Indonesia presidential polls marred by fake news crisis

This picture taken on March 1, 2019 shows Indonesian Muslims participating in a campaign rally calling for clean elections in support of presidential and vice presidential candidates Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno, in Jakarta. Source: BAY ISMOYO / AFP

10 April 2019 

FOR THE first time in Indonesia’s history, the president, vice president, and constituents of the People’s Consultative Assembly will be selected on the same day during its general elections on April 17.

Like many countries, Indonesia has long grappled with the spread of misinformation and targeted disinformation – so-called ‘fake news’. The issue has proliferated in line with rising rates of digital adoption in the Indo-Pacific, exacerbated by increasingly embittered political rivalries, sectarianism, and rising religious conservatism.

As the election inches ever-closer, disinformation is again becoming a normality in the archipelago nation, where it has played a pivotal role in previous political events. Despite a country-wide crackdown – including increasingly stringent legislative efforts to police online behaviour – election watchdogs have once again reported a spike in fake news.

This follows mounting regional concerns about the long-term impact of disinformation in a country of avid social media users.

Indonesia boasts one of the highest user-bases in the world; recent years have seen platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook, and Twitter thrive in an environment where legacy media – especially television – is seen as partisan.

With most large media outlets firmly behind the incumbent administration, social media has grown immensely as the predominant method of reading, sharing, and discussing news and politics.

SEE ALSO: Indonesia: Superficial presidential debates reveal major flaw in local politics

Candidates and officials are taking to these platforms to share slogans, pitch policies, provoke rivals, and rouse support. They rely on the coordinated dissemination of propaganda – both self-promoting and slanderous – distributed by ‘buzzer’ teams behind the scenes. These groups are paid to command hundreds of personalised, automated, and entirely fabricated accounts targeting millions of unwitting citizens each week.

In polarised countries like Indonesia, fake news on this scale is a powerful force. Survey results suggest that voters are becoming increasingly partisan: selecting their information and ‘judging’ its authenticity based on their existing political preferences. The information economy is threatened by the rise of these online echo chambers, where voters simply disbelieve or delete the information they don’t want to hear.

In line with regional trends, laws governing Indonesian cyberspace have grown increasingly authoritarian and invasive over the past decade. Anxieties surrounding political sedition, fake news, and religious conservatism have spurred a rise in censorship which in practice has done little to curb the disinformation problem.

These legislative changes have raised questions about the potential for overcompensation in moderating online content, where the bid to tackle disinformation may jeopardise citizens’ digital freedoms.

Tighter regulation has also raised concerns about abuses of power and the use of legislation to further monopolise and distort political discourse online.

Article 40 of the Information and Transactions Law permits the Indonesian government to block access to pornographic or extremist content, as well as any other content it deems “negative”. Articles 28, 27, and 29 on hate speech, defamation, and extortion respectively, have also stirred controversy.

Incumbent President Joko Widodo (R on the stage) gestures during a campaign in Tangerang, in the Banten province on April 7, 2019. Source: DEMY SANJAYA / AFP

The legislature does not clearly define ‘negative content’ or any specific mechanisms for reporting it, meaning the process of flagging and removing content lacks oversight, transparency, and ultimate accountability. Authorities have often interpreted ‘hate speech’ to include any broadly critical expression against public officials. This type of ambiguity leaves room for selective enforcement based on the whim of different actors within the Indonesian system.

Article 40 allows the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to prevent access to online information directly. The blocking process, which was automated and centralised in 2018, allows Internet service providers to blacklist additional sites at their own discretion. In turn, this has led to a rise in arbitrary, inconsistent censorship, and has created uncertainty for citizens seeking recourse when content is improperly blocked.

While media freedom has generally improved since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, the past year has seen more social media platforms, media organisations, and political sources suffer from blocking under this system.

Hundreds of independent blogs and other sites publishing criticism of military action, Islam, or of the government are blocked. The result is a media environment stripped of the information required to form genuine political opinions, yet rife with targeted propaganda.

It’s clear that regulators have responded to rising anxieties by tightening governing powers over the Internet as a whole. While this serves well to remove offensive or inappropriate content, it does little to tackle the spread of misinformation and fake news, and further reduces the possibility of open and informed discussion.

As deceptive technology improves, verifying content online is only set to become more difficult, heightening its potential to sow social discord, skew political discourse, and undermine people’s faith in their institutions. This trend is worrisome enough for advanced economies, but underscores an immediate crisis for those still developing or emerging, where democratic institutions are more fragile.

If regulators lose patience with long-term digital literacy initiatives, they may be steered towards employing more acute and illiberal solutions. Autocratic governments across the world have leveraged the issue of disinformation to tighten online controls and quash political dissent, and democracies like Indonesia seem to be testing these waters too.

SEE ALSO: To preserve its democracy, Indonesia must reconsider its current cyber-policy

In the absence of effective and democratic policy remedies, the issue may lead developing countries to adopt a more autocratic stance on Internet governance.

Second to China, Indonesia wields the most influence over regional diplomacy. While these elections are unlikely to revitalise the country’s politics, the developing disinformation playbook has the capacity to aggravate social divisions and destabilise future elections in the region. In countries already suffering from religious and ethnic tensions, forces reliant on exploiting this friction can exasperate polarised groups and generate real violence.

Deliberate or otherwise, misinformation has become a collective challenge requiring action not just from corporations, civil activists, and regular Internet users, but also from governments.

Solutions posed by policymakers will require careful deliberation to ensure they are capable of safeguarding electoral integrity whilst thwarting the steady rise in censorship occurring worldwide.

By William Chalk, a freelance cybersecurity journalist and senior security researcher at Top10VPN, an independent digital rights group. This piece was first published at Policy Forum, Asia and the Pacific’s platform for public policy analysis and opinion. 

Twelve days of chaos: Inside the Trump White House’s growing panic to contain the border crisis

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was a loyal soldier for President Trump and often repeated his falsehoods, but it wasn’t enough to save her job. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By David Nakamura ,

Josh Dawsey and

Seung Min Kim-April 9 at 8:02 PM

He had threatened to close the southern border and ordered a halt to foreign aid for three Central American nations. But as President Trump weighed his next move to respond to a mounting immigration crisis, he had another problem: His homeland security chief was in Europe on a week-long business trip.

The location of Kirstjen Nielsen, the embattled leader of the Department of Homeland Security, on April 1 was like a bad joke for a president who vowed to curb unauthorized immigration but was now showing signs of panic as border crossings spiked to the highest levels in more than a decade.

Except no one was laughing, and Trump was livid. Nielsen was in London, then headed for Stockholm and Paris, to huddle with U.S. allies on counterterrorism and cybersecurity issues. Although Nielsen aides had informed the White House of the trip, Trump complained to her on the phone that she was out of town while the border was, in his words, out of control, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.

Nielsen, who had barely hung on to her job during previous run-ins with Trump, cut her trip short and flew back to Washington. Upon returning, she furiously tried to save her job. Nielsen convened emergency calls with White House aides and Cabinet officials to urge them to help her on immigration, White House officials said. She ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deploy “emergency surge operations,” shifting up to 750 officers from other duties to help the overwhelmed Border Patrol. But by then it was too late.

Trump was souring again on Nielsen over her opposition to his demands that DHS reinstate the family separation policy that the president had reversed last summer after a political backlash. Trump considered firing her upon her return, aides said, and though he held off briefly, Nielsen’s fate was sealed.

In the end, Trump chose not to close the border but instead turned his ire on his senior DHS leadership team: He forced out Nielsen and rescinded the Senate nomination of a career official to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump named CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to take over DHS in an acting capacity.

Across the U.S.-Mexico border, Customs and Border Protection agents are grappling with huge numbers of Central America migrants seeking asylum. (Video: Jorge Ribas/Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

The goal, White House aides said, is to create a more assertive agency, but some administration officials are privately concerned that Trump, influenced by senior adviser Stephen Miller, a border hawk, will hire only “yes men” who will not stand up to a president whose orders have, in many instances, been blocked by federal courts.

Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior over the past 12 days — since he first threatened to seal the border in a series of tweets on March 29 — has alarmed top Republicans, business officials and foreign leaders who fear that his emotional response might exacerbate problems at the border, harm the U.S. economy and degrade national security.

The stretch also has revealed that a president who has routinely blamed spiking immigration numbers on others — past presidents, congressional Democrats, Mexican authorities, federal judges, human smugglers — is now coming to the realization that the problems are closer to home. Though his aides have taken the fall, and it is unlikely that Trump will blame himself, the president is facing an existential political crisis ahead of his 2020 reelection bid over the prospect of failure on his top domestic priority.

"He was politically grandstanding for his base, for his reelection, and not thinking through a plan," said Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who has met with White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, to discuss immigration reform. "He has no plan except to talk about immigration as a political piñata to score points with the far right. But illegal immigration has increased in the two years he has been president."

At the White House on Tuesday, Trump reiterated his criticism of Democrats, who have rejected his legislative proposals to speed up deportations and build a border wall, and the federal courts, which have blocked some of his administration’s most aggressive actions. This week, a federal judge issued an injunction halting a program requiring Central Americans to wait in Mexico as their asylum cases are adjudicated. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the administration would appeal the ruling.

U.S. immigration laws are “the worst laws of any country anywhere in the world,” Trump said. He denied wanting to reinstate the policy that separated more than 2,700 children from their parents last summer and repeated false assertions that the Obama administration had first implemented that practice.

He added that without a strong deterrence message, migrants “are coming like it’s a picnic, because, ‘Let’s go to Disneyland.’ ”

A flash-bang of tweets

It was Trump who was visiting a resort, his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., when he posted the tweets on March 29 that exploded like a flash-bang grenade, shocking the senses of Washington’s political class, business leaders and foreign officials.

“If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING . . . the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week,” Trump wrote.

At a tour of infrastructure at the state’s Lake Okeechobee later that day, Trump told reporters that he also had ordered a halt of $500 million in U.S. aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the Northern Triangle countries responsible for the surge in migration.

The threats came just days after DHS announced that the number of border arrests had swelled to more than 100,000 in March — the highest monthly total in a dozen years. Nielsen had sent a four-page letter to Congress pleading for emergency funds to avert a systemwide “meltdown.”

News of Trump’s tweets ricocheted through the region. In San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, a bipartisan congressional delegation was gathered at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Jean Elizabeth Manes, who was appointed in 2015 under President Barack Obama and is one of the few holdovers in the Trump administration.

The lawmakers were receiving a briefing on the success that El Salvador, with U.S. assistance, has had in reducing violent crime, when an aide informed them of the president’s threats. In contrast to Guatemala and Honduras, Salvadoran migration to the United States has decreased in recent years, and U.S. officials have touted progress in battling the transnational MS-13 gang in that country.

The mood became “very dejected,” Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), who was in the meeting, recalled in an interview. “Everybody was very upset and concerned that this was happening.”

Trump’s threats cast a pall over the rest of the trip. The next day, the lawmakers met with Salvadoran president-elect Niyab Bukele, who had visited Washington in mid-March. Bukele joked that he hadn’t even been sworn in and Trump was already taking away his money.

“He said he needs the U.S. as a partner,” Espaillat recalled.

In Washington, similar angst was spreading among lobbyists for the nation’s biggest businesses. At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, officials had been told a day before Trump’s tweets that the White House was considering bolder, but vaguely defined, steps to manage the border crisis, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Over the weekend, as Trump spent two days at one of his Florida golf courses, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce heard from business owners who had begun emergency contingency planning. On April 1, the day Trump called Nielsen in London, Neil Bradley, the group’s chief policy officer, issued a statement opposing a border shutdown.

The next day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned that sealing border ports would have a “potentially catastrophic economic impact,” and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), whose state exported $97.7 billion in goods to Mexico in 2017, pleaded with Trump in a phone call to reconsider.

In an interview, Cornyn said he warned the president of the potential unintended consequences of acting out of frustration, and Trump asked him to collaborate with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on other ideas.

“I told him I’d be happy to work with him and his administration,” Cornyn said. “But sealing off the border is not a solution.”

That same day, Cornyn told 200 members of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that he would fight against closing the border, drawing an ovation. Ramiro Cavazos, the group’s president, said Trump’s disparaging rhetoric against Mexico and hard line immigration policies have hampered cross-border investment.

“We think a lot of the drama that has occurred . . . is making America look very bad to the rest of the world,” Cavazos said.

Upended plans

Nielsen’s trip to Europe was planned around the Group of Seven meeting of interior ministers in Paris at the end of last week — the type of multilateral collaboration that Trump has largely rejected.

But David Lapan, a former DHS spokesman, said the itinerary illustrated that Nielsen’s duties at DHS — a massive agency with 229,000 employees that was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — extended far beyond immigration.

“Counterterrorism and aviation security and election security and cybersecurity — all are things the secretary should be engaging our partners on,” said Lapan, now at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “But now you’re being pulled back to this one, singular focus.”

Flying home on a Coast Guard jet, Nielsen was angry that Trump had announced the elimination of aid to Central America one day after she announced a new border security compact with the Northern Triangle countries. Nielsen told associates that she blamed Miller for goading Trump to act, current and former White House officials said.

In a meeting on March 28, a day before Trump’s tweets, Nielsen repeatedly urged him not to close the border, said officials with knowledge of the meeting, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity. She also asked Trump for more operational control over negotiations with Mexico and protested that she was not informed of decisions affecting her own agency, said White House aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks.

Meanwhile, Miller lobbied the president to make a wholesale overhaul among DHS leadership, telling him that senior officials, including Lee Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, had slow-walked regulations aimed at curbing migration. Miller even argued that some of the DHS leadership was fearful of damage to their public reputations if they backed Trump’s hard-line agenda, the White House officials said.

Others have defended Cissna, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who issued a warning to the White House on Monday not to remove him from his job.

By the time she returned from London, Nielsen had been steamrolled in the power struggle. On Thursday, Trump abruptly reversed his border threats, telling reporters that he believed Mexico was cracking down on Central American migrants and that he would give Mexican officials a one-year warning.

“He made a threat, he saw some action, and that’s the way he rolls,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said in an interview, defending Trump’s moves. “It works for him.”

But that evening, the White House yanked the Senate nomination of Ronald Vitiello, a former CBP official, to lead ICE, a decision made without Nielsen’s input, according to officials. The move was so abrupt that White House officials initially indicated to the Senate that the withdrawal was a mistake, according to two officials familiar with the matter. A day later, Trump told reporters he intended to go in a “tougher” direction.

On Sunday, Trump summoned Nielsen to the White House and asked her to resign.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports lower immigration levels, joked that the situation at the DHS is akin to “The Apprentice: Washington, D.C., Edition” for a president who has been reduced to auditioning candidates to stop the migrant flow.

Trump is facing a 2020 campaign in which immigration again will be a “defining issue for him,” Krikorian said. “He needs to be seen by voters as having done every conceivable thing he can possibly do.”

As for Nielsen, Trump said she could remain in another administration job, but officials said she told colleagues she’s not interested.

Nick Miroff contributed to this report.

Declining China

Malaysia recently cancelled $22billion of investments financed by China. Sri Lanka has asked the IMF for help. Pakistan is preparing to do the same

by Alessandro Giardiello-8 April at 21:39 

"When China wakes up, she will shake the world." This famous prediction of Napoleon has been confirmed by history. Particularly in the last 20 years, China has become an economic power of primary importance that objectively threatens the world leadership of the United States.

But now, for the first time, Beijing will no longer be a buffer against world recession (as it was after the 1990s and until very recently) but one of its triggers. Now the question is not just "How will China enter the impending world recession?", but, above all, "how will it come out of it?"

Trade

Donald Trump's trade war with China is no joke. In December, it caused a 63 percent fall in US imports from China and, at the same time, there was a collapse of foreign direct investment towards Beijing. In November, it was 26.3 percent, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce, and this continued in the following months, although at less-devastating levels. The value of stocks on the Shanghai Stock Exchange has also fallen by 20 percent in the same period.

However, the most interesting data, as observed by Il Sole 24 Ore, is that "a dramatic fall in private investments" and a "substantial recovery in the investments of state companies" were already underway, in conflict with what had previously been decided.

In other words, they had to plug the crisis through state spending, and avoid the risk of contagion, given that, as the World Bank writes, "China is deeply integrated into the global economy". Suffice it to say that China's investments represent one-fifth of global investments, and account for 42 percent of the recovery after the crisis in 2010-15.

The decline in Chinese private investment raises serious concerns, on the part of the government, over the country's GDP growth prospects. China's potential growth is expected to decrease from its previous 10.6 percent in 2010 to 6 percent in 2020. Today, it is officially at 6.4 percent. This may seem positive by European standards, but with a 4 percent population growth and internal mobility of tens of millions of Chinese who move from the countryside to the cities every year looking for a job, this figure is considered to indicate a stagnant economy, and moreover is destined to worsen.

A sea of debt

Furthermore, the Chinese economy is beginning to drown in a sea of debt, as was the case in all the historically advanced countries of world capitalism in recent years, with the difference that Beijing has accumulated its debt over a much shorter period of time.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Chinese state debt has reached US$6 trillion, while the total overall debt (which also includes household, private and bank debts) stands at the astronomical level of US$23 trillion.

As we will see, despite the efforts undertaken by Xi Jinping to reach an agreement with the US on trade, it is unlikely that these will have a lasting positive impact. The pressure is bound to increase.

In the face of numerous declarations that go in the direction of détente between the two countries, the facts tell a different story. Huawei, China's largest telecommunications company, is preparing a billion-dollar lawsuit against the US government. Certainly, the US request for the Canadian authorities to put Meng Wanzhou, the financial director (as well as the founder's daughter) of the Chinese giant under house arrest cannot be considered an act of reconciliation towards Beijing.

Pressure from the US and the European Commission against the Italian government is becoming more and more aggressive. Italy has been accused of acting as a Trojan horse, favouring the penetration of Chinese products into the European market by joining the One Belt, One Road, also known as the "New Silk Road" initiative.

During Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent visit to Italy on 22 March, Italy officially signed up to the Chinese mega-project. What we see here is China's new role and the level of the conflict that is maturing on an international scale.

Overproduction

China has a desperate need to widen its commercial outlets, as it has been overproducing for some time, even though the Xi Jinping government has gone beyond the "natural laws" of capitalism and has continued to invest impressive amounts as a measure to artificially support the economy.

This policy of credit expansion (which economists call quantitative easing), which all the central banks in the world overdid after the 2008 crisis, is being used less and less, for the simple reason that it no longer has an effect, as Bloomberg confirmed recently (01/17/2019).

The Fed, the American central bank, abandoned it more than a year ago, followed by the ECB in January of this year. In Japan, it has had no effect for at least a decade.

Now it is China’s turn to find itself in a paradoxical situation, as only a part of the gigantic debt that it has accumulated has served to develop new industrial technologies and infrastructures, while a substantial part has gone to support the national currency and defunct public enterprises that can no longer survive on their own within the market. This is for the simple reason that, if the Chinese government had acted any differently, it would have added to unemployment created by private companies carrying out tens of millions of redundancies in the state-owned companies.

So we see how "Keynesian" policies are no longer having the desired effect even in China, in the only country that seemed to still have the financial resources to maintain them.

Beijing continues to have significant foreign exchange reserves (3.2 trillion dollars, even if this is down compared to 4.4 trillion a few years ago) and certainly has the largest banks in the world, although new clouds are gathering on the horizon.

In addition to the debt bubble, the real estate bubble and the protectionist measures of Trump, China is starting to have problems even with its allies that joined One Belt, One Road in recent years. Several of these countries have fallen into the classic "debt trap", and are indebted at levels that are no longer sustainable, including, among others, Malaysia, Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, etc.

Malaysia recently cancelled $22billion of investments financed by China. Sri Lanka has asked the IMF for help. Pakistan is preparing to do the same, even though Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State, has already declared that they will not give Pakistan a penny if this money goes to repay debts to China.

The pressures made by China to bring India into the project resulted first in the conflict in Bhutan, and more recently in the resumption of the conflict on the Kashmir border, with the killing of two Indian fighters by the Pakistani army.

There is now an increasingly stable alliance between the USA, India, Japan and Australia to limit Chinese expansion in Asia and the world.

The exhaustion of quantitative easing policies by the US Fed and the relative increase in interest rates on the dollar have caused a further shock for China, as capital is tending to flee the country. Already in 2015 the government's attempt to support the currency cost billions. On the other hand, accepting the devaluation would lead to new heavy internal contradictions (increases in interest rates and the cost of imports) and external contradictions (increased commercial tensions).

The rising level of tension with the US is revealed by changes in China’s foreign policy, which in the past had always been prudent, which is confirmed in the situation in Venezuela, where China has openly sided with Maduro.

They need commercial outlets through consolidating economic relations and finding new economic and political partners. This will bring them up against the interests of the US and also the European Union. That is why, beyond public declarations, commercial tensions are destined to remain and even deepen.

Working class and students: towards a Chinese ‘68?

As a result of the crisis, companies are starting to close in China, despite the state's efforts. Unemployment is growing (although this is not accurately recorded by the regime's statistics) and trade union disputes are on the increase.

The thing that worries the regime the most is that these disputes, which have been growing since 2008, are also starting to involve students. In Guangdong, the manufacturing centre of China and the world, about 50 students joined the workers of Jasic International at the end of July, and wanted to unionise legally under the ACFTU. The Jasic workers initially obtained permission from the ACFTU to unionise, but the latter then rescinded their permission which prompted the workers to enter into struggle.

The workers

As soon as the students and workers gathered in a hotel in Huizhou, they were arrested by police in riot gear.

In major Chinese universities, students have stopped attending the official courses on Marxism (presented as "courses on the theory of economic development") since the autumn, while self-run courses have been organised on the crisis of overproduction and the class struggle.

The rector of Beijing University has threatened to close the student-run "Marxist society,” charging its members with developing a doctrine that aims to build links with the working class, instead of sticking to the orthodoxy of the Chinese Communist Party.

In Nanjing, two students were arrested in a demonstration against the non-recognition of the "Marxist Society" and, between November and December, 12 students mysteriously disappeared in Beijing, Shanghai, Guanzhou, Shenzen and Wuhan.

The government has hired thugs, who threatened and beat up the students who organised the search for their missing comrades. The university administrators have accused them of conducting "criminal activities."

The main reason why these students scare the regime so much is due to the fact that they come from elite universities. They are the children of the new Chinese ruling class and senior officials of the CCP bureaucracy.

These young people are gifted and influential; they were taught to consider themselves as neoliberals, thinking only of their own careers. They were supposed to compete with each other, and only think about how to make money and make their way through life. Then, at some point, they realised that, despite their efforts and sacrifices, they could not get the jobs they aspired to. And they have ended up rediscovering Marx.

What we are witnessing in China is a phenomenon very similar to what was seen in the French May ‘68 and in the Italian Hot Autumn [1969], where the children of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie turned to the factories in search of unity with the working class.

The difference, compared to back then, is not only the size of the phenomenon (China has a population of 1.4 billion and the most impressive industrial working class ever seen in history), but above all in the fact that the Chinese working class has no points of reference on the political and trade union level. They are young and much more educated than the first generation of workers that emigrated from the countryside in the early 1990s to work in the cities.

This second generation not only does not trust the ruling party, the CCP and the official unions, but tends towards organising independent unions, becoming the protagonist of uncontrollable mobilisations, with real outbursts of anger against the regime.

There is no mass communist opposition party in China today such as that of Marchais or Berlinguer, who in the 1960s and 1970s led the mobilisations in France and Italy down "reasonable" and reformist channels. Who can play that role in today's China?

A young man who organised one of the student Marxist societies was asked: "What are the causes of this return to Marxism among young people in China?" The answer was: "The government focuses on Confucianism, the extended family and nationalism, but this no longer works. Amongst the main causes for at least 20 percent of young Chinese people looking at Marxism, there are basically two: the slowing down of the economy and the revolutionary tradition of the country."

So, to answer the questions posed at the beginning of this article, we can say that China will enter the coming recession as a country that aspires to the leadership of world capitalism but which will emerge as an epicentre of a new revolutionary process, transforming Napoleon's hypothesis into the most earth-shattering and grandiose of realities.

[This is a slightly edited version of an article originally published in Italian here.]

How Japan Became the Adult at the Trade Table

While Washington withdraws from multilateral deals, Tokyo has been uncharacteristically leading efforts to save them.

Shinzo Abe speaks at his party's headquarters in Oct. 2017 (Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images

BY MICHAEL HIRSH

 | APRIL 10, 2019, 11:39 AM

Throughout their history, the Japanese have been uncomfortable with free trade—and resentful of U.S. efforts to promote it on their shores. Indeed, the United States has been trying to pull Japan into the world at least since the mid-19th century, when President Millard Fillmore sent gunboats—the Japanese called them “black ships”—into Tokyo Bay, demanding open ports.

Japan’s first response to these U.S. market-opening initiatives was to forswear its feudal isolation, swiftly build an industrialized economy, and launch a war of aggression in the Pacific, creating a short-lived but savage military empire that Tokyo euphemistically called the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” After that effort ended badly, the Japanese waged war again, this time with trade as a weapon (as many U.S. diplomats described it). They created the fearsome “Japan Inc.” of decades past, keeping many foreign products and services out while getting rich by dumping cheaply priced product abroad, especially in the United States. Only slowly, under unrelenting U.S. gaiatsu (foreign pressure), did Tokyo begin to discard its isolationist and protectionist trade practices.

Today, however, it’s clear something dramatic has changed in the relationship. With the United States and Japan planning to sit down this month for yet another iteration of trade talks, Tokyo is now generally taking the lead in pushing for more open markets, and Washington is retreating into isolation. Under President Donald Trump, the United States is abjuring the very multilateral system it had the largest hand in building—and which it once dragged Tokyo into—while Japan is becoming one of the system’s main champions.

In a crowning historical irony, Japan is again trying to build a kind of co-prosperity sphere in East Asia without the United States—but a real one this time, with open and fair trade rules, designed around preserving what’s left of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that Trump tried to junk in 2017.
Moreover, Japan is being credited with playing the leading role in preserving the main body of what many experts call a state-of-the-art multilateral trade agreement—indeed perhaps the future of the global trading system—at a time when Trump, who proudly calls himself “Tariff Man,” appears to be trying to turn back the clock nearly three centuries to the antiquated mercantilist thinking that preceded Adam Smith.

Tokyo is also very consciously keeping the TPP open for a post-Trump Washington to rejoin, much as the Western Europeans are doing with the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate pact, from which Trump also abruptly withdrew.

Other major U.S. trading partners are full of praise for Tokyo’s leading role—not least of which is Canada, which gives a lot of credit to Japan for saving the heart of the TPP. “I can truly say the Japanese position, attitude, and support for the rule-based multilateral trading system and fair trade has been exemplary and very important,” James Carr, Canada’s international trade minister, told Foreign Policy in an interview. By contrast, dealing with the Trump administration “can be difficult, and it can be unpredictable,” Carr said.

Carr noted that since the TPP’s swiftly negotiated successor—the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—was signed in Chile in March 2018, Canada’s exports to participating countries have surged on the strength of several tariff cuts. By January of this year, Canadian exports to Japan had increased 20.8 percent. His relationships with his Japanese counterparts, Carr said, “have been nothing but positive and aligned.”

All in all, it has been a remarkable evolution of Japanese attitudes toward trade. “The outcome on the CPTPP is something no one would have predicted if you looked at where Japan was only five to seven years ago,” said Wendy Cutler, a longtime senior U.S. trade negotiator and now vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. “There was a lot of domestic opposition to TPP at first in Japan.
 … The notion that not only did they join but then once we exited they led the other countries to a successful conclusion is something no one could have expected.”

Matthew Goodman, a former U.S. Treasury Department official in Japan and a senior vice president for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Tokyo has changed its approach because it knows that Japan needs to boost productivity to deal with an aging and shrinking population, and it has a far more enlightened bureaucracy that recognizes Japanese companies are truly globalized and depend on the rules and norms of a multilateral trading system.

“They’re more dependent on global supply chains underpinned by a set of rules and norms that, for want of a better word, are the Western preferred rules and norms—ones that the U.S. used to champion,” he said.

“Some things have really changed that have forced Japan to step in and in a way it might not have otherwise.”

Above all, the economic and geopolitical challenge from neighboring China has forced Japan’s hand, Goodman and other experts said. Tokyo can’t afford a new wave of protectionism with Beijing breaking so many free-trade rules on its own. Thus, Japan is also taking a lead role in reforming the World Trade Organization (WTO) ahead of Tokyo’s first chairmanship of the G-20 summit in June.

That could be a key factor, along with the CPTPP, in forcing Beijing to open up and observe rules against government subsidization of industry and protecting intellectual property—perhaps more than anything Trump does in his ongoing bilateral talks with Beijing.

“I think China is fundamentally challenging the liberal order on which Japan’s security and prosperity has rested,” Goodman said. “Japan always played defense before. … The TPP effort by Japan was really out of character.”

Cutler added: “What is happening is that the U.S. is retreating from its leadership role in the WTO and other countries, including Japan, are trying to fill that void, either by leading or also forming coalitions with other countries.” Ironically enough—considering that Japan effectively wrote the book on how to subsidize and protect domestic business in its earlier decades—Tokyo is pushing for tougher WTO restrictions on this practice.

After Trump announced he was pulling out of the 12-nation TPP pact in early 2017, calling his predecessor Barack Obama’s handiwork a “horrible deal,” Japan’s initial response along with most other participating nations was to say that the TPP couldn’t work without Washington. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had campaigned on an economic reform platform called “Abenomics,” later changed his mind. He swiftly took the initiative to salvage what he could as the leader of the second-largest TPP economy. In defiance of Japan’s politically powerful and protected industries such as agriculture, Abe pushed a renegotiated “TPP-11” through the Japanese parliament, just as he had the earlier TPP pact.  He also left open a future U.S. return to the deal by deactivating—but not cancelling—some 20 U.S.-demanded TPP provisions mostly involving highly technical protections of patents and rights and terms for litigating investor disputes.

In a speech to the parliament shortly before the revised TPP pact was approved, Abe said that he personally would become the “standard-bearer” in promoting multilateral trade in the region, despite efforts by Trump to return U.S.-Japan relations to the hostile bilateral disputes of the 1980s.

“The Japanese were the anchor essentially, though they had support from Australia and New Zealand,” said Jeffrey Schott of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Some longtime Japan observers, mindful that Tokyo has rarely taken any kind of global leadership role since World War II, are skeptical about how long the country’s new enthusiasm for pushing the envelope on multilateral free trade will persist. “I still ask myself if it’s sustainable,” Goodman said. “This is a unique situation with a unique Japanese prime minister who puts a premium on the U.S.-Japan alliance, ensuring that the U.S. and Japan are shaping the order in Asia and not China. It’s not clear to me that a future prime minister is going to have that same strategic perspective and political courage.”

Yet it’s going to be hard for Japan to move in reverse. The opening of Japan has been a gradual process by which the once all powerful ministry mandarins in Tokyo—who for decades sought to balance U.S. demands for open trade against the need for socially stabilizing measures like so-called lifetime employment—have found themselves outpaced and outflanked by globalized Japanese corporate giants like Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Sony. A generation ago, for example, Japan’s formidable Finance Ministry squelched most attempts by Japanese banks and securities firms to compete globally (also slowing down asset securitization, which helped Japan somewhat in the 2008 financial crisis). Today, the ministry’s offshoot, the Financial Services Agency, “is the most progressive regulator in the world, bar none,” Goodman said.

More recently, Tokyo was jolted when South Korea negotiated free trade agreements with the United States and European Union, giving Seoul the economic edge; Tokyo also recognized that the Doha round of global talks by WTO members was going nowhere. “They recognized they needed to do something drastic,” Cutler said.

Underlying the TPP was a fundamental recognition that around the world—and especially in the manufacturing-intensive Pacific region—trade was no longer simply a country-to-country issue. Corporate supply chains are increasingly complex; the content of any given product now runs through many countries.

“It made more sense to do a regional deal because that’s the way business was conducted,” said Cutler, who also noted that with the TPP Washington only needed one congressional vote whereas, under Trump’s approach, “you’re setting yourself up for a whole slew of congressional votes, and as we’re seeing with the USMCA, none of them are easy.” (The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Trump’s successor to NAFTA, has run into heavy resistance on Capitol Hill.)

And while Trump derided the TPP, even his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, has acknowledged that U.S. negotiators adapted many of its innovations—mainly those related to digital and intellectual property, patent protections, currency manipulation, labor standards, and environmental rules—to create the USMCA. The TPP is “state of the art because the U.S. used the TPP negotiations as a negotiating laboratory,” Schott said. “The modernized part of the revised NAFTA is essentially TPP with more bells and whistles, which are already being implemented by Canada and Mexico.”

Despite Trump’s recalcitrance on free trade—which flies in the face of nearly every U.S. president’s approach since 1945—Goodman and other experts on U.S.-Japan trade say Washington at least can claim some credit for its past role in pulling Japan into the world. And for giving it the motivation to lead now.

 

Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @michaelphirsh

As India votes, social media faces big test

 

10 April 2019

“This work is done across dozens of teams, both in India and around the globe, and began more than 18 months ago with a detailed planning and risk assessment across our platforms,” this is not the Indian government or a political party talking about the upcoming elections. No, not the Elections Commission either. 

These are the words of Ajit Mohan, Managing Director and Vice President of Facebook in India talking about the platform’s preparations just three days before 900 million Indians were getting ready to vote during an election that would take over a month. 


He added, “the findings allowed us to concentrate our work on key areas, including blocking and removing fake accounts; fighting the spread of misinformation; stopping abuse by domestic actors; spotting attempts at foreign meddling; and taking action against inauthentic coordinated campaigns.” 

The Indian elections are going to be a real tester for Facebook (with over 400 million Indian users on Facebook and Whatsapp combined) in particular and other social media platforms in general on their role in forming public opinion

World over every day, Facebook alone blocks or removes over a million accounts. There is no verified data on how many accounts, real and fake, are being created per day. 

The Indian elections are going to be a real tester for Facebook (with over 400 million Indian users on Facebook and Whatsapp combined) in particular and other social media platforms in general on their role in forming public opinion. Facebook to a large extent and others like Twitter and Google-owned Youtube have been heavily scrutinized on how they tackle misinformation and manipulation efforts.
 
Ironically, the last time Indian PM Narendra Modi contested for the post, Facebook was almost part of the campaign. The 2014 election was dubbed India’s First Social Media Election and by extension Modi became India’s first social media PM. With 12 million plus followers on Twitter then, Modi was only second to US President Barak Obama in popularity. Modi is even more popular on Facebook now with 49.5 million followers. But the situation is poles apart from what it was five years back. 

After what happened at the last US elections, Facebook has tried hard make sure that it does not in any way appear as close as it was to Modi is 2014. It has taken down thousands of Indian accounts, with millions of followers for misbehaviour meaning, these accounts together were sharing posts in such a way to create more attention on them. The biggest losses in these sweeps were suffered by Modi supporters.

Facebook has also been more transparent in who pays for its ads. But as with every patch-up Facebook has come up with, serious flaws remain. For one the money trail stops at the account who paid for the ad, Facebook cannot seek more details. On a more serious note, recent research has shown that Facebook’s ad placement algorithm itself is skewed.

The 2014 election was dubbed India’s First Social Media Election and by extension Modi became India’s first social media PM. With 12 million plus followers on Twitter then, Modi was only second to US President Barak Obama popularitynow with 49.5 million followers  

“To accomplish this (ad placements), the platforms build extensive user interest profiles and track ad performance to understand how different users interact with different ads. This historical data is then used to steer future ads towards those users who are most likely to be interested in them, and to users like them,” a research paper titled Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook’s ad delivery can lead to skewed outcomes revealed. 

“By running experiments where we swap different ad headlines, text, and images, we demonstrate that the differences in ad delivery can be significantly affected by the image alone. For example, an ad whose headline and text would stereo-typically be of the most interest to men with the image that would stereo-typically be of the most interest to women delivers primarily to women at the same rate as when all three ad creative components are stereo-typically of the most interest to women.” 

The author is the Asia-Pacific Coordinator for the DART Centre for Journalism and Trauma, a project of the Columbia Journalism SchoolTwitter - @amanthap

Annabella Landsberg: HMP Peterborough inmate's death 'shocking'

Annabella Landsberg died after spending several weeks in segregation at HMP Peterborough

4 April 2019

The events leading to the death of a prisoner after she was restrained and left on the floor for 21 hours were "truly shocking", a report has said.

HMP Peterborough staff thought Annabella Landsberg was "play-acting" when she stayed on her cell floor after being restrained on 2 September 2017.

However, when examined the next day the 45-year-old was found to be seriously unwell and later died in hospital.

An inquest jury has found a series of failings contributed to her death.

Jurors in Huntingdon concluded there were failings on the part of the prison, healthcare staff, GPs and custody officers.

Ms Landsberg's sister, Sandra, said: "It was very distressing to learn that my sister was left on her cell floor for so long when she was so unwell, repeatedly considered to be 'faking it'.

"My sister will not come back but no other family should have to go through this.

"Prisoners should be properly supported and looked after."

Annabella Landsberg moved to the UK from her native Zimbabwe

Ms Landsberg, who was in the prison's segregation unit, had Type 2 diabetes and the inquest heard prison officer Amy Moore had asked her to stand for her medication on 2 September.

But after she grabbed Ms Moore's leg, the mother-of-three - who was serving four years for offences committed under a suspended sentence - was physically restrained by staff at about 18:00 GMT.

The incident was not filmed because an officer had removed her body-worn camera, which the Prison and Probation Ombudsman criticised, adding it meant "the opportunity to capture potentially crucial evidence about the use of force was lost".

Ms Landsberg, from Worthing, West Sussex, remained on the floor throughout the night, ate neither her breakfast nor her lunch and later appeared to have wet herself.

Annabella Landsberg was serving a four-year sentence at HMP Peterborough

A nurse attended Ms Landsberg three times, on the final occasion telling her to "stop messing around" and then threw some water on her to provoke a reaction.

A clinical reviewer "particularly criticised" this final check, and said the nurse was apparently concerned she might be at risk of assault from Ms Landsberg, even though she had no history of violence.

When a second nurse attended, the inquest heard she "quite quickly" realised the prisoner was in "a bad way" and an ambulance was called.

Ms Landsberg, from Zimbabwe, died on 6 September 2017 from complications of hyperosmoler hyperglcaemic syndrome and rhabdomyolysison arising from her diabetes .

In a narrative conclusion, the jury found a lack of awareness of her diabetic status as a result of "inadequate checks", repeated failings to recognise the severity of the situation from diabetic symptoms and a failure to provide any medical observations after she was restrained, had probably contributed to her death.

Damian Evans, director at HMP Peterborough, said the prison was "very sorry" for care Ms Landsberg received.

Mr Evans said: "Since Annabella's death we have undertaken a thorough review of the delivery of healthcare services at HMP Peterborough and accepted all the recommendations from the initial Prison and Probation Ombudsman's report into her death.

"This has led to many changes and improvements being made."

Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough

Network of eight radio telescopes around the world records revolutionary image

 The image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Photograph: EHT Collaboration

Hannah DevlinScience correspondent @hannahdev-Wed 10 Apr 2019 15.23 BST

Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects.

The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55m light years from Earth.

The black hole itself – a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape – is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.

The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists.

Sheperd Doeleman, EHT director and Harvard University senior research fellow said: “Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have taken a picture of a black hole.”

Astronomers reveal first-ever picture of a black hole – video

France Córdova, director of the US National Science Foundation and an astrophysicist, said that the image, which she had only seen as it was unveiled at the press briefing she was chairing, had brought tears to her eyes. “We have been studying black holes for so long that sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us has seen one,” she said. “This will leave an imprint on people’s memories.”

The image gives the first direct glimpse of a black hole’s accretion disc, a fuzzy doughnut-shaped ring of gas and dust that steadily “feeds” the monster within.

The EHT picks up radiation emitted by particles within the disc that are heated to billions of degrees as they swirl around the black hole at close to the speed of light, before vanishing down the plughole.

The halo’s crescent-like appearance in the image is because the particles in the side of the disc rotating towards Earth are flung towards us faster and so appear brighter. The dark shadow within marks the edge of the event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which no light or matter can travel fast enough to escape the inexorable gravitational pull of the black hole.

Black holes were first predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity – although Einstein himself was sceptical that they actually existed. Since then, astronomers have accumulated overwhelming evidence that these cosmic sinkholes are out there, including recent detection of gravitational wavesthat ripple across the cosmos when pairs of them collide.

But black holes are so small, dark and distant that observing them directly requires a telescope with a resolution equivalent to being able to see a bagel on the moon. This was once thought to be an insurmountable challenge.

The EHT achieved the necessary firepower by combining data from eight of the world’s leading radio observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (Alma) in Chile and the South Pole Telescope, creating an effective telescope the size of the Earth.

When observations were launched in 2017, the EHT had two primary targets. First was Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, which has a mass of about 4m suns. The second target, which yielded the image, was a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, into which the equivalent of 6bn suns of light and matter has disappeared.

The collaboration is still working on producing an image of the Milky Way’s black hole. “We hope to get that very soon,” said Doeleman.

The success of the project hinged on clear skies on several continents simultaneously and exquisite coordination between the eight far-flung teams. Observations at the different sites were coordinated using atomic clocks, called hydrogen masers, accurate to within one second every 100 million years.

And, on one night in April 2017, everything came together. “We got super lucky, the weather was perfect,” said Ziri Younsi, a member of the EHT collaboration who is based at University College London.

The sheer volume of data generated was also unprecedented – in one night the EHT generated enough data to fill half a tonne of hard drives. This meant waiting for half a year for the South Pole data, which could only be shipped out at the end of Antarctic winter.

The observations are already giving scientists new insights into the weird environment close to black holes, where gravity is so fierce that reality as we know it is distorted beyond recognition.

At the event horizon, light is bent in a perfect loop around the black hole, meaning if you stood there you would be able to see the back of your own head. The observations also provide one of the most stringent tests to date of Einstein’s theory of general relativity: this predicts a rounded shape of the black hole’s halo, in line with what EHT has observed.

Scientists are also hoping to understand more about the origin of jets of radiation that are blasted out from the poles of some black holes at close to the speed of light, creating brilliant beacons that can be picked out across the cosmos.

However, the observations do not yet reveal anything about the black hole’s inscrutable interior.
“The black hole is not the event horizon, it’s something inside. It could be something just inside the event horizon, an exotic object hovering just beneath the surface, or it could be a singularity at the centre … or a ring,” said Younsi. “It doesn’t yet give us an explanation of what’s going on inside.”

Heino Falcke, chair of the EHT science council, who is based at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said: “The big question for me is whether we’ll ever be able to transcend that limit. The answer may be maybe not. That’s frustrating but we’ll have to accept it.”

The student who developed a crucial algorithm

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 Katie Bouman, now at CalTech, was studying at MIT when she came up with a key algorithm. Photograph: MIT

The Event Horizon Telescope relies on a technique called interferometry. This is a bit like trying to reconstructing a pebble being dropped into a pond by placing detectors around the pond’s edge to measure the ripples sent out. Similarly, with the EHT, the signals from all eight telescopes have to be combined and fed through a computer to turn a mountain of incomprehensible blips into a visual picture.

This presented an unprecedented computational challenge: the amount of data collected was so enormous that it had to be physically shipped to a central location, the MIT Haystack observatory, in the form of half a tonne of hard drives.

Developing new, sophisticated algorithms was a crucial part of turning the EHT data into an image. These needed to not only combine the data but also filter out noise caused by factors like atmospheric humidity, which warps radio waves, and precisely synchronising the signals captured by the far-flung telescopes.

While still studying at MIT, the computer scientist Katie Bouman came up with a new algorithm to stitch together data collected across the EHT network. Bouman went on to lead an elaborate series of tests aimed at ensuring that the EHT’s image was not the result of some form of technical glitch or fluke. At one stage, this involved the collaboration splitting into four separate teams which analysed the data independently until they were absolutely confident of their findings.

“We’re a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that’s what it took to achieve something once thought impossible,” said Bouman.