. Now we say, ‘We are a different country, we have our own system, our own culture.’ ”

U.S. President Barack Obama is introduced to speak by former President George H.W. Bush at the Points of Light forum at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 16, 2009. Reuters Pictures

AP | Oct 19, 2009

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Former President George H.W. Bush doesn’t like the “ugliness” President Barack Obama has faced since taking office, but he thinks it’s no worse than his son experienced and is not about Obama being black.

Bush, who was hosting Obama at a volunteerism forum here Friday, said the tone of the criticism “crosses the line of civility.”

“To the degree it turns off one student or young person from serving, that’s bad,” Bush said in an interview with CBS News Radio at his presidential library. “It should not happen.”

President Barack Obama greets students as he is introduced by former President George H.W. Bush (not shown) at the start of the Points of Light Institute forum at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Friday, Oct. 16, 2009. AP Photo

But Bush stressed that conservatives aren’t the only ones to blame. Liberal pundits heaped similar scorn on his son, former President George W. Bush.

“They just hammered him mercilessly — and I think obscenely — a lot of the time,” he said.

Former President Jimmy Carter recently asserted that much of the bitterness aimed at Obama stemmed from his being the nation’s first black president.

Obama disagreed.

The elder Bush said, “You might find some racists out there but I don’t think the attacks per se have to do that he’s an African-American.”

Bush, who turned 85 in June, said presidents throughout history have suffered at the hands of critics.

“I’m reluctant to say it’s a whole new thing in politics — this ugliness,” he said. “I mean you go back to Grover Cleveland … It was terrible the things that people said.”

Frédéric Mitterrand wrote about paying “young boys” for sex during trips abroad  Photo: AP

Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s culture minister, was under pressure to resign after it emerged that he had admitted to paying “young boys” for sexual acts while on holiday in Thailand.

Telegraph | Oct 7, 2009

Frédéric Mitterrand admitted to paying for sex with ‘young boys’ in Thailand

By Henry Samuel in Paris

The revelations in his 2005 autobiography “The Bad Life” have come back to haunt Mr Mitterrand after he emerged as one of the most vociferous defenders of Roman Polanski, the film director currently detained in Switzerland in connection with an outstanding conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in the US in 1977.

In his book, Mr Mitterrand, the nephew of the late Socialist president François Mitterrand, wrote: “I got into the habit of paying for boys…All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excite me enormously.

“One could judge this abominable spectacle from a moral standpoint but it pleases me beyond the reasonable.”

Curiously, there was little outcry when the book was published in 2005. However, Mr Mitterrand’s tastes were brought to the fore on Monday by Marine Le Pen, daughter of the far-right National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, on a political chat show.

Miss Le Pen read out a passage in which Mr Mitterrand wrote: “The profusion of very attractive and immediately available young boys puts me in a state of desire that I no longer need to hinder nor hide…as I know that I will not be refused.”

Her call for his resignation has become an internet hit.

On Tuesday, the opposition Socialists joined the chorus of outrage. Benoît Hamon, the party spokesman, said: “As a minister of culture he has drawn attention to himself by defending a film maker and he has written a book where he said he took advantage of sexual tourism. To say the least, I find it shocking.”

Mr Mitterrand responded on Tuesday by saying he was “flabbergasted”.

“If the National Front drag me through the mud then it is an honour for me.

“If a leftist politician drags me through the mud then it is a humiliation for him,” he added.

Xavier Bertrand, the head of Mr Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party, defended Mr Mitterrand. “The Socialists are now on the same ground as the extreme right, it’s incredible. One is not obliged to use private life for political ends,” he said.

Mr Mitterrand, who joined the cabinet in June, was considered a great catch for Mr Sarkozy and proof of his “open” style of government; the minister comes from a grand Socialist family and is admired by many in the Left-wing cultural establishment. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the first lady, was said to have had a hand in his nomination.

Politicians from across the spectrum criticised his vitriolic attack on the arrest of Mr Polanski, a French citizen who US authorities wish to extradite over his 1977 conviction. Mr Mitterrand initially described the pursuit of the director as “callous” and “absolutely horrifying”, but then toned down his criticism.

Mao Xinyu, second from right, the grandson of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, left a conference in Beijing in March 2008. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Many took note that General Mao has a son and a daughter in a society where most families today have only one child, a result of population control policies put in place after his grandfather’s death.

NY Times | Sep 24, 2009

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — He enjoys generous helpings of red braised pork, collects Chinese fans and keeps an unapologetically patriotic blog. Now Mao Xinyu, the 39-year-old grandson and only surviving male heir of Mao, appears to have become the youngest major general in the People’s Liberation Army, according to the state media.

Although his elevation has not been officially announced by the military and some Web sites have dismissed it as a rumor, the news was reported Thursday by the Changjiang Daily, a state-run newspaper, and has been among the top news items on Chinese Web portals as the nation prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the revolution that brought Mao and the Communists to power.

A historian trained at the Central Party School and a steadfast guardian of Mao’s political thought, the younger Mao is one of the Great Helmsman’s four grandchildren. Although the official media afford him considerable respect, he is the object of some derision among other Chinese, who lampoon what they call his mediocre performance as a student, his unkempt ways and his prodigious girth; in recent years, his weight has exceeded 220 pounds.

Reaction to the news, posted anonymously on Chinese Web sites, was rife with sarcasm. “An excellent role model of our army, an unparalleled military leader and theorist of very high quality,” one comment read.

Many took note that General Mao has a son and a daughter in a society where most families today have only one child, a result of population control policies put in place after his grandfather’s death.

China’s ruling party, unlike the one in neighboring North Korea, disavows hereditary rule. Even so, General Mao has had a low profile compared with that of other descendants of some major Communist Party leaders. He is not viewed as a “princeling,” an appellation given those who have mined family connections for lucrative business opportunities or, in a few cases, political power.

Chinese analysts at one time speculated that General Mao might harbor ambitions of becoming a big-city mayor. But he seems to have settled for what has turned out to be a rewarding career in the military. He has also had some success writing books and articles on his grandfather.

He is not one to dwell on the repercussions of Mao’s missteps, including the tens of millions who starved as a result of his failed policies, or the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, which destroyed so many lives.

During interviews, General Mao provides reliable paeans to his grandfather, whom he describes as “the spine of the Chinese people,” or simply the Chairman. “Without the guidance of Mao Zedong thought and Marxist theory, our industrialization and modernization could not have been accomplished,” he said in an interview published last month by Southern People Weekly. “China will not produce anyone as great as Mao Zedong within the next one thousand years.”

General Mao says he has no recollection of his grandfather, who died in 1976. His father, Mao Anqing, was dogged by mental illness, and he was reared by his mother, a photographer and army general.

In an interview published last year by News Express, a newspaper, General Mao complained about the pressures of being born into modern China’s most famous family. “As a descendant of the Leader, I do have a lot of stress,” he said. “I feel that people are always watching my behavior, so I must do good.”

There are few babies to be seen on the streets of China’s commercial capital. The city is ageing so quickly that by 2020 more than a third of its 19m people will be 60 or over. The city’s pension fund faces bankruptcy.

Call for more babies as China turns to grey

London Times | Sep 20, 2009

Michael Sheridan in Shanghai

WHEN the head of family planning in Shanghai said young couples should have more babies because the city was growing old, it sounded like a statement of the obvious.

Yet within days there was a storm of comment on the internet and in state media as people asked whether this meant the government was preparing to relax its one-child policy.

There are signs officials are rethinking the ban, which has prevented 400m births since 1979, because on present trends China’s population will begin to decline by the middle of the century. By then, India will have overtaken it as the most populous nation.

Xie Lingli, the Shanghai family planning official, was forced to explain publicly that he had not deviated from the party line, which restricts most couples in Chinese cities to one child.

The rules allow couples who are both only-children to have two babies. Shanghai has introduced other exceptions, including more leeway for fishermen and farmers. It has also abolished a rule that couples who are allowed more than one child must wait four years between births.

“There’s a huge social demand for second children,” said Yang Henmin, an engineer in Shanghai. “In the end the government cannot control it any more than it can grasp the wind.”

The city’s family planners talk of “encouraging” more births in a change of tone that sounds distinctly like liberalisation by stealth.

“In the past we stressed birth control, not the chance to have a second child. Not many people know these exceptions to the regulations so we were just reminding them,” said Xie.

There are few babies to be seen on the streets of China’s commercial capital. The city is ageing so quickly that by 2020 more than a third of its 19m people will be 60 or over. The city’s pension fund faces bankruptcy.

It is a harbinger of change that will come as a shock to some commentators who portray China as a youthful country that is destined to rule the world. In fact, the one-child policy means China is “greying” fast. On present trends it will grow old before it has a chance to get rich.

Although China’s population has passed 1.3 billion and is still growing, it is expected to peak within three decades. By 2040, India will have 1.5 billion people versus 1.42 billion Chinese, according to Barbara Pillsbury, an expert on population control.

The Chinese media reported her forecast and the Shanghai debate shows that officials have begun to grasp the consequences of the policy.

By the middle of the century China will have more than 330m people over 60, of whom 100m will be over 80. In contrast, the US is predicted to have a younger population because of immigration and higher birth rates.

“We say that four, two, one — that’s four grandparents, two parents and one child — is the usual family structure in Shanghai,” said Tan Jie, a businessman, “so the burden of care is a heavy one.”

Then there is the gender imbalance. Pillsbury said that while the average live birth ratio is 105 boys to 100 girls, in China it is 119 to 100 — the result of abortions by couples desperate for a son.

In Mao Tse-tung’s time, the average Chinese woman had six children. Today she has 1.8. In the past, there were six younger people working to support each old person. In the one-child generation, said Pillsbury, there would be one couple to support each one.

“The figures are getting close to those in Japan and Sweden,” wrote the China Youth Daily, “so Shanghai’s intentions should be praised, but its methods are wrong.”

The newspaper warned that if other provinces did the same, the “strain on society” would be immense. “The government should not ask or encourage people to have another child; families should make the decision,” it said.

Its line seemed to suggest that a cautious debate about relaxing the policy has reached the upper echelons of the Communist party.

“China accounted for 40% of the world’s population in the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty \, but today it accounts for 20%,” said Wang Xinhai, a social scientist. “So China should encourage people to have even three children,” he said.

Chinese officials are defensive about a widespread misconception that the one-child limit is imposed on every couple. In the countryside, people may have a second child if their first is a girl, or disabled. No restrictions apply to China’s minorities, including Tibetans and Uighur Muslims.

But Shanghai, which was the first modern city in China, is keeping up its pioneering role. Five other provinces have followed its lead by relaxing the rule requiring four years between births. A historic change of policy may be in the early stages of gestation.