Commentary: How ending mine disasters could help China’s energy security

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Cracking down on this should be a priority for any nation – but it’s particularly important in China, given its hunger to pay foreign countries for the same gas its own coal mines are throwing away.

Chinese companies have been on a shopping spree in the global gas market lately. China National Petroleum in June signed a 27-year liquefied natural gas deal with Qatar.

LNG imports could double over the coming decade to about 188 billion cubic meters, according to consultants Rystad Energy. Pipelines totaling 85 billion cubic meters from Russia and Turkmenistan could add close to the same amount again.

The country is so desperate for more molecules that it’s started drilling a 10,000m gas well in Sichuan province, one of the deepest ever.

CLEANING UP COAL MINE METHANE

Why has it been so hard to clean up China’s coal mine methane? The technology to do so is fairly straightforward, and widespread in other coal-mining regions such as the US and Australia: Drilling into coal seams to release their gas, and if necessary fracturing the rock to drive more of it out.

Regulations introduced by Beijing during the 2000s even provide incentives and penalties to encourage mine owners to drain their pits before work begins. There’s little firm evidence of success, though. Satellite monitoring indicates that waste gas has, if anything, accelerated.

A separate study that found some positive effects still saw them falling short of government targets. Abandoned pits can also release methane long after mining ceases.

At root, the problem is the same one that plagues the country’s entire coal industry: Government fears about power cuts, combined with an electricity market set-up that makes poor use of renewables and the declining quality of local coal, are twisting the sector out of shape.

Hitting tonnage targets is all that counts. If doing so means skimping on gas recovery and putting workers at risk, it’s seen as a necessary price to pay.

That’s a dangerous mistake. China is compounding the problems of an industry that mines half the world’s coal by failing to deal with its noxious waste products. The sooner it regulates, reins in and shrinks its solid fuel mines, the better for both the planet, and its own pit workers.

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Commentary: Japanification? China should be so lucky

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PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN ONE-PARTY CHINA?

One key difference is public accountability. When public dissatisfaction sufficiently mounted in post-bubble Japan, voters could dump the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from power, as they did briefly in 1993 and again in 2009 (the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, now obsolete, was similarly punished in elections in 2012 that restored the LDP to power.)

Much is made of the party’s post-war dominance of the political system, but it needs to stay keenly attuned to the public mood – witness current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s current struggles with an unpopular identification card scheme. Can one-party, election-free China find the same pressure valves? 

One major challenge facing both countries is demographics. Japan’s low birth rate and greying population have long been on policymakers’ minds. When it was fashionable to deride Japan, subpar fertility was something to be wielded against the country, a sign that a kind of permanent twilight was settling over what’s still one of the world’s biggest economies.

What doesn’t get nearly enough attention is that Japan isn’t doing too badly, relative to the neighbourhood and advanced economies: The total fertility rate (TFR), the number of children a woman can expect to bear in her lifetime, fell to 1.26 last year. South Korea has it far worse at 0.78, as does Singapore, where the TFR dropped to 1.05. Japan’s is closer to Spain and Italy than to its neighbours.

In China, the rate plummeted to 1.09 last year from 1.30 in 2020, according to a study by a government agency reported by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. Japan almost looks hale by comparison.  

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Commentary: Taiwan’s nascent #MeToo movement – from ‘eating tofu’ to Netflix

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“EATING TOFU”, MALE VICTIMS

Sexual harassment is so prevalent in Taiwan that Taiwanese people have adopted the phrase “eating tofu” to describe unwelcome social interactions faced daily by women and girls – from verbal comments regarding women’s bodies to various types of unwanted physical and sexual contact.

Taiwan’s mainstream heterosexual script expects women to embody two contradictory gender roles. On the one hand, being deemed sexually attractive under the male gaze is still a core element of femininity. On the other hand, this understanding of femininity also demands women to be sexually passive.

Men are encouraged to initiate physical contact while women are expected to dodge or resist. This gendered script imposes an outdated femininity on Taiwanese women while also misrepresenting women’s refusal of unwanted sexual attention as “flirtation”.

The #MeToo movement has also shown men and boys to be victims of sexual harassment in workplaces, schools and universities. But the stigma surrounding same-sex desire works to silence male victims.

The risks associated with speaking up about one’s experiences of sexual harassment continue to be underestimated by mainstream society. Victims are subject to all kinds of questioning, with their motivations for making an allegation to the time elapsed between the assault and its reporting. In the digital era, many victims are subject to various rumours and defamation once they post their testimonies on social media.

The ways that Taiwanese society deals with sexual harassment not only serves to silence victims but also neglects the societal taboos preventing women and girls from talking about sex – be it sexual pleasure or violence. As women and girls are taught to associate sex with reputational damage and shame, many women have kept their stories silent until now – when the #MeToo movement has created a community that allows for their voices to be heard.

Taiwan still has a long way to go in terms of gender and sexual equality and the DPP’s “zero-tolerance” policy on sexual harassment is demands that the social fabric change substantially. It would be beneficial to treat the #MeToo movement as an opportunity to create space for women and girls to talk about their experiences and for collective work to be done on how society can better support and rehabilitate victims.

Mei-Hua Chen is Professor in the Department of Sociology at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. This commentary first appeared on East Asia Forum.

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Commentary: India landed a spacecraft on the moon, but where are its corporate moonshots?

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Put a capability like that under a computer software tsar in Bengaluru, and you’ll get a flourishing outsourced service. But that’s all you will get.

“Technology can and must be the great amplifier of our human potential, our humanity,” Vishal Sikka, the chief executive of Infosys, wrote in the software exporter’s 2015-16 annual report. The former SAP computer scientist, a co-author of a natural language processing patent, was talking about a small donation to a nonprofit lab in San Francisco.

By the time OpenAI went commercial in 2019 – and Microsoft invested US$1 billion in the ChatGPT maker – Sikka was no longer around at the Indian company to write another cheque. Infosys may make plenty of money by helping its global clients run other people’s large language models. But will it ever have another chance to own a foundational technology?  

Capital is no longer a constraint, at least for large Indian companies. And yet they haven’t quite flexed their muscles.

Tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries spent US$363 million on R&D last financial year. This was 15 per cent more than the previous year, but still only 0.3 per cent of revenue. 

Among other things, the telecom-to-petrochemicals firm is trying to come up with in-house technologies for carbon capture, so that its gigantic refinery could go from dirty “grey” hydrogen to less-polluting “blue” H2. That’s just scratching the surface of the experimentation India – and the world – will need in low-carbon molecules.    

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Commentary: Thailand has a new PM but Pheu Thai will have a political price to pay for it

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THAKSIN’S FUTURE

A crucial portfolio to watch is the justice ministry which oversees the criminal justice system, the powerful Department of Special Investigation and the Department of Corrections, which is responsible for keeping prisoners in custody.

Pheu Thai will want to ensure that Thaksin is kept safe and gets the necessary medical treatment while serving his sentence, and to deter political rivals from opening new cases that could end up extending his eight-year jail term.

On the other hand, the conservatives likely suspect that Pheu Thai could be tempted to meddle in the justice system to shorten Thaksin’s sentence and pave a way for his political rehabilitation.

All things considered, this is unlikely – at least in the next few months.

Pheu Thai will want to focus on consolidating power amid considerable public disenchantment. Mr Srettha will almost certainly come under pressure to do something to help Thaksin, but he may seek to dissuade and placate them through other means to preserve his job.

Deal or no deal, nobody should rule out Thaksin reasserting himself as a nexus of political power akin to the days of old. He has shown his enduring influence in Pheu Thai and the strength of his family’s personal brand.

Once the present economic travails subside, Pheu Thai might conceivably explore options to revive Thaksin’s clout. Pheu Thai will likely need it to combat public support for the MFP as a genuinely democratic force ahead of the 2028 election and Thaksin will be motivated to secure a bright political future for his daughter Paetongtarn.

Any misstep could still give the conservatives and the military a convenient pretext to call an abrupt end to this strange and unprecedented partnership.

Harrison Cheng is a Director in risk consultancy firm Control Risks.

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Commentary: The curious tales of defectors to North Korea

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UNHAPPY NEW LIVES

In reality, many North Korean defectors face countless challenges ranging from integrating into a fast-paced, modern society to difficulty finding stable jobs and making ends meet. According to a 2022 survey published by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB), North Korean defectors earn about 74.4 per cent of the average income of salaried South Korean employees.

In addition, defectors often experience discrimination. A 2017 poll showed that nearly half of all defectors living in the South felt discriminated against due to their economic status (16 per cent), level of education (14.4 per cent), or region of origin (12.2 per cent).

Many South Koreans see their North Korean counterparts as “a cultural other”, reluctantly tolerating their presence while never fully accepting them as a “normal” member of society. Despite sharing a common history, language, ethnicity and traditions, North Koreans often feel like “strangers in a strange land” once they enter South Korea.

In fact, some would rather return to North Korea altogether. According to the 2022 NKDB report, 18.8 per cent of surveyed defectors said they had thought about going back to the North. Another survey published the same year by the Seoul National University Institute for Peace and Unification Studies showed that 18.5 per cent of North Korean defectors expressed that they “regret” moving to South Korea.

The reasons for this are several, including wanting to see family and friends, difficulty integrating into South Korean society, unfair treatment, and the need for greater emotional support. The lack of community in the South is a particular reason why some defectors consider returning to their homeland.

However, there are also cases where defectors have been tricked by brokers who paint South Korea as a land of opportunity and wealth. These North Koreans have demanded to be repatriated to the North once they have realised the realities of living in the South.

The cases of Kim Ryon-hui, 48, and Kwon Cheol-nam, 44, fall under this category and made headlines in 2017. Moreover, although official statistics only identify 29 re-defectors, this figure is likely to be much higher as the whereabouts of around 900 defectors were reportedly unknown as of 2017.

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Commentary: Japan’s Fukushima wastewater release plan is about nuclear diplomacy as much as science

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HUMAN FEARS AND ANXIETIES ABOUT ALL THINGS NUCLEAR

Despite the scientific endorsement, very little is known in the public regarding the effects of radiation. Fears and anxieties persist – it is only human.

The concerns are largely on the environmental impact and degradation of marine ecology, as well as the risks to human health.

Tritium emits beta radiation, but this cannot penetrate human skin. The concern lies with the ingestion of affected seafood, which is why outcry within Japan has stemmed mainly from its fishery industry.

As a precaution, Japan has stepped up monitoring of radiation levels in nearby affected waters and will test fishery products before they are released to the consumer market. However, such precautionary measures are not foolproof and people worry that contaminated fish and seafood could arrive on the dining table.

Another contributing factor is TEPCO’s lack of transparency regarding the management of the Fukushima wastewater. 

In 2011, prior to the ALPS treatment process introduced in 2013, TEPCO discharged tonnes of untreated, highly radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, drawing huge criticisms about their irresponsible behaviour. TEPCO had also denied claims of repeated leakages to the groundwater, which led to the flow of radioactive nuclides into the ocean.   

Given TEPCO’s disrepute, several experts remained sceptical that the ALPS-treated water was safe and below the acceptable threshold for discharge. As such, TEPCO should first demonstrate the trustworthiness of its organisation before going all out to convince the international community to accept its “science-based” approach. 

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Commentary: Cybertrooper activity in state elections marks irreversible trend in Malaysia politics

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PN CYBERTROOPERS

PN’s cybertroopers dominated Facebook and built most of their political campaigning around firebrand characters, particularly caretaker Chief Minister of Kedah, Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor.

Prior to the elections, police arrested Sanusi after he allegedly insulted local royalty in a TikTok video. During the campaign, there were several controversies involving Sanusi, most notably with the Minister of Home Affairs on the issue of rare earth element theft and with the caretaker Chief Minister of Selangor, who threatened to sue Sanusi.

In both cases, PN cybertroopers defended Sanusi and presented PH-BN as an abusive government that silenced its critics by curtailing the freedom of speech and abusing lawsuits. 

In the final week of campaigning, two major issues became a focus of cybertroopers: An incident involving Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim at an event with local pre-university students and a televised debate between Minister of Economics Affairs Rafizi Ramli and the PAS MP for Bachok Syahir Sulaiman on economic plans for Malaysia.

In the first, Anwar was accused of being condescending and rude in his response to a student’s question regarding the racial quota system in tertiary education while in the second, Syahir was seen as losing the debate as his presentation was poor, with flawed and under-developed arguments. 

PH-BN and PN cybertroopers were quick to engage in both these episodes to spin the story in their side’s favour. In defence of Anwar, PH-BN cybertroopers focused on highlighting that the original video was intentionally edited to embarrass Anwar and emphasising that the PM was right to chide the student.

On the other hand, PN cybertroopers, in manipulating public opinion, accepted that Syahir performed poorly but sought to minimise the debate by calling it a waste of time and claiming that it would not affect the election. 

Cybertroopers are not meant to flip political viewpoints but to entrench them; they cast doubt on valid political viewpoints and pre-emptively shut down debate or distort it. In all the examples of online fighting between PH-BN and PN cybertroopers, both sides were adamant that their side was faultless and the other could do no right.

The upshot is that their growing presence is causing Malaysian voters to become even more polarised and fragmented in real life, leaving neutral voters disenfranchised, as they are pushed out of online discourse.

Benjamin YH Loh is Visiting Fellow of the Media, Technology and Society Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute and Senior Lecturer at Taylor’s University, Malaysia. Sarah Ali is a PhD candidate at the Gender Studies Programme at Universiti Malaya. This commentary first appeared on ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute’s blog, Fulcrum.

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Commentary: The challenges facing Malaysia’s opposition as it works up to GE16

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WHAT NOW FOR BERSATU?

Bersatu’s challenges are more existential. 

The party is a breakaway from the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which had ruled Malaysia for more than six decades before being booted out of power in 2018. It was formed in September 2016 after Mr Muhyiddin and former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad abandoned UMNO following a political fallout with Malaysia’s now-jailed former prime minister and UMNO president, Najib Razak.

Without a powerbase, the party now faces an uphill task to remain politically relevant until the next general election. 

The party’s leadership is grappling with legal troubles over charges of corruption that are bound to be a serious distraction to performing as a credible opposition and staying cohesive. Apart from Mr Muhyiddin, opposition leader Hamzah Zainuddin and Azmin Ali, a former senior politician in Mr Anwar’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) party, Bersatu does not have a second echelon leadership line-up. 

Separately, a new dynamic is taking shape in Malaysian politics. 

The last two general elections in Malaysia featured contests between three broad political forces. In the 2018 general election, the fight was between the UMNO-led Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, PH and PAS, while the polls in November 2022, saw fights between PH, BN and PN. 

Last weekend’s state assembly elections featured straight fights between Mr Anwar’s unity government that now includes UMMO and BN against the PN. 

To emerge as a serious alternative, the PN coalition must find something other than the disenchantment among the Malay community towards establishing a national political footprint.

Leslie Lopez is a senior correspondent at CNA Digital who reports on political and economic affairs in the region.

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Commentary: Japan and South Korea look to the future, for a change

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RAPPROCHMENT MUST OUTLAST CURRENT LEADERS

Though Yoon deserves the plaudits that will accompany a successful summit (at least in Tokyo and Washington, if not at home), success will, ironically, only be confirmed if this thaw can outlast him. The leaders are all too aware of what tends to happen historically: A change of leadership in Seoul, a return to a focus on prior feuds and more distrust on both sides. 

That’s what happened to the “final and irreversible” 2015 agreement on comfort women, a euphemism for those trafficked to army brothels during Imperial Japan’s occupation, which the government of Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-in, swiftly abandoned. It gummed up the gears of relations for years, with the nations engaging in tit-for-tat trade disputes. 

Biden’s presence has helped provide a backdrop of stability that is a marked difference to his predecessor’s haphazard foreign policy in Asia. But there’s a real chance that Donald Trump might return to the White House, bringing one or both of his “fire and fury” or “love letter” approaches to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Yoon’s presidency runs until 2027, but he’s limited to this one term; and though the Japanese public admires how Kishida has handled the South Korea matter, his domestic support is flagging. While personal ties between leaders are important, this relationship must survive once the three men have departed office. 

BALANCING CHINA AND US

Despite what Beijing’s mouthpieces might say, there’s no talk of forming an Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) just yet.

The steps likely to be announced this weekend are tamer, such as making the summit an annual event and setting up a three-way hotline between Japan, South Korea and the US.

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