Fukushima: China retaliates as Japan releases treated nuclear water
EPAJapan has begun its controversial discharge of treated waste water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, sparking protests in the region and retaliation from Beijing.
China is the biggest buyer of seafood from Japan, and on Thursday it said it would block all such imports.
Japan say the water is safe, and many scientists agree. The UN’s nuclear watchdog has also approved the plan.
But critics say more studies need to be done and the release should be halted.
More than a million tonnes of water stored at the nuclear plant will be discharged over the next 30 years.
China, which has been the most vocal of opponents since the plan was announced two years ago, called the water discharge an “extremely selfish and irresponsible act” and said Japan was “passing an open wound onto the future generations of humanity”.
Shortly afterwards, China’s customs office announced that an existing ban on seafood imports from Fukushima and some prefectures would be immediately extended to cover the whole of Japan to “protect the health of Chinese consumers”.
The move is calculated to inflict economic damage, and Japan has admitted that businesses will take a “significant” hit. Mainland China and Hong Kong together import more than $1.1bn (£866m) of seafood from Japan every year – making up nearly half of Japan’s seafood exports.
Burt analysts say that the reactions from China in particular, are as much motivated by politics as they are by genuine concerns.
Tokyo’s relationship to Beijing has deteriorated in recent years as it draws closer to the US and also shows support to Taiwan, an island which sees itself as independent but which China claims as its own.
“This incident is more of a symptom than a cause of worsening Sino-Japanese relations,” said Chinese foreign policy expert Neil Thomas with the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“Beijing may have made less of a fuss about the water release if its relationship with Tokyo was in a better place.”
In return, Japan is likely to “reject this criticism, but they are unlikely to do anything provocative,” said James DJ Brown, a professor specialising in Japanese foreign policy expert at Temple University’s Japan campus.
“While Japan’s government is deeply concerned by what it sees as the aggressive actions of the Chinese Communist Party, they understand that it is in their interests to maintain stable relations with their larger neighbour.”
But it may not need to wait for long. Some observers believe that China may not stick with the ban.
“China’s growing economic difficulties could mean that any ban is relatively brief and narrow, so as to limit the negative impact on Chinese importers and business sentiment,” said Mr Thomas.
South Korea also has a longstanding ban on some Japanese seafood. But on Thursday its government had a more muted reaction.
Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said “what is important now is whether Japan, as it promised to the international community, strictly follows the scientific standards and transparently provides information”.
Seoul and Tokyo have drawn closer despite deep historical grievances, united in their allyship to the US while facing down threats from North Korea and China.
However, most South Koreans are opposed to the water’s release, and on Thursday protesters in Seoul attempted to storm the Japanese embassy. Angry demonstrations were also held in Hong Kong and Tokyo.
Meanwhile Mark Brown, chair of the Pacific Islands Forum which had previously castigated the plan, said they now believe the plan “meets international safety standards”.
‘Negligible impact’ on environment
Since a tsunami destroyed the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011, power plant company Tepco has been pumping in water to cool down the reactors’ fuel rods. This means every day the plant produces contaminated water, which is treated and stored in massive tanks.
Even after treatment, the water contains unacceptably high levels of radioactive substances tritium and carbon-14 which are difficult to remove. Japan’s solution is to dilute it with seawater before releasing it into the ocean.
More than 1,000 tanks have been filled, and Japan says this is not a sustainable long-term solution. It has argued that after treatment and dilution the water is safe to release.
Many scientists have backed the plan, saying it is sound. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency has also said the plan complies with international standards and would have a “negligible” impact on the environment.
Authorities have promised to continuously monitor levels of radiation in the ocean and to maintain a high level of transparency.
But there are some who are still sceptical given Tepco’s track record – the company has in the past been blamed for a lack of transparency over the disaster, which it has apologised for.
And while disposing treated water in the ocean is common practice for nuclear plants, critics have pointed out that the amount being released from Fukushima is on an unprecedented, far vaster scale.
Some scientists say more studies should be done on how it would affect the ocean bed and marine life. Environmental activist group Greenpeace has also called for the water to stay in the tanks until better processing technology is invented.
The plan has particularly angered coastal communities and fishermen in Japan. They fear it would harm their livelihoods as some worried consumers avoid seafood from the area, which has never fully recovered economically since the 2011 disaster.
The wider Japanese public also remains deeply divided on the issue, with only half supporting the water’s discharge according to the latest polls.
“I think there should have been many other methods… instead of releasing it into the ocean,” Tokyo protester Keiko Kisei told Reuters on Thursday.
“However, they chose to discharge the water and cause trouble to the world. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”
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Russiaâs invasion gives Ukraineâs Independence Day new meaning: Ukrainian Ambassador to Singapore
Moscow in July withdrew from the UN-brokered deal, which allowed the safe passage of Kyiv’s grain and some other vital products via the Black Sea.
Ms Zelenko said Moscow has destroyed more than 200,000 tonnes of grain meant for countries in Asia and Africa, alongside 26 support facilities and five vessels.
“We see deliberate attacks by Russia missiles on our port infrastructure. It seems like this is one of the targets that could help Russia move ahead with its hunger games,” she said.
“Not only do the people of Ukraine suffer from the grave humanitarian consequences from this gross violation of the UN Charter and the international law, the whole of humanity on all continents bears the cost of the Russian aggression.”
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Ms Zelenko said Ukrainians are positive on continued international support as they fight the invasion.
“We are still seeing new commitments being made. We see so much international support for Ukraine. We see that the circle of those willing to make a difference is growing. That is something that gives us strength,” she said.
Democrat MPs defend pro-Srettha votes
Action reflected confusion over party’s stance, say members who insist they don’t want to join the government
Democrat Party MPs who voted in support of Srettha Thavisin for prime minister have blamed their action on confusion over the troubled party’s stance. They denied aspiring to be in the government and declared they were fully ready for an opposition role in parliament.
In the parliamentary vote on Tuesday to select the prime minister, 16 Democrat MPs unexpectedly voted for Mr Srettha, the Pheu Thai Party candidate. Many political observers were flabbergasted as it was understood that the party had earlier passed a resolution for its MPs to abstain.
Led by Det-it Khaothong, a caretaker deputy party leader and Songkhla MP, and Chaichana Dechdecho, a caretaker deputy secretary-general and Nakhon Si Thammarat MP, the 16 members on Thursday came out in defence of their action.
Mr Det-it told reporters that when the party held a meeting of its 25 MPs on Monday, the day before the parliamentary vote, they were split into three different groups.
Some MPs said the party should vote against Mr Srettha’s nomination, reasoning that the Democrat and Pheu Thai parties had long been in conflict. Some new MPs argued that the bitter past should be left behind, otherwise bad attitudes would persist. At this point, he said, some senior party MPs walked out of the meeting.
One group of MPs was of the opinion that the party should vote for the Pheu Thai nominee as the country had reached a dead end and there were many problems remaining to be solved.
But most of the MPs said the party should opt to abstain, he said.
Mr Det-it said that Jurin Laksanawisit, the caretaker party leader, then rose and suggested there should not be a vote on the matter because it was the individual right of an MP to vote as they wish.
“The meeting ended without a vote. We were not sure whether the party had passed a resolution or not,” he said.
Mr Det-it said that during the debate prior to the prime ministerial vote on Tuesday, the MPs in his group sat together in a separate room, listening to the comments of MPs and senators on Mr Srettha’s qualifications. Most of them found Mr Srettha acceptable to them, he added.
When it came time to vote, they noticed that Mr Jurin abstained while two other former party leaders — Chuan Leekpai and Banyat Bantadtan — voted against Mr Srettha’s nomination.
Mr Det-it said the inconsistency on the part of the three senior MPs, who are the party’s main pillars, caused MPs to conclude that the party did not have a definitive resolution regarding the vote.
‘Interest of the nation’
“We arrived at the conclusion that we should act in the interest of the nation and the people by voting in support of the Pheu Thai Party which had mustered more than 250 (MP) votes,” he said.
Pheu Thai, he noted, had also managed to reconcile with other parties that had been its political opponents in the past, notably the military-linked Palang Pracharath and United Thai Nation.
The Democrats were part of the Palang Pracharath-led coalition that formed the previous government.
“We were of the opinion that, as Democrat members of the new era who had never donned either yellow or red shirts and never had a conflict with anyone, we should not inherit the heritage of hatred and conflicts from people of the old generations,” Mr Det-it declared.
At the same time, however, he affirmed that his group of 16 MPs remained fully committed to sitting in the opposition.
“We do not aspire to be in the government. We would join a government only when we are invited and that must be a party resolution,” he said.
Asked whether the 16 MPs wanted the party to expel them so that they could join a new party, Mr Det-it said he doubted it would come to that.
“In fact, an MP can be expelled by as many as three-fourths of party MPs and executive committee members. But, since most of the MPs and party executives are here with us, I wonder how could we be expelled?” he asked.
He acknowledged what commentators have been saying for some time, that the Democrat Party was not united.
The party remains leaderless as Mr Jurin resigned following the May 14 election to take responsibility for its poor showing. It failed on two recent occasions to elect a new leader and executive board due to the lack of a quorum. In addition to the damage to its reputation, the party had to spend 3-4 million baht to arrange each meeting.
Mr Det-it urged the party to call another general assembly to elect a new leader and executive committee. And this time, he said, all sides must reconcile to ensure a sufficient quorum.
Indian rover begins exploring Moon’s south pole
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Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt among 6 nations set to join BRICS economic bloc
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âGirl scoutâ karaoke hostesses fined
Police in Sattahip take action after online outcry over inappropriate use of uniforms
PUBLISHED : 24 Aug 2023 at 15:37
CHON BURI: A group of Sattahip karaoke hostesses who thought that wearing girl scout uniforms would be good for business have been fined 100 baht each for their fashion statement.
Police in the seaside town south of Pattaya took action after online fashion critics reacted unfavourably to photos and videos of the young women on a Line group that later went viral.
Pol Col Panya Damlek, chief of the Sattahip station, ordered officers on Wednesday night to track down the hostesses at the bar near the Thongthip market. They were brought in for questioning and told that the Scout Act of 2008 takes a dim view of people wearing scout uniforms and emblems for non-scouting purposes.
The offence carries a jail term of up to one month and/or a fine of up to 1,000 baht. In this case police fined the first-time offenders 100 baht each as they had made an honest mistake, said Pol Lt Col Sinsamut Bunthatsana, investigation chief at the station.
One of the staff said she came to work in a girl scout uniform on her birthday on Aug 18. She proposed a theme night in which all the staff would wear the uniforms.
She insisted she was not aware that she was doing anything illegal, and apologised to anyone who was offended.
Singapore’s PM Lee congratulates newly appointed Thai PM Srettha Thavisin
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Activists seek answers about âfavoursâ for Thaksin
Former premier under quarantine at Police General Hospital until Sunday
PUBLISHED : 24 Aug 2023 at 14:56
Activists on Thursday pressed authorities to look into whether Thaksin Shinawatra received a special favour when he was admitted to Police General Hospital just hours after he started his eight-year prison term.
Well-known petitioner Srisuwan Janya brought his complaint to the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC). He wants the NACC to look into the decision by the Department of Corrections to transfer the former prime minister to Police General Hospital “only for hypertension”.
He filed the complaint a day after authorities said the 74-year-old prisoner’s multiple health conditions justified the referral to a hospital that is better equipped than the medical facilities at the Bangkok Remand Prison.
Earlier, when Thaksin was living abroad, he appeared to be in good health and fit enough to travel frequently between countries, Mr Srisuwan said.
The activist also took issue with reports that Thaksin would not have to wear his hair short like other male inmates.
At the Ministry of Justice, an activist group led by Pichai Chaimongkol and Nasser Yeema told officials that said the public was questioning the way the Department of Corrections was treating Thaksin.
They also asked if Thaksin was really severely ill, given the number of online pictures showing him looking quite healthy in recent times.
Sahakan Phetnarin, the ministry’s deputy permanent secretary, said that when prisoners had life-threatening health problems, they must be referred to a hospital in accordance with corrections regulations.
Nastee Thongplad, the governor of Bangkok Remand Prison, said Thaksin remained at Police General Hospital and during his first five days there, from Wednesday to Sunday, he would be quarantined and no visitors would be allowed.
Afterwards, he said, authorities would allow Thaksin to see 10 people who had already expressed their intention to visit him. He declined to name the expected visitors.
Thaksin returned to the country on Tuesday after 15 years of self-imposed exile. On the same day, the Supreme Court ordered him imprisoned for a total of eight years based on convictions in three cases.
Thaksin was brought to Bangkok Remand Prison early Tuesday afternoon, but shortly after midnight he was sent to Police General Hospital.
China halts all Japanese seafood imports over ‘selfish’ Fukushima release
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Crisis-hit China is right to avoid Japanâs failed example
TOKYO — As economists weigh the odds of China becoming Japan, many are drawing the wrong lessons from Tokyo’s lost decades.
The common misconception about the deflationary funk that relegated Japan to No 2 in Asia is that the central bank was too conservative in efforts to revive growth. It’s the opposite, really.
Though the Bank of Japan (BOJ) eased plenty in the early- to mid-1990s, it’s the last 24 years of zero interest rates and quantitative easing that sealed the nation’s fate. All of that monetary stimulus, paired with a fiscal-loosening boom, re-inflated one asset bubble after another.
Each time one of those bubbles burst or fizzled, the BOJ was keen to blow new ones. All those overlapping bubbles, propped up year after year, created the illusion of recovery.
It was all a mirage. Wages flatlined, innovation and productivity stagnated and the animal spirits that once wowed the world went dormant.
That’s because the BOJ’s steroids warped incentives across the economy. Why do the hard work of reinvention, recalibrating, rethinking and reforming when the central bank has your back day in, day out?
So, when economists urge the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to fight deflation with a monetary easing onslaught, they’re ignoring the examples the BOJ continues to serve up even today, argues independent economist Andy Xie.
In a series of writings, including in the South China Morning Post, and media interviews, including with Peter Lewis’ Money Talk Podcast, Xie has been making the case one can only hope that PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng is heeding.
“Market-driven restructuring is driving China’s deflation,” argues Xie, formerly a top Morgan Stanley economist. “It leads to more efficient allocation of resources and greater purchasing power for consumers.”
Xie continues that “if China can resist the reflationary pressure from those who lose out due to the deflation of property bubbles, a healthier and more sustainable growth cycle is coming, which will turn China into a high-income country.”
The thing about so-called “Japanification,” Xie explains, is that Japan’s malaise was less about the level of the money supply than a slow-moving economic system unable to see that its competitiveness was waning.
“As the generation of entrepreneurs who built Japan’s economy retired in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” Xie writes in SCMP, “their successors have behaved like bureaucrats, hanging onto what they have. They were paralyzed as Japan’s neighbors peeled off its industries one by one with better tech and lower prices.”
By 1999, when then-BOJ governor Masaru Hayami slashed rates to zero and began pioneering QE, a first for a Group of Seven nation, several years of political apathy were already stymying what was then Asia’s biggest economy.
Around 2011, when China first surpassed Japan in gross domestic product (GDP) terms, Tokyo had a chance to reboot — an opportunity to rekindle its entrepreneurial mojo. It doubled down on monetary easing instead.
In 2013, Haruhiko Kuroda took the reins at BOJ with a mandate to supersize Tokyo’s QE experiment. Kuroda did just that, hoarding government bonds and stocks as never before. By 2018, the BOJ’s balance sheet topped the size of Japan’s US$5 trillion economy.
Yet even this asset-buying onslaught failed to end deflation. Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine did that with its resulting spikes in energy and food costs. Wages didn’t respond the way Kuroda and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party expected.
There was a moment of optimism earlier this year when annual Shunto negotiations with unions resulted in the biggest pay hikes in 30 years. But great uncertainty about Japan’s 2024 prospects means the average 3.91% wage hikes might not live on.
As economist Richard Katz, publisher of Japan Economy Watch newsletter, observes: “Wages in Japan disappointed again in June, rising less than economists had forecast.
“Moreover, real wages adjusted for inflation fell year-on-year for the 15th month in a row. As a result, real consumer spending fell year-on-year for the fourth month in a row, bringing spending during April-June 5% below its 2018 level.”
Tokyo’s response? An even weaker yen to boost exports, not a bigger push to recalibrate growth engines and alter economic incentives. Yet, this too may backfire — again.
In an interview with Bloomberg, the head of Japan’s stock bourses warned the yen has fallen too far, too fast this year.
“This level of exchange rate is a bit too weak for the Japanese yen,” says Japan Exchange Group CEO Hiromi Yamaji. He said the 10.5% drop is taking a toll on investor confidence in Japan’s economy.
Negative side effects, including pushing up Japan Inc’s import bill, are doing more harm than good, Yamaji notes. The nation, he adds, can withstand interest rates rising away from zero.
Current BOJ leader Kazuo Ueda has so far refused to take that step. And odds are Tokyo officials won’t step into the market to tame the yen until it blows past the 150 level to the US dollar (from 145 now), says Atsushi Takeuchi, who led the BOJ’s foreign exchange division during Tokyo’s assertive 2010-2012 intervention efforts.
“When to intervene has always been an extremely political decision in Japan,” Takeuchi tells Reuters. “Nowadays, it’s the prime minister that ultimately makes the call.”
Trouble is, it’s not clear that even Japan has learned the lessons from Japan. Economic growth jumped 6% year-on-year in the April-June quarter thanks to robust exports. The risk is that the lesson Ueda and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida take from this dynamic is that a weaker yen is helping.
As DBS Bank economist Ma Tieying observes, Kishida’s team will surely notice that Japan’s “outperformance is primarily driven by exports and tourism-related sectors.” And that the “assertion that a weak yen has a positive net impact on the economy gains support from data.”
But these dynamics mask Japan’s underlying frailties, including a deep addiction to free money and the biggest public debt burden among top economies.
“The important thing to remember when assessing trade flows is that trade is about relativity,” says economist Robert Brusca at advisory Fact and Opinion Economics.
“It’s not about Japan’s prices; it’s about Japan’s prices compared to foreign prices. It’s not about Japan’s growth; it’s about Japan’s growth compared to foreign growth. It’s not about Japan’s export growth; it’s about Japan’s export growth compared to its import growth… and so on,” says Brusca.
Absent, though, are any moves in Tokyo to, in Xie’s words, promote a “more efficient allocation of resources and greater purchasing power for consumers.”
China needs to go the other way. This helps explain why the PBOC under Yi Gang (2018-2023) and Pan today is resisting aggressive easing moves.
Bold monetary stimulus would be the quickest and easiest way to defuse default risks in China’s troubled property sector.
Concerns that Country Garden, once China’s largest builder, might miss a series of bond payments have global investors on default watch. That came the same week China Evergrande Group, the country’s largest property company, filed for bankruptcy protection in the US.
Are more Chinese shoes about to drop? Let’s not forget, too, that the China Securities Regulatory Commission last week launched an investigation into possible violations of disclosure rules by Evergrande’s onshore unit, Hengda Real Estate Group, observes analyst Sandra Chow at advisory CreditSights.
As China’s real estate crisis deepens, the pressure is on President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang and Pan to bail out the property sector. Yet doing so might just re-incentivize bad behavior, increasing financial leverage and setting back efforts to weed out corrupt speculators.
Here, the value of the yuan is a key indicator of how the PBOC is addressing the challenge. Yet, as Xie argues, it would be a mistake for the PBOC to give in to short-term concerns.
After all, Xie says, it was a “misallocation of resources during China’s boom years” that stands as the “cause of today’s challenges. A vast property bubble hijacked the country’s macroeconomic policy.”
As those bubbles “threatened to take down the country with it,” policymakers “danced around it again and again” using PBOC policies, without addressing the underlying problems, Xie argues.
The message speculators took away was that Beijing “would never let the bubble burst, which supercharged it in every upturn,” he said. This fed a bubble in asset bubbles, including shadow banking reaching 100% of GDP at its peak.
But this machine is breaking down, Xie notes. After a decade-plus of frenetic stimulus and giant infrastructure projects, many local governments lack the fiscal space to support growth this time.
Chinese households still reeling from Covid lockdowns are keener to pay off debt than buy property. Over time, these trends are likely to depress retail sales.
Yet, Xie stresses, many of the deflationary pressures China is exhibiting have more to do with rampant competition than economic gloom. He points to the “price war” driving change in the auto sector, mainland coffee houses giving Starbucks a run for its money and rabid competition in the tourism space.
Xie thinks it matters, too, that the first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs is still “working and hungry,” offering timely case studies of success and failure for the millennial set and Generation Z.
As Japan continues to live off ever bigger doses of monetary and fiscal steroids, it’s clear that the “key to China’s future is to focus on real economic activities, not reviving bubbles.”
In the years after the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, Xie adds, South Korea and Taiwan pivoted to tech innovation and private- and service-sector-driven growth. As a result, they morphed into high-income economies.
“China must not revive bubbles using stimulus,” Xie says. “Letting them go is half of the success story. Time will do the rest.”
It’s a bit of wisdom that hasn’t appeared to seep into the halls of power in Tokyo. But at PBOC headquarters in Beijing, officials are holding their fire in ways to which history may be kind.
Follow William Pesek on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @WilliamPesek