In China's power circle, it's a man's world at the top

Agencies
October 23, 2017

Beijing, Oct 23: When Xi Jinping warned against "pleasure seeking" in a stern message to the Communist Party congress last week, the audience included few women and some notable absentees -- officials ousted by graft scandals involving illicit affairs.

The scene was a reminder that China`s leadership remains a man`s world, where women have been excluded from the highest echelons of power and men have abused their positions in sex-for-favours scandals.

Women represent only a quarter of the 2,300 delegates attending the week-long congress held just twice a decade, highlighting the yawning gender gap in the world`s most populous nation.

Since the Communists took power in 1949, under Mao Zedong who famously declared that "women hold up half the sky", no woman has ever risen to the top ruling council.

Delegates at the congress will choose members of the party`s Central Committee, where women account for just 4.9 percent of the 205-strong membership -- down from 6.4 percent in 2012.

The committee then has the task of selecting the 25-person executive Politburo, which currently has only two women, and its elite standing committee -- which boasts seven ageing men.

When the new Politburo Standing Committee lineup is unveiled on Tuesday or Wednesday, no woman is expected to break the glass ceiling and join them.

Guo Jianmei, a leading lawyer and women`s rights advocate, had prepared a letter to the party congress criticising China`s lack of attention to women`s participation in politics.

"The letter describes this situation but there is no way to submit it, because no party representative is willing to help us," Guo said.

"China has generally not given any thought on how to promote women`s leadership status."Gender equality is enshrined in the constitution but analysts say traditional social structures have kept women from gaining more space in politics, pressuring them to prioritise family roles over their careers.

The official All China Women`s Federation coined the derogatory term "leftover women" in 2007 to describe unmarried professionals after the government announced a campaign to improve population "quality" by encouraging educated women to have babies.

A party congress delegate from Shanghai said she did not see a problem.

"China has already achieved equality between the sexes. The government supports women`s aspirations," she told AFP, declining to give her name.

While women have been left out of top jobs, Xi`s anti-corruption drive has revealed a large number of cases involving men committing adultery, which is against party rules.

"All thinking and behaviour in the vein of pleasure seeking, inaction and sloth, and problem avoidance are unacceptable," he intoned last week, reminding party members to lead by example.

The most prominent figure netted so far in the graft campaign is 74-year-old former security tsar Zhou Yongkang, who was accused of committing adultery with a number of women "in power-for-sex and money-for-sex trades".

And last month rising political star Sun Zhengcai from the Chongqing megalopolis was expelled for "serious violations of party discipline" including allegations that he took bribes and "exchanged money for sex", state media said. The litany of alleged crimes in corruption cases can sometimes be cover for factional score-settling. But official data shows that men in power hand ample ammunition to their critics.

A 2013 study from Renmin University in Beijing found that 95 percent of corrupt officials had extramarital affairs, and at least 60 percent had kept a mistress, which typically involves providing an apartment and an allowance.

"It`s definitely still prevalent," said Beijing-based writer Zhang Lijia, who conducted research on China`s sex industry for her novel, "Lotus".

"The traditional practice of men showing their social standing with numerous concubines has returned in the form of mistress culture."

In recent years, authorities have jailed and intimidated outspoken critics on women`s issues.

Ye Haiyan, one of China`s most prominent feminist activists, gained fame for her brazen protests against a string of child sexual abuse cases.

But she said she does not dare to even write blog posts about women`s rights issues now.

"They get deleted right away, and authorities have pressured multiple landlords to evict me," she said. "The harassment only stopped after I moved in with my husband."

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News Network
May 20,2020

Washington, May 20: The United States recorded another 1,536 coronavirus deaths over the past 24 hours, the Johns Hopkins University tracker said.

That figure, tallied as of 8:30 pm (0030 GMT), raises to 91,845 the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the US.

The US tops the global rankings both for the highest death toll and the highest number of infections, with more than 1.5 million cases.

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Agencies
July 15,2020

Huawei will be completely removed from the UK's 5G networks by the end of 2027, the UK government announced on Tuesday after a review by the country's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on the impact of US sanctions against the Chinese telecommunications giant.

In the lead up to this complete removal of all Huawei kit from UK networks, there will be a total ban on the purchase of any new 5G kit after December 31, 2020.

The decision was taken at a meeting of the UK's National Security Council (NSC) chaired by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in response to new US sanctions against the telecom major imposed in May which removed the firm's access to products which have been built based on US semiconductor technology.

5G will be transformative for our country, but only if we have confidence in the security and resilience of the infrastructure it is built upon, said Oliver Dowden, UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Following US sanctions against Huawei and updated technical advice from our cyber experts, the government has decided it necessary to ban Huawei from our 5G networks. No new kit is to be added from January 2021, and UK 5G networks will be Huawei free by the end of 2027. This decisive move provides the industry with the clarity and certainty it needs to get on with delivering 5G across the UK, he said.

The minister, who laid out the details of the UK's ban on Huawei in the House of Commons, said the government will now seek to legislate with a new Telecoms Security Bill to put in place the powers necessary to implement the tough new telecoms security framework.

By the time of the next election (2024) we will have implemented in law an irreversible path for the complete removal of Huawei equipment from our 5G networks, said Dowden.

The new law will give the government the national security powers to impose these new controls on high risk vendors and create extensive security duties on network operators to drive up standards, DCMS said.

Technical experts at the NCSC reviewed the consequences of the US sanctions and concluded that Huawei will need to do a major reconfiguration of its supply chain as it will no longer have access to the technology on which it currently relies and there are no alternatives which we have sufficient confidence in.

They found the new restrictions make it impossible to continue to guarantee the security of Huawei equipment in the future.

After a ban on the purchase of new Huawei kit for 5G from next year, the aim is to completely remove the Chinese vendor's influence on 5G networks across the UK by the end of 2027.

The DCMS said Tuesday's decision takes into account the UK's specific national circumstances and how the risks from these sanctions are manifested in the country.

The existing restrictions on Huawei in sensitive and critical parts of the network remain in place, it highlighted.

The DCMS said the US action also affects Huawei products used in the UK's full fibre broadband networks. However, the UK has managed Huawei's presence in the UK's fixed access networks since 2005 and we also need to avoid a situation where broadband operators are reliant on a single supplier for their equipment.

As a result, following security advice from experts, DCMS is advising full fibre operators to transition away from purchasing new Huawei equipment. A technical consultation will determine the transition timetable, but it is expect this period to last no longer than two years.

The government said its new approach strikes the right balance by recognising full fibre's established presence and supporting the connections that the public relies on, while fully addressing the security concerns.

It stressed that its new policy in relation to high risk vendors has not been designed around one company, one country or one threat but as an enduring and flexible policy that will enable the UK to manage the risks to the network, now and in the future.

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News Network
March 3,2020

Mar 3: Just hours after the ending of a week-long “reduction” in violence that was crucial for Donald Trump’s peace deal in Afghanistan, the Taliban struck again: On Monday, they killed three people and injured about a dozen at a football match in Khost province. This resumption of violence will not surprise anyone actually invested in peace for that troubled country. The point of the U.S.-Taliban deal was never peace. It was to try and cover up an ignominious exit for the U.S., driven by an election-bound president who feels no responsibility toward that country or to the broader region.

Seen from South Asia, every point we know about in the agreement is a concession by Trump to the Taliban. Most importantly, it completes a long-term effort by the U.S. to delegitimize the elected government in Kabul — and, by extension, Afghanistan’s constitution. Afghanistan’s president is already balking at releasing 5,000 Taliban prisoners before intra-Afghan talks can begin — a provision that his government did not approve.

One particularly cringe-worthy aspect: The agreement refers to the Taliban throughout  as “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban.” This unwieldy nomenclature validates the Taliban’s claim to be a government equivalent to the one in Kabul, just not the one recognised at the moment by the U.S. When read together with the second part of the agreement, which binds the U.S. to not “intervene in [Afghanistan’s] domestic affairs,” the point is obvious: The Taliban is not interested in peace, but in ensuring that support for its rivals is forbidden, and its path to Kabul is cleared.

All that the U.S. has effectively gotten in return is the Taliban’s assurance that it will not allow the soil of Afghanistan to be used against the “U.S. and its allies.” True, the U.S. under Trump has shown a disturbing willingness to trust solemn assurances from autocrats; but its apparent belief in promises made by a murderous theocratic movement is even more ridiculous. Especially as the Taliban made much the same promise to an Assistant Secretary of State about Osama bin Laden while he was in the country plotting 9/11.

Nobody in the region is pleased with this agreement except for the Taliban and their backers in the Pakistani military. India has consistently held that the legitimate government in Kabul must be the basic anchor of any peace plan. Ordinary Afghans, unsurprisingly, long for peace — but they are, by all accounts, deeply skeptical about how this deal will get them there. The brave activists of the Afghan Women’s Network are worried that intra-Afghan talks will take place without adequate representation of the country’s women — who have, after all, the most to lose from a return to Taliban rule.

But the Pakistani military establishment is not hiding its glee. One retired general tweeted: “Big victory for Afghan Taliban as historic accord signed… Forced Americans to negotiate an accord from the position of parity. Setback for India.” Pakistan’s army, the Taliban’s biggest backer, longs to re-install a friendly Islamist regime in Kabul — and it has correctly estimated that, after being abandoned by Trump, the Afghan government will have sharply reduced bargaining power in any intra-Afghan peace talks. A deal with the Taliban that fails also to include its backers in the Pakistani military is meaningless.

India, meanwhile, will not see this deal as a positive for regional peace or its relationship with the U.S. It comes barely a week after Trump’s India visit, which made it painfully clear that shared strategic concerns are the only thing keeping the countries together. New Delhi remembers that India is not, on paper, a U.S. “ally.” In that respect, an intensification of terrorism targeting India, as happened the last time the U.S. withdrew from the region, would not even be a violation of Trump’s agreement. One possible outcome: Over time the government in New Delhi, which has resolutely sought to keep its ties with Kabul primarily political, may have to step up security cooperation. Nobody knows where that would lead.

The irresponsible concessions made by the U.S. in this agreement will likely disrupt South Asia for years to come, and endanger its own relationship with India going forward. But worst of all, this deal abandons those in Afghanistan who, under the shadow of war, tried to develop, for the first time, institutions that work for all Afghans. No amount of sanctimony about “ending America’s longest war” should obscure the danger and immorality of this sort of exit.

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