Sobitha Thera blasts move to form jumbo Cabinet

National Movement for Social Justice (NMSJ) Leader the Ven. Maduluwawe Sobitha Thera today severely criticized the move to appoint a large number of ministers for the purpose of accommodating a 'National Government'. 

“Appointing a large number of ministers has become a joke and a farce. The Mahinda Rajapaksa government had appointed an unreasonable number of ministers. Nobody protested then. I am optimistic that President Maithripala Sirisena will not continue the mistakes committed by that regime,” he told Daily Mirror. 

Sobitha Thera said that when considering this trend, it won't be a surprise if all 225 parliamentarians are appointed ministers. 

He said the 19th Amendment had not specified the exact number of ministers in case of a ‘National Government’ and as such it had to be decided by the decision makers of both parties. 

The Thera criticized the move to form a ‘National Government’ and warned that such a move might lead to a crisis between the legislature and the executive. 

“Even the beginning of the new government is in a mess. Some of the SLFP parliamentarians are describing the recently signed MoU as a move towards the formation of national government and some of them who have opposed such an agreement had decided to sit in the Opposition while the JVP and the TNA have not so far supported the proposal. In such a scenario, how can it be called a national government,” the Thera said.

 He said in the wake of the UNP winning the most number of seats in parliament Prime Minister and UNP Leader Ranil Wicremesinghe should have formed a UNP-led government by inviting those who were willing to work with his government and thus secure at least a simple majority.

The Thera said if the Prime Minister had done this then there would be no stalemate as what was happening now. (Piyumi Fonseka)

Drivers of change for education reforms

Education, school education in particular, is an area where is efficiency of government is paramount; more importantly, radical new ideas are needed here

26 August 2015

Education is one of the five thrust areas in the UNP manifesto presented in the 2015 general election. The other four are: Developing the economy, Combating Corruption, Ensuring freedom and Investing in infrastructure.
Infrastructure includes ‘hard’ infrastructure such as housing, transport and roads and the environment. Interestingly, health and welfare, the aim of which is a healthy society, is included under infrastructure, but, education, another ‘soft’ infrastructure is singled out as a thrust area of its own, reflecting its relative importance.
Looking at all five thrusts, I feel that the education thrust is the weakest in terms of the believability of the gains promised because the plans are not linked to a convincing theory or a driver of change. 

Drivers of change
Good manifestos or well-intentioned leaders are not sufficient to bring about change. Each change has to have an underlying causal mechanism, a theory or a driver of change.
Causal mechanism is a term used in social sciences to describe the cause and effect link that underlie social phenomena. Theory of change, a similar term used by development agencies, is a credible explanation as to how a proposed set of actions will lead to the desired outcomes. The term driver of change is perhaps more suited to a general discussion on change. I will be using all three terms as appropriate.

Governance
The promises on governance by the UNP are indeed believable because we have seen the drivers of change in action. In his address to the nation on 14 July President Sirisena outlined four reasons why the former President shall not win the general election if he chose to contest. Two of those reasons are significant here. He said globally the tide has turned against corrupt and undemocratic forms of government. Secondly, he said, civil society and the youth in this country too are firmly for good governance. 
We have already seen the 19th Amendment in action during the past election which has been described as the most peaceful election conducted in the recent history of this country. The governance promises of the UNP are indeed believable, but, civil society and our youth have should continue their vigilance.

Economy
The UNP has chosen a competitive and market-driven path for developing the economy. They use the term social market to soften the hard image of a market-driven economy. For those who believe in the market as a driver of development, the UNP’s economic reform proposals make sense.  However, there will be tremendous pressure from opposition to protect failing State enterprises and push the governing party away from its professed path. The chambers and media have a done a sorry job in the past in protecting market place, but they will have to do better in the future.

Infrastructure development 
There is no question that there was infrastructure development under the Rajapaksa regime. Unfortunately, the driving force behind this development was autocratic decision making and what one might call productive corruption. It is indeed widely believed that kickbacks from contractors cascaded down from the top to the very bottom to oil the wheels of political and bureaucratic machinery. 
These morbid drivers of change are not sustainable in the long run. But what will take its place? A recent study had shown that doing away with corruption will slow down growth unless corruption is replaced with efficiency in government. What will drive efficiency in government? The new government needs to give more to that.
Education, school education in particular, is an area where is efficiency of government is paramount. More importantly, radical new ideas are needed here.

Education reforms, then
Fixing education is like rebuilding a ship while it is sailing in a rough sea. Today’s parents are a nervous lot. Competition is tough and they are not willing to experiment. They feel they have mastered the ways and means (krama saha vidhi) of acing the system. Government may say it will reduce the class size to 35 and so on, but powerful parent group will resist change.
The central school concept initiated in 1946 by C.W.W. Kannangara is perhaps one education policy that worked. During their heydays, the best and brightest in the each of the 25 districts got a chance to attend an exemplary school in their district. With time these schools lost their prestige. For reasons that are not sufficiently researched, in their place there has emerged a system of ‘popular’ schools which are concentrated in 33 out of the 93 education zones in the country.
Each succeeding government has tried to spread these ’popular’ school more equitably. Whether called Navodya, Isuru, or Mahindodaya, the concept behind the initiatives are always the same —provide money for facilities and supplies and build capacity through training. To date none of these initiatives have been able to stop to tide. Parents from all walks of life continue to make it their life’s work to get their children into popular schools in major cities. 
The driving force behind the success of the central college concept, the reason for the slow deterioration of these schools and our inability to create anything even close is a question that should be explored further. 

Decentralisation and competition in public education?
The new education Minster will be all pumped and ready to clean the system, but, like old Jacob Marley in Christmas Carols,  I hope he gets to meet “ghosts of education reforms past” and realise the limits of a national Minister for education and his/her cadre of  bureaucrats cloistered in Colombo.
All political parties more or less agree on objectives of general education. They want a more equitable distribution of resources across schools and a holistic approach education to replace the current examination-centred system. Proposed solutions too are similar. Increase expenditure, remove political controls, bring in a new education act, limit class size, and bring international schools to the national policy framework and so on. Unfortunately, attempts at reforms whether called Navodya, Isuru or Mahindodaya have achieved little.
One notion I like to I like to explore in the next few columns is a radical decentralisation of education as a driver of reforms where the Ministry of Education functions only as an arbiter of competition in a system with a cascading flow empowerment and incentives from the central government to provinces, districts, zones and individual schools. 

But same old ideas new bottle?
Some of the language in the UNP manifesto makes me hopeful. An oversight board is proposed and the word incentives is mentioned in the proposal for equitable distribution of resources to schools, but, the overall vision is still that of a ‘new and better’ minister in a ‘new and better’ administration charging a like knight on a white horse (except with the stated restriction on not postponing public examinations without Parliamentary approval) to save the schools.
Sorry, been there, done that. It does not work.

Sanga for Ambassador – What Makes a Diplomat?

by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne

We can’t all play a winning game
someone is sure to lose
yet we can play so that our name
no one may dare accuse
That when the master referee
scores against our name
it won’t be whether we won or lost
but how we played the game ~ Anon

( August 25, 2015, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) It has been reported that President Sirisena has offered the much celebrated Kumar Sangakkara the post of High Commissioner of Sri Lanka in the United Kingdom.  At the time of writing, there was no indication that Mr. Sangakkara had accepted the offer.  The writer hopes he does, not merely for the reasons that this cricketer who brought Sri Lanka much pride and dignity is both articulate and educated (qualities that are essential for a diplomat), but also because he has the reputation of bringing to bear the best of our country with his sincerity, integrity and empathy both on and off the field.

Sanga for Ambassador – What Makes a Diplomat by Thavam Ratna

Coca Cola could face compensation call over claimed leak

- Aug 24, 2015

Multinational company Coca-Cola is pressurizing the government after the Central Environmental Authority cancelled the environment protection licence of its Kaduwela factory.

An underground fuel pipeline of the factory leaked into the Kelani River a week ago, causing a major contamination.

The factory was also fined nearly Rs. 01 billion.

US government officials are exerting pressure on Sri Lanka to suspend the cancellation and grant some concessions to the factory.

An official at the Sri Lankan embassy in the US has telephoned a government official and asked that the fine be reduced.

The CEA says there is clear evidence the leakage has caused considerable environmental pollution, and the cancellation is pending an evaluation of the damage.

Coca-Cola claims it had repaired the damage very quickly on the same day of the leakage happened after seeking advice from the CEA and the Water Board.

The Water Board announced a water cut to prevent the distribution of contaminated water.

Together wit the CEA and the Marine Environment Protection Authority, it joined forces to flush away water from the affected area; floaters were used to sponge the oil out of the river.

Before restoring water supply officials carried out a grease content evaluation that showed grease at 0.2 mg per litre, the maximum acceptable level for drinking water, sundaytimes.lk reports.

The Board’s deputy general manager, western production, Ranjith Perera, who is based at the Ambatale plant, said that despite the beverage company claiming that there had been a leak in one of its oil tanks his officers had not been able to find anything that would support this explanation.

“Officers from the WSDB, CEA and the police went to the company to check and were not able to find the source of the leak. Even if there was a leakage it is not acceptable,” Perera said, adding that the company was CEA-approved and thus should have precautionary measures planned in case of such a leak.

CEA Chairman Prof. Lal Dharmasiri said the swift action taken to stop the oil from wholesale contamination of the water supply had cost the government more than anticipated. Apart from stopping water distribution, employing people and using resources to lift off the oil from the river the CEA also had to release water from the Laxapana reservoir to flush out the impure water.

Mervyn noticed over white vans

2015-08-25

Colombo Chief Magistrate issued notice on Former Minister Mervyn Silva to appear before court on November 11 to give evidence regarding “white van culture.”

Chief Magistrate Gihan Pilapitiya issued notice on former minister sequent to a Habeas Corpus petition filed by relatives of three missing people in October 2011.

The petitioners stated that the former Minister had made a complaint with the CID that he knew information about the “white vans” which were used to abduct civilians during the previous regime. - See more at: http://www.dailymirror.lk/84809/mervyn-noticed-over-white-vans#sthash.3kMATiQH.dpuf

Yemeni army, popular forces attack Saudi convoy in Jizan

The photo shows Saudi military vehicles in the country’s southwestern province of Jizan, April 13, 2015. ©AFP

Sun Aug 23, 2015

Yemeni armed forces, backed by members of Popular Committees, have launched an attack against a Saudi military convoy in the kingdom’s southwestern province of Jizan.

According to reports on Sunday, the Yemeni forces targeted the Saudi soldiers who had been deployed in the region to recapture the military bases already seized by the Yemeni army.

Scores of vehicles belonging to the Saudi military were destroyed in the attack, the reports added.

Earlier in the day, the Yemeni army detected and targeted a Saudi convoy of arms and ammunition in al-Khobe region of Jizan, inflicting heavy losses on the Saudi military. A Saudi ammunition dump was also destroyed in the province, according to reports.

Yemeni forces further launched retaliatory missile and rocket attacks against several Saudi military bases near the Yemeni border. Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry announced that a Saudi soldier was killed in an overnight attack near the country’s border with Yemen.

Earlier in the day, the Saudi military pounded the northwestern Yemeni province of Sa’ada with over 50 airstrikes. There is still no word on the possible casualties of the attacks.

Also on Saturday, the Yemeni forces managed to shoot down an Apache military helicopter belonging to the United Arab Emirates in Lawdar district between the Yemeni provinces of Bayda and Abyan.

This is the second Apache chopper to be downed by the Yemeni forces over the past two days. On Friday, the Yemenis targeted a Saudi helicopter with a surface-to-air missile in al-Khobah district of Jizan.

Local media also reported heavy clashes between the Yemeni forces and al-Qaeda terrorists elsewhere on the battlefield in the southern province of Aden.

Saudi fighter jets also struck a hospital in the southwestern province of Ta’izz, setting the surgical ward on fire.

Smoke billows following Saudi airstrikes on the Yemeni capital city of Sana’a on August 20, 2015. ©AFP

Meanwhile, reports said that the death toll from Riyadh’s Friday airborne assaults on Ta’izz has increased to 63.

Saudi Arabia launched its military aggression against Yemen on March 26 – without a UN mandate – in a bid to undermine Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to the country’s fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.

Over 4,300 people have been killed in the Yemeni conflict, the World Health Organization said on August 11. Local Yemeni sources, however, say the fatality figure is much higher.

Right-wing extremists plotting violent attacks on US Muslims, FBI warns

Men carrying rifles attend a “Freedom of Speech” rally organized by anti-Muslim groups, across from the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix, Arizona, 29 May.Nancy WiechecReuters

Rania Khalek Rights and Accountability 25 August 2015

Militia extremists inspired by right-wing conspiracy theories are starting to target American Muslims, a leaked intelligence bulletin from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) counterterrorism division reveals.

Right-wing Extremists Plotting Violent Attacks on US Muslims, FBI Warns by Thavam Ratna

Isis releases pictures of ancient Palmyra temple destruction

TUESDAY 25 AUGUST 2015
The so-called Islamic State group releases images of the destruction of an ancient temple in Palmyra - an act Unesco has called a "war crime".

Isis destroyed the temple of Baal Shamin on Sunday, and on Tuesday released still showing the 2,000-year-old structure being rigged with explosives, and then destroyed.

Syria's antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim told Channel 4 News on Monday that the destruction of the Roman-era temple raises fears over the future of other monuments at the world heritage site.

"It is something very negative, for us and the international community, what will happen in the future after some weeks and months," he said.

"Really we are very worried."

On Monday Unseco's Director-General Irina Bokova described the destruction as "a new war crime and an immense loss for the Syrian people."

"The systematic destruction of cultural symbols embodying Syrian cultural diversity reveals the true intent of such attacks, which is to deprive the Syrian people of its knowledge, its identity and history," she said.

The destruction also follows the murder of a Syrian antiquities scholar, Khaled Asaad, who was beheaded in teh central Syrian city before being hung from a lamp post.

The 82-year-old was described as the "father of archaeology" in Syria by Mr Abdulkarim.

Hamas leader says no negotiations with Israel over long-term ceasefire 

A member of the armed wing of the Hamas movement, kisses a boy during a military parade in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip on 21 August 2015 (AA) 

Tuesday 25 August 2015

Senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar denied on Tuesday that his party were involved in negotiations for a long term truce with Israel, saying that the lifting of the siege on the Gaza Strip must precede any such kind of talks.

In an interview with Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV, Zahar also advocated for a “resistance program” to overtake the West Bank, adding that the success of Hamas in its confrontation against Israel has bolstered its international standing, and that this success should be emulated in the West Bank.

In an exclusive interview with Qatari website al-Araby al-Jadeed, Hamas’s exiled leader Khaled Meshaal confirmed that there were ongoing indirect talks between Israel and Hamas for a long term ceasefire based on five key issues: ending the siege, reconstruction of the strip, building an airport and seaport, the opening of the borders, and funding for public sector workers.

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair invited Hamas officials to London to discuss the long term truce, but Zahar refused his request, telling Al Aqsa that talks of Hamas nearing a ceasefire with Israel were “lies that have no basis in reality.”

Meshaal ruled out that Hamas’s armed wing will stop its activity against Israel, but added that the movement did not want another battle.

“There is a legitimate resistance that will continue working against the occupation as long as there is occupation and settlements- but we don’t want wars,” he said.

Israel has denied that it is involved in any negotiations with Hamas. 

Russian court jails Ukrainian film-maker for 20 years over terror offences

Oleg Sentsov is convicted of plotting terror attacks but Amnesty International has likened his prosecution to a ‘Stalinist-era show trial’

Film director Oleg Sentsov sings the Ukrainian national anthem as he is sentenced to 20 years in a high-security penal colony by a Russian military court for ‘terrorist attacks’ in Crimea

Shaun Walker in Moscow-Tuesday 25 August 2015

A Russian court has sentenced the Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov to 20 years in prison after a trial described by Amnesty International as “redolent of Stalinist-era show trials”.

Sentsov, 39, and his co-defendant Alexander Kolchenko, who received a 10-year sentence at the trial on Tuesday, were accused of planning terrorist acts in Crimea after the peninsula was annexed by Russia last year.

The trial was littered with irregularities: Sentsov said he had been tortured, while investigators dismissed the bruises on his body as being the result of a supposed penchant for sadomasochistic sex. The main prosecution witness recanted in the courtroom and said his evidence had been extorted under torture. He said no “acts of terrorism” were ever committed except for an arson incident in which nobody was injured and Sentsov denied involvement.

Nevertheless, prosecutors asked for him to be given a 23-year sentence and Kolchenko a 12-year term. On Tuesday, the panel of three judges in a Rostov military court handed down their verdict. When the judges asked the pair if they understood the verdict, they smiled and sang the national anthem of Ukraine.

In an impassioned message to the court last week, Sentsov said he had not been prepared to accept deals with the investigators, who tortured him and pressed him to confess. He said: “When they put a bag on your head, beat you up a bit, half an hour later you’re ready to go back on all your beliefs, implicate yourself in whatever they ask, implicate others, just to stop them beating you. I don’t know what your beliefs can possibly be worth if you are not ready to suffer or die for them.

“I am not going to beg for leniency. Everything is already clear. A court of occupiers cannot be just by definition.”

Sentsov directed the 2011 feature film Gamer, but stopped work on a new movie when Russia began to intervene in Crimea. He coordinated relief efforts for the Ukrainian soldiers who were blockaded inside their bases by Russian troops.

Heather McGill, a researcher at Amnesty International, said: “This whole trial was designed to send a message. It played into Russia’s propaganda war against Ukraine and was redolent of Stalinist-era show trials of dissidents. This trial was fatally flawed and credible allegations of torture and other ill-treatment have been ignored by the court.”

International film directors, including Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Wim Wenders, have signed an open letter to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, calling for Sentsov’s release and an investigation into claims of torture against him. Russian directors have also joined the appeals.

Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose most recent film, Leviathan, won a Golden Globe, said on Monday that he had read the documents from the court case and found them unconvincing. He asked the Russian authorities to “either release [Sentsov] or try him only for what you can prove irrefutably”.

Alexander Sokurov, the director of Russian Ark and other acclaimed films, described the case as rather fantastic. In a blog post, he wrote that Sentsov’s actions were “nothing more extremist than civil protest”.

The UK minister for Europe, David Lidington, said he was deeply concerned about the verdict and described the charges as disproportionate and politically motivated.

Lawyers for Sentsov and Kolchenko said they always expected the court to issue a guilty verdict: innocent verdicts are almost unheard of in the Russian legal system. Their main hope is for some kind of prisoner exchange with Ukraine, possibly for Russian soldiers captured in the east of the country.

In Ukraine, the case has prompted a wave of criticism, and Sentsov’s Ukrainian lawyer is preparing a criminal case against the prosecutors, investigators and others involved in the trial, for the illegal kidnapping and torture of a Ukrainian citizen. The court ruled that Kolchenko and Sentsov automatically became Russian citizens after the annexation of Crimea, and tried them as such.

The Ukrainian MP Mustafa Nayyem wrote on Facebook that he believed Russian citizens should be admitted to Ukraine in future only after answering a question about whether they believed the sentence in the Sentsov case to be just.

The case has been seen as an attempt to discourage further dissent in Crimea, which was annexed after a speedily held referendum last spring. The majority of residents supported joining Russia, but Russia has done everything to prevent the disgruntled minority from protesting. Many ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars have left for mainland Ukraine. A small group of people who gathered to celebrate the birthday of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in March werearrested for holding Ukrainian flags.

Putin spent three days in Crimea last week, descending to the depths of the Black Sea in a bathyscaphe to inspect the wreck of a Byzantine trading ship and directing government officials to boost tourism in the region.

Ukraine claims Russia is holding at least 10 of its citizens on various charges ranging from espionage to murder. The best known is the military pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, who is accused of being an artillery spotter for the Ukrainian forces and involved in the deaths of two Russian journalists. Her lawyers say she was abducted and brought across the border to Russia. She is due to go on trial in the southern Russian town of Donetsk, close to the Ukrainian border, in the coming weeks.

India to auction 20 major iron ore mines to revive industry

Freight trains are loaded with iron ore at a railway station at Chitradurga in Karnataka November 9, 2012.REUTERS/DANISH SIDDIQUI/FILES

 BY KRISHNA N. DAS-Tue Aug 25, 2015

India will auction about 20 major iron ore mines this year in its first such sale ever, a top government official said, as it looks to revive its corruption-tainted mining industry.

India's mining sector has been mired in controversy over illegal allocation of resources. Once the world's third-biggest iron ore exporter, the country now imports the steelmaking ingredient due to a court-led crackdown on illegal mining.

The government hopes auctions will help curb wrongdoing. While it is unlikely to lead to an immediate boost in iron ore output at a time when there is a global glut, mine sales will bring India closer to its target of tripling its steel capacity to 300 million tonnes by 2025 and relying less on ore imports.

"Most of the states are in the midst of carrying out their pre-auction activities and hopefully by the end of October and November onwards they will start (auctions)," Mines Secretary Balvinder Kumar told Reuters in an interview on Monday evening.

He expects about 80 mines to be auctioned in the first phase, including limestone, gold and "about 20 iron ore mines". States are estimating reserves, Kumar added.

India produced 136 million tonnes of iron ore last fiscal year ended March 31. About 1.5 million tonnes of ore are needed to make 1 tonne of steel, implying India's ore output will have to more than triple in 10 years if steel companies are to be self sufficient.

Most of the iron ore mines being sold are in the southern state of Karnataka, known for its high-quality ore. This will greatly benefit local steelmakers like JSW Steel.

Led by JSW's purchases, India's ore imports hit a record of over 15 million tonnes last fiscal year as global prices collapsed.

Kumar expects prices to improve by the time the mines start.

"The mining process takes two to three years because they will need all kinds of clearances: forest, environment, from pollution control board. (It) takes a lot of time to comply."

POSCO STEEL

India's new law to auction mines instead of handing them over to private firms without competition could, however, prompt South Korea's POSCO to scrap plans for a $12 billion steel project it agreed to set up in India a decade ago.

While a withdrawal by POSCO could dent Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Make in India" manufacturing push, Kumar said the government cannot change its laws for individual companies.

Kumar attended a meeting in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's office on Tuesday to consider options for POSCO's plans for the steel plant in Odisha state that was billed as India's biggest foreign direct investment.

A source at the meeting said there was no concrete result from it and Odisha and POSCO have been asked to look at other options.

Odisha's state mining company can be allotted a mine, iron ore from which can be sent to POSCO if they form a joint venture, Kumar said. Odisha has said that was a possibility but POSCO wants to see the details first.

(Additional reporting by Nigam Prusty; Editing by Himani Sarkar and David Evans)

China’s Market Slide Turns an Economic Crisis into a Political One

With Wall Street reeling from China’s slowdown, President Xi Jinping’s upcoming trip to Washington might be a rocky one.

BY DAVID FRANCIS-AUGUST 24, 2015

The Dow Jones industrial average won back some of its historic losses Monday, bouncing back from a 1,000-point loss at the opening bell after China’s main index shed 8.5 percent of its value. As the run on China’s stocks continued — down nearly 40 percent since June — White House spokesman Josh Earnest made clear the near-financial meltdown has a very political component.

At a press briefing Monday, Earnest sought to assure Americans that China’s economic slowdown would not impact U.S. economic growth. He also used the occasion to take a swipe at officials in Beijing, who have been trying to artificially manipulate China’s economy in an attempt to stop an equities free fall.

“Improving transparency into their economy is something we believe will be good for the global economy — and also good for the [U.S.] economy and China,” Earnest said. “They should continue to pursue financial reform to increase exchange rate flexibility and to move rapidly toward a more market-determined exchange rate system.”

“That is a case that we have continued to impress upon the Chinese as being a priority of the United States,” the spokesman also said Monday. “Certainly, there will be continued discussion about China’s efforts to move towards a more market-determined exchange rate for their currency.”

By the day’s end, the Dow closed down 588 points, or 3.57 percent.

President Barack Obama, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and the International Monetary Fund have long urged China to allow market forces to determine the value of its currency and traded stock. China flirted briefly with these kind of reforms earlier this month, when it allowed the renminbi to “float,” or let supply and demand determine its value.

But those changes were short-lived. Officials at the People’s Bank of China only allowed the renminbi to float for three days. The central bank has also infused billions of dollars of liquidity into China’s financial system — $90 billion was pumped in last week alone, the largest amount in almost 19 months — to stimulate financial growth. But these efforts have proven fruitless; on Monday, the Shanghai Composite Index had its worst day since 2007.

That marked “a disastrous result for China, after working so hard to breathe life back into domestic equities after the 2007 crash and having spent hundreds of billions of dollars propping up the market since June,” Angus Nicholson of IG Markets said in a research note.

Now, as Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares to visit Washington next month, experts warn tensions over China’s meddling in its markets are rising. Coming on the heels of recent allegations of cyberattacks on U.S. targets by Chinese hackers — including the theft of personal information on tens of millions of federal workers — and Beijing’s continued push to build airstrips in contested areas of the South China Sea, the much hyped visit could turn into little more than a frosty photo opportunity.

“The relationship is not on good footing,” Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Foreign Policy on Monday. “Xi is coming to Washington, and it’s not going to be a very happy visit. It’s either going to be a cotton candy-level summit — lots of empty calories — or it’s going to be a train wreck.”

“The atmospherics around the summit are already not very good,” added Andrew Small, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Conflicts on all fronts are intensifying.”

Financial damage around the world in the wake of China’s continuing equity slide was widespread, but early concerns about a “Black Monday” proved unfounded. Germany’s stock index, the DAX, closed down 4.7 percent, and the FTSE 100 in England dropped 4.67 percent. However, it sent oil prices tolows not seen since 2009.

But as the chart below shows, damage to the Dow was limited, despite the historic loss of more than 1,000 points; the index had never shed more than 800 points in a day. In terms of percentage lost, Monday’s session doesn’t come close to other historically bad days on Wall Street, including the stock market crashes in 1929 and 1987.

DJIA Worst Percentage Losses Comapred to Monday

8/24/15

-3.57

-22.61

10/19/87

-12.82

10/28/29

-11.73

10/29/29

-9.92

11/6/29

-8.72

12/18/1899

-3.57

8/24/15

 

That doesn’t mean the global impact from China’s slowdown isn’t real. The Bloomberg Commodity Index has put the price of products like oil, coffee, and cattle at their lowest levels since the end of the 20th century, in part due to waning Chinese demand. Emerging markets, which rely on China to import their goods, are especially vulnerable to China’s continuing slowdown, warned Dominic Rossi, chief investment officer for equities at Fidelity Worldwide Investment.

Kennedy said Chinese egos suffered the greatest loss in Monday’s bloodletting. As the world economy sank into the Great Recession in 2008, China was a beacon of growth. That fueled China’s confidence as it emerged as the second-largest economy in the world. Now, however, it’s becoming clear that intervention by Beijing is not enough to stop outside economic forces from savaging its economy.

“They have a lot of debt to overcome that they accumulated to avoid the global financial crisis,” Kennedy said. “A lot of that money went into real estate that’s sitting empty. That’s a big chain to drag up the hill right now.” Case in point: Beijing’s debt load is more than double the size of its gross domestic product, according to Bloomberg.

Small of the German Marshall Fund said that China’s slowing economic growth puts the country’s officials at a “weaker, less self-confident position than they were just a couple of months ago.… They look regressive, slowing down on some of the reform moves they said they were making.”

The IMF board will meet on Oct. 9. It has long insisted that the renminbi float as a condition for China joining the euro, the Japanese yen, the pound sterling, and the U.S. dollar in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights currency basket, an international reserve fund meant to back up national coffers. Now, as economic forces continue to rock Beijing, officials there are faced with a choice: Do as the IMF and the United States want — and risk further economic damage — or continue desperate interventions in what could be afutile attempt to stop the free fall.

So far, Xi has chosen to do the latter.

Photo credit: Feng Li/Getty Images