The economist USA 12 01 2019

The Economist January 12th 2019 3Contents continues overleaf1 Contents The world this week 6 A round-up of politicaland business news 27 Nicolás Maduro’s mess 28 Protecting scarlet macaw

Red moon rising

Will China dominate science?

The Economist January 12th 2019 3

Contents continues overleaf1

Contents

The world this week

6 A round-up of politicaland business news

27 Nicolás Maduro’s mess

28 Protecting scarlet macaws

30 Bello Brazil’s confused

foreign policy

Asia

31 Health care in Japan

32 The king of Malaysia

defeatist, page 46

On the cover

If China dominates science,

should the world worry?

Leader, page 9 It has become a

leading scientific power Can it

go on to become a great one?

Page 68

•The world’s least successful

president After a catastrophic

first term, Nicolás Maduro is

digging in for a second, page 27

•Putin threatens Belarus

As Vladimir Putin tightens his

bear-hug, the leader of Belarus

fights back, page 42 Two new

documentaries depict the

optimistic beginning and

eventual fraying of Mr Putin’s

long reign, page 73

•Pakistan: impoverished by its

army The penury of Pakistan’s

208m citizens is a disgrace—and

the army is to blame: leader,

page 11 Why Imran Khan will

struggle to make their life better:

Briefing, page 17

•How the mighty dollar falls

The fate of the greenback will

shape financial markets in 2019,

page 62 Against the dollar, other

currencies are at their cheapest

in 30 years: Graphic detail,

page 81

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Volume 430 Number 9125

Europe

42 Belarus and Russia

43 Orthodox schism

44 Pitching Fort Trump

44 Women and street signs

47 Labour’s balancing act

48 Can “no deal” be stopped?

50 Bagehot Speaker of the

House, head of the asylum

International

51 Missionaries from poor

countries target the

57 PG&E feels the heat

57 Carlos Ghosn in court

62 Buttonwood How the

mighty dollar falls

63 Studies in sexism

64 Jim jumps from theWorld Bank

64 Open banking in Europe

65 Wall Street v exchanges

66 Free exchange Down

towns

Science & technology

68 Can China become ascientific superpower?

Books & arts

73 Vladimir Putin on film

76 Who owns Kafka?

76 “Cat Person” returns

čljĝĪĝĜĚıāęĨġĬęĤčĦĝČÿċĝĥĚĝĪĄĂćāāęĞȲīĜħĦħĬĨĪħĮġĜĝĬĠĝīęĥĝīĝĪĮġěĝīęīĚęĦģĚĪęĦěĠĝīĚĭĬĠęĮĝÿĒċīęĦĜęīīħěġęĬĝīįĠħěęĦĠĝĤĨıħĭāęĞȲīęĮęġĤęĚĤĝġĦīĝĤĝěĬĤħěęĬġħĦī ąħĬħĤħěęĬġħĦīěęĨġĬęĤħĦĝěħĥĞħĪĤħěęĬħĪĄħħĜęĦĜĚĝĮĝĪęğĝīĨĪħĮġĜĝĜĚıęĬĠġĪĜĨęĪĬıƣ! 'āęĨġĬęĤčĦĝ

6 The Economist January 12th 2019

1

The world this week Politics

America’s federal government

remained shut down, as

Demo-crats refused to fund Donald

Trump’s wall on the Mexican

border (which he had

previous-ly said Mexico would pay for)

In his first televised speech

from the Oval Office, the

president said that migrants

trying to cross the border

illegally represented a

“humanitarian and security

crisis” Democrats offered to

reopen the government by

funding everything bar the

Department of Homeland

Security Mr Trump walked out

of a meeting with them

John Bolton, Mr Trump’s

national security adviser,

assured allies that American

troops would not be leaving

Syriaquickly, all but

contra-dicting what Mr Trump had

said a few days earlier Mr

Bolton said that, before any

withdrawal, Islamic State had

to be fully defeated and Turkey

had to promise not to attack

Syrian Kurds Turkey’s

presi-dent, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

rejected that idea, saying that

his plans for an offensive

against the Kurdish force,

which Turkey regards as a

terrorist group, were almost

complete

Family values

A Saudi teenager who had

barricaded herself into a hotel

room in Bangkok and

live-tweeted her ordeal was

de-clared a legitimate refugee by

the un Rahaf Mohammed

al-Qunun said she wanted

asylum in Australia She fears

that her family will kill her if

she is returned to Saudi

Arabia, because she has

re-nounced Islam She also fears

being forced into an unwanted

marriage

The Saudi government struck ablow for feminism, decreeingthat women whose husbands

divorcethem must be formed of this fact Courts willnotify them by text message

in-Félix Tshisekedi, an oppositioncandidate, was unexpectedlydeclared the winner of a presi-

dential election in the

Demo-cratic Republic of Congo.Pre-election polls had putanother opposition leader,Martin Fayulu, far ahead

Furious voters speculatedabout a possible stitch-up MrFayulu had vowed to investi-gate corruption within theoutgoing regime of PresidentJoseph Kabila

Protests spread across Sudan.

What began as an isolated rallyagainst high bread prices hasbecome a broad movementagainst the dictatorship ofOmar al-Bashir, who has runthe country since 1989 and isaccused of genocide in Darfur

At least 40 people have beenkilled in the protests

The constitutional court in

Madagascarconfirmed theelection of Andry Rajoelina aspresident after his opponentcomplained of electoral fraud

Mr Rajoelina took 55% of thevote in last month’s run-offagainst Marc Ravalomanana

Only doing its job Guatemala’sgovernmentordered the shutdown of theInternational Commissionagainst Impunity in Guatemala(cicig) and the expulsion of itsforeign workers within 24hours The foreign ministeraccused the un-backed body ofexceeding its authority andpoliticising its work But theconstitutional court suspend-

ed the order, setting the stagefor a confrontation cicig hasbeen investigating corruption,including allegations againstthe family of the president,Jimmy Morales

Only days before Nicolás duro was to be sworn in for asecond term as president of

Ma-Venezuela, a justice of thecountry’s supreme court fled

the country Christian Zerpacalled Mr Maduro’s regime a

“dictatorship” and said thecourt had become “an appen-dage of the executive branch”

This was an about-turn for MrZerpa, who in 2016 wrote thecourt’s opinion justifying theusurpation of the legislature’spowers by the government

Brazil’snew populist ment sent the national guard

govern-to the state of Ceará govern-to curb anoutbreak of violence Crimi-nals have staged attacks,including fire-bombings, onbanks, buses and petrolstations

A taste for travel North Korea’sdictator, KimJong Un, paid a visit to Beijingwhere he met the Chinesepresident, Xi Jinping It was his

fourth to China in ten months.

This latest trip has fuelledspeculation that he may bepreparing for another summitwith Donald Trump

Officials allowed a handful offoreign reporters to visit three

of the camps in the far western

region of Xinjiang where

human-rights groups sayhundreds of thousands ofMuslims, mostly ethnicUighurs, have been detainedand pressed to be less pious

The journalists heard residentssinging “If you’re happy andyou know it, clap your hands”

in English Xinjiang’s governorsaid the facilities had been

“extremely effective” in ing extremism

reduc-China’s anti-graft agency isinvestigating offences alleged-

ly committed by a former

vice-mayor of Beijing, Chen

Gang Mr Chen was responsiblefor urban planning in thebuild-up to the city’s Olympicgames in 2008

Ethnic Rakhine militants

attacked police posts in

Myan-mar’sRakhine state, bating tensions in the region inwhich pogroms by the armyand Rakhines againstRohingyas, a Muslim minority,led to an exodus of 800,000Rohingya refugees in 2017

exacer-The king of Malaysia, Sultan

Muhammad V of Kelantan,abdicated abruptly for undis-closed reasons The hereditarymonarchs who rule over nine

of Malaysia’s 13 states will meetsoon to pick one of their num-ber to serve a five-year term asking

Jolovan Wham, a Singaporean

activist, was found guilty oforganising a public assemblywithout a permit He hadconvened a seminar on civildisobedience

By any means necessary

In Britain a cross-party

amendment to the ment’s finance bill designed toreduce the chances of crashingout of the eu without a dealpassed by 303 to 296 votes, thefirst defeat on a budget mea-sure since 1978 Although themeasure cannot stop a no-dealBrexit, it would prevent thegovernment from varyingtaxes if there were no deal byMarch 29th And in a constitu-tionally suspect move, thespeaker of the House of Com-mons, John Bercow, permitted

govern-an amendment requiring thegovernment to outline a Plan Bwithin three days if, as expect-

ed, it loses a crucial vote on itsBrexit deal on January 15th Germany identified the alleged

hackerof the personal details

of 1,000 politicians, journalistsand celebrities: not Russia, but

a 20-year-old who lives withhis parents

Ukraine’sOrthodox churchbroke away from the patriarch-ate of Moscow This was seen

as a blow to Vladimir Putin,who prizes Russian primacyover its neighbours in mattersspiritual as well as temporal

The Economist January 12th 2019 7

The world this week Business

Carlos Ghosnappeared in

public for the first time since

being taken into custody in

mid-November amid claims of

wrongdoing, which led to his

dismissal as Nissan’s

chair-man Mr Ghosn appeared at a

court in Tokyo where he denied

all the allegations, which

include a “breach of trust” at

Nissan and understating his

pay to the authorities He

described the claims as

“mer-itless” The court nevertheless

recommended that he remain

in custody

root-and-branch restructuring of its

operations in Europe, a

loss-making region for the

carmak-er Thousands of jobs are

expected to go Jaguar Land

Roverprepared its workers for

huge job losses in Britain

What a drag

Samsungsaid that it expects

its operating profit for the last

three months of 2018 to be

significantly lower than

ex-pected, its first decline in

quarterly profit in two years

The South Korean electronics

giant blamed weaker demand

in China, a factor that lay

be-hind Apple’s recent warning

about decreased revenues

The unemployment rate in

the euro area dipped to 7.9% in

November, the lowest it has

been since October 2008 The

youth unemployment rate

stood at 16.9%, but remained

much higher in Greece, Italy

and Spain

American employers added

312,000 jobs to the payrolls in

December, exceeding forecasts

and capping a year in which

the most jobs were created

since 2015, thanks in part to tax

cuts As the labour market

tightens, wages are rising as

employers vie for workers

Average hourly earnings were

up by 3.2% year on year

The good news on jobs sent

stockmarkets soaring

follow-ing a month of turbulence

Investors were also buoyed by

assurances from Jerome

Powell, the chairman of the

Federal Reserve, that the tral bank would take a “flex-ible” approach both to interest-rate rises and winding downthe assets it accrued throughquantitative easing, a soft-ening of the remarks he madeafter the Fed’s recent meeting

cen-Negotiators from America andChina wrapped up their firstround of talks since a truce wascalled in the two countries’

trade dispute The mood at thetalks was said to be positive,with China making moreconcessions to deal with Amer-ican complaints Both sides areworking towards beating adeadline of March 1st, afterwhich America threatens toraise its tariffs significantly ifthe issues aren’t resolved

Bristol-Myers Squibbagreed

to buy Celgene, a specialist in

drugs that tackle cancer Thetakeover, worth around $90bn,

is one of the biggest ever in thepharmaceuticals industry

The announcement that Jeff

Bezosand his wife are to vorce raised questions abouthis stake in Amazon Mr Bezosmarried MacKenzie in 1993, ayear before he founded thee-commerce company Heholds a 16.3% stake in Amazon,but if Mrs Bezos gets half ofthat she could carry consider-

di-able clout The two gest shareholders each havestakes of around 5%

next-big-Amazonbecame the world’smost valuable publicly listedcompany when its marketcapitalisation at the close oftrading ended up above Micro-soft’s Microsoft had only justregained the crown from Ap-ple, which has seen its shareprice tumble over worriesabout its growth prospects

Amazon is now worth around

$800bn, much less than the

$1trn valuation it hit (alongwith Apple) in the middle oflast year

SoftBankwas reported to haveslashed the amount it wasthinking of investing in

WeWork, which providesshared-office space in 96 citiesaround the world, from $16bn

to $2bn The Japanese techconglomerate is said to havebeen nervous about making

such a large commitment,which would have been thelargest ever in a tech startup,amid a slump in technologystocks WeWork, meanwhile,rebranded itself as the WeCompany

A combustible mix

The share price of Pacific Gas

& Electric, California’s biggestenergy provider, plunged amidspeculation that it might de-clare bankruptcy The com-pany is being investigated inrelation to the outbreak ofwildfires in 2017-18, the deadli-est in the state’s history pg&ewill have to fork out billions ofdollars in damages if its powerlines are found to have contrib-uted to the infernos, even if itobserved strict safety rules

Jim Yong Kim decided to stepdown as president of the

World Bank, three years beforethe end of his second term

Following the convention thatAmerica gets to select the head

of the World Bank (and peans get to choose the leader

Euro-of the imf), Mr Kim was nated for the job by BarackObama Mr Kim’s appointmentwas the first to be challenged

nomi-by candidates from developingcountries Such oppositionmay intensify with DonaldTrump in the White House

World’s biggest companies

Source: Datastream from Refinitiv

By market capitalisation January 8th 2019, $trn

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Amazon

Microsoft Alphabet Apple Berkshire Hathaway

Leaders 9

Ahundred years ago a wave of student protests broke over

China’s great cities Desperate to reverse a century of decline,

the leaders of the May Fourth Movement wanted to jettison

Con-fucianism and import the dynamism of the West The creation of

a modern China would come about, they argued, by recruiting

“Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy”

Today the country that the May Fourth students helped shape

is more than ever consumed by the pursuit of national greatness

China’s landing of a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon on

Jan-uary 3rd, a first for any country, was a mark of its soaring

ambi-tion But today’s leaders reject the idea that Mr Science belongs in

the company of Mr Democracy On the contrary, President Xi

Jinping is counting on being able to harness leading-edge

re-search even as the Communist Party tightens its stranglehold on

politics Amid the growing rivalry between China and America,

many in the West fear that he will succeed

There is no doubting Mr Xi’s determination Modern science

depends on money, institutions and oodles of brainpower Partly

because its government can marshal all three, China is hurtling

up the rankings of scientific achievement, as our investigations

show (see Science section) It has spent many billions of dollars

on machines to detect dark matter and neutrinos, and on

insti-tutes galore that delve into everything from genomics and

quan-tum communications to renewable energy and

advanced materials An analysis of 17.2m papers

in 2013-18, by Nikkei, a Japanese publisher, and

Elsevier, a scientific publisher, found that more

came from China than from any other country

in 23 of the 30 busiest fields, such as sodium-ion

batteries and neuron-activation analysis The

quality of American research has remained

higher, but China has been catching up,

ac-counting for 11% of the most influential papers in 2014-16

Such is the pressure on Chinese scientists to make

break-throughs that some put ends before means Last year He Jiankui,

an academic from Shenzhen, edited the genomes of embryos

without proper regard for their post-partum welfare—or that of

any children they might go on to have Chinese

artificial-intelli-gence (ai) researchers are thought to train their algorithms on

data harvested from Chinese citizens with little oversight In

2007 China tested a space-weapon on one of its weather

satel-lites, littering orbits with lethal space debris

Intellectual-prop-erty theft is rampant

The looming prospect of a dominant, rule-breaking,

high-tech China alarms Western politicians, and not just because of

the new weaponry it will develop Authoritarian governments

have a history of using science to oppress their own people

Chi-na already deploys ai techniques like facial recognition to

mon-itor its population in real time The outside world might find a

China dabbling in genetic enhancement, autonomous ais or

geoengineering extremely frightening

These fears are justified A scientific superpower wrapped up

in a one-party dictatorship is indeed intimidating But the

ef-fects of China’s growing scientific clout do not all point one way

For a start, Chinese science is about much more than

weap-ons and oppression From better batteries and new treatmentsfor disease to fundamental discoveries about, say, dark matter,the world has much to gain from China’s efforts

Moreover, it is unclear whether Mr Xi is right If Chinese search really is to lead the field, then science may end up chang-ing China in ways he is not expecting

re-Mr Xi talks of science and technology as a national project.However, in most scientific research, chauvinism is a handicap.Expertise, good ideas and creativity do not respect national fron-tiers Research takes place in teams, which may involve dozens

of scientists Published papers get you only so far: conferencesand face-to-face encounters are essential to grasp the subtleties

of what everyone else is up to There is competition, to be sure;military and commercial research must remain secret But purescience thrives on collaboration and exchange

This gives Chinese scientists an incentive to observe tional rules—because that is what will win its researchers access

interna-to the best conferences, laborainterna-tories and journals, and becauseunethical science diminishes China’s soft power Mr He’s gene-editing may well be remembered not just for his ethical breach,but also for the furious condemnation he received from his Chi-nese colleagues and the threat of punishment from the authori-ties The satellite destruction in 2007 caused outrage in China It

has not been repeated

The tantalising question is how this bears on

Mr Democracy Nothing says the best scientistshave to believe in political freedom And yetcritical thinking, scepticism, empiricism andfrequent contact with foreign colleagues threat-

en authoritarians, who survive by controllingwhat people say and think Soviet Russia sought

to resolve that contradiction by giving its tists privileges, but isolating many of them in closed cities

scien-China will not be able to corral its rapidly growing scientificelite in that way Although many researchers will be satisfiedwith just their academic freedom, only a small number needseek broader self-expression to cause problems for the Commu-nist Party Think of Andrei Sakharov, who developed the Russianhydrogen bomb, and later became a chief Soviet dissident; orFang Lizhi, an astrophysicist who inspired the students leadingthe Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 When the official ver-sion of reality was tired and stilted, both stood out as seekers ofthe truth That gave them immense moral authority

Some in the West may feel threatened by China’s advances inscience, and therefore aim to keep its researchers at arm’s length.That would be wise for weapons science and commercial re-search, where elaborate mechanisms to preserve secrecy alreadyexist and could be strengthened But to extend an arm’s-lengthapproach to ordinary research would be self-defeating Collabo-ration is the best way of ensuring that Chinese science is respon-sible and transparent It might even foster the next Fang

Hard as it is to imagine, Mr Xi could end up facing a muchtougher choice: to be content with lagging behind, or to give hisscientists the freedom they need and risk the consequences Inthat sense, he is running the biggest experiment of all 7

Red moon rising

If China dominates science, should the world worry?

Leaders

10 Leaders The Economist January 12th 2019

1

The government has partially shut down Again No other

advanced democracy has government shutdowns In

Ameri-ca they have become almost routine This is the third since

Do-nald Trump became president and by far the most damaging The

others were resolved quickly; this is already the second-longest

on record It is not happening because America is in turmoil: the

country is not at war, unemployment is as low as it has ever been

It is happening because that is what the president wants

What is playing out in Washington is the denouement of a

po-litical fight (see United States section) Mr Trump was elected on

a promise to build a wall on the southern border, though Mexico

was supposed to pay for it The new Democratic majority in the

House is reluctant to give the president a victory on his

best-known policy The Senate majority leader, who

might be able to end the stand-off, is awol

House Democrats have reason on their side

Even knowledgeable immigration hawks think

spending $5.7bn on a wall would be a waste of

money The number of people crossing the

southern border illegally is at a 45-year low

Vastly more people fly into the country legally

and then overstay their visas If illegal

immigra-tion is the problem, Mr Trump should be focusing on that

Yet it is also true that $5.7bn is peanuts in budgetary terms

The federal government spends that amount every12 hours And,

despite what Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, says, there is

nothing inherently “immoral” about a wall Quite a lot of wall

and fencing was built on the southern border long before Mr

Trump became president, and with Democratic support

If this were just a fight about policy, it is clear what a deal

would look like Congress would pass a bill giving citizenship to

those who arrived in the country illegally as children,

amount-ing to about 700,000 people, and fund the wall in exchange The

president gets something he wants; Democrats get something

they want; America gets back its government

But the fight is really about Mr Trump’s authority The dent was offered just such a trade a year ago by Senate Democrats

presi-He turned it down, saying he wanted cuts to legal immigration,too Had he accepted it, the wall would by now be under con-struction, but Mr Trump is not the master dealmaker he claims to

be In December he said he would be “proud to shut down thegovernment for border security” Having picked a fight, he mustwin it or see his power diminished for the rest of his term

If politics blocks the obvious deal, Congress could pass a billfunding the entire government or, along the lines of a Democrat-

ic idea, all of it barring Homeland Security, and then override thepresident’s veto But that would take a two-thirds majority inboth houses, and so will not happen soon

Hence things may get worse before the down ends Nearly 1m federal employees areworking without pay or have been sent home Atsome point their absence will make itself felt.Federal spending on food for the poor could alsorun dry, which will hit programmes that pay forschool lunches and milk for infants The irsmay be unable to pay tax refunds on time Na-tional parks and monuments will remain un-staffed, harming businesses that depend on tourism Eventually,the pressure on Republicans in the Senate to bypass the presi-dent and cut a deal could prove irresistible

shut-There is another possibility The president could cut out gress and award himself emergency powers, allowing him tospend money on the wall as “military construction”, even as hereopens the government That would set off a legal dispute overthe limits of his authority Sadly, the prospect of such a raw exer-cise of presidential power—to say nothing of a good old fightover the law—could appeal to all Mr Trump’s worst instincts.And yet to declare an emergency where one doesn’t exist, legal ornot, would open another chapter in Washington’s degradation ofgood government.7

Con-How America’s shutdown ends

An almighty fight over presidential authority is brewing

Politics in Washington

As the deadline for Britain’s departure from the European

Union approaches, with an exit deal still elusive, mps are

haring off in every direction Parliament has descended into

guerrilla warfare, as backbenchers attempt to wrestle the

initia-tive from the execuinitia-tive (see Britain section) Meanwhile the

gov-ernment organised a pretend traffic-jam of 89 lorries on the road

to Dover, as part of preparations for a “no deal” exit All it showed

was that Britain is hopelessly unprepared for what happens next

Amid the chaos, on January 10th the leader of the opposition,

Jeremy Corbyn, stepped forward to propose a way out of the

mess Yet his speech, delivered as we went to press, merely

dou-bled down on his policy of calculated equivocation Labour willvote against the government’s draft Brexit deal on January 15th,but has no plausible explanation of how it would get a better one,nor a convincing strategy to break the impasse in Parliament ifthe deal is defeated Its abdication of responsibility makes La-bour complicit in the crisis that is about to engulf Britain And itexposes the hollowness of Mr Corbyn’s promise that, as leader,

he would hand power back to the party’s members, whose ing calls for a second referendum he continues to ignore

grow-Labour’s Brexit policy amounts to cake followed by morecake Though the party sensibly rejects the option of leaving with

Still having its cakeLabour’s Brexit cop-out makes a mockery of its promise to empower party members

Britain’s opposition

The Economist January 12th 2019 Leaders 11

1

2no deal, it insists that the withdrawal terms should provide the

“exact same benefits” as membership of the single market while

also allowing Britain to manage migration—something the eu

would never agree to In its refusal to acknowledge Brexit’s basic

trade-offs, Labour is at a stage in the argument that even the most

deluded Tory Brexiteers left behind months ago

Its tactics in Parliament are thoroughly obscure If the

gov-ernment’s deal is voted down, Labour will try to force a general

election But that is not in the party’s gift: success depends on the

support of Tory and Democratic Unionist mps, who do not want

Mr Corbyn anywhere near Downing Street The other way to

break the stalemate would be another referendum But Labour

says only that such a vote should be one “option on the table” Mr

Corbyn, a convinced Eurosceptic who campaigned only

half-heartedly to remain in 2016, has confused matters further by

ap-pearing to accept that any referendum should have an option to

remain, but also saying that “we can’t stop” Brexit

There is a certain political logic in this lack of clarity Four out

of ten Labour voters and six out of ten Labour constituencies

backed Brexit Many voters see a second referendum as a plot to

thwart the will of the people It may even be in Labour’s interests

to let the Tories drive Britain over the no-deal cliff Mr Corbyn,

whose main achievement during three decades in Parliament

was grabbing a selfie with Hugo Chávez, would not win an

elec-tion under normal circumstances The shock doctrine of no deal

might just make Britain susceptible to his disaster socialism

Yet Labour’s equivocation is at odds with the strongly pro-euviews of the half-million party members who elected him Eightout of ten of them voted to remain in 2016 Now seven out of tenwant a second referendum A party “policy forum” this weekheard calls from constituency associations around the countryfor Labour to back a second vote Even most members of Momen-tum, a hard-left activist group set up to support Mr Corbyn, wantthe party to endorse a referendum

Hearing without listening

Although all party leaders sometimes have to ignore their bers, for Mr Corbyn to go over the heads of the rank and file inthis instance reeks of hypocrisy When members re-elected himleader in 2016, Mr Corbyn said that Labour’s growing member-ship “has to be reflected much more in decision-making” Yet,over Brexit, Labour members who swallowed his promise of

mem-“people-powered politics” have been had Party managers havedone their best to keep controversial Brexit motions off the agen-

da at Labour’s conferences, in feats of stage management worthy

of Tony Blair, a predecessor he derides

More important Mr Corbyn’s refusal to listen is letting downthe country at large Britain’s democracy relies on an opposition

to provide an alternative For Labour to show that it is the ernment in waiting” that it claims, it would have to put forward abetter Brexit plan than the Tories This is a dismally low bar Butthe opposition has so far failed to clear it 7

“gov-It has for so long been a country of such unmet potential that

the scale of Pakistan’s dereliction towards its people is easily

forgotten Yet on every measure of progress, Pakistanis fare

atro-ciously More than 20m children are deprived of school Less

than 30% of women are employed Exports have grown at a fifth

of the rate in Bangladesh and India over the past 20 years And

now the ambitions of the new government under Imran Khan,

who at least acknowledges his country’s problems (see Briefing),

are thwarted by a balance-of-payments crisis If Mr Khan gets an

imf bail-out, it will be Pakistan’s 22nd The

per-sistence of poverty and maladministration, and

the instability they foster, is a disaster for the

world’s sixth-most-populous country Thanks

to its nuclear weapons and plentiful religious

zealots, it poses a danger for the world, too

Many, including Mr Khan, blame venal

poli-ticians for Pakistan’s problems Others argue

that Pakistan sits in a uniquely hostile part of

the world, between war-torn Afghanistan and implacable India

Both these woes are used to justify the power of the armed forces

Yet the army’s pre-eminence is precisely what lies at the heart of

Pakistan’s troubles The army lords it over civilian politicians

Last year it helped cast out the previous prime minister, Nawaz

Sharif, and engineer Mr Khan’s rise (as it once did Mr Sharif’s)

Since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, the army has not just

defended state ideology but defined it, in two destructive ways

The country exists to safeguard Islam, not a tolerant, prosperous

citizenry And the army, believing the country to be surrounded

by enemies, promotes a doctrine of persecution and paranoia.The effects are dire Religiosity has bred an extremism that attimes has looked like tearing Pakistan apart The state backedthose who took up arms in the name of Islam Although they ini-tially waged war on Pakistan’s perceived enemies, before longthey began to wreak havoc at home Some 60,000 Pakistanishave died at the hands of militants, most of whom come underthe Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (ttp) The army at last moved

against them following an appalling schoolmassacre in 2014 Yet even today it shelters viol-ent groups it finds useful Some leaders of theAfghan Taliban reside in Quetta The presumedinstigator of a series of attacks in Mumbai in

2008, which killed 174, remains a free man

Melding religion and state has other costs,including the harsh suppression of local identi-ties—hence long-running insurgencies in Ba-loch and Pushtun areas Religious minorities, such as the Ahma-dis, are cruelly persecuted As for the paranoia, the army is nomore the state’s glorious guardian than India is the implacablefoe Of the four wars between the two countries, all of whichPakistan lost, India launched only one, in 1971—to put an end tothe genocide Pakistan was unleashing in what became Bangla-desh Even if politicking before a coming general election ob-scures it, development interests India more than picking fights The paranoid doctrine helps the armed forces commandeer

Praetorian penuryThe impoverishment of Pakistan’s 208m citizens is a disgrace—and the army is to blame

Pakistan

12 Leaders The Economist January 12th 2019

2resources More money goes to them than on development

Worse, it has bred a habit of geopolitical blackmail: help us

fi-nancially or we might add to your perils in a very dangerous part

of the world This is at the root of Pakistan’s addiction to aid,

de-spite its prickly nationalism The latest iteration of this is

Chi-na’s $60bn investment in roads, railways, power plants and

ports, known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (cpec)

The fantasy that, without other transformations, prosperity can

be brought in from outside is underscored by cpec’s transport

links Without an opening to India, they will never fulfil their

po-tential But the army blocks any rapprochement

Mr Khan’s government can do much to improve things It

should increase its tax take by clamping down on evasion, give

independence to the monetary authority and unify the official

and black-market exchange rates Above all, it should seek to

boost competitiveness and integrate Pakistan’s economy with

the world’s All that can raise growth

Yet the challenge is so much greater By mid-century,

Paki-stan’s population will have increased by half Only sizzling rates

of economic growth can guarantee Pakistanis a decent life, andthat demands profound change in how the economy works, peo-ple are taught and welfare is conceived Failing so many, in con-trast, really will be felt beyond the country’s borders

Transformation depends on Pakistan doing away with thestate’s twin props of religion and paranoia—and with them thearmy’s power Mr Khan is not obviously the catalyst for radicalchange But he must recognise the problem He has made a start

by standing up to demagogues baying for the death of Asia Bibi, aChristian labourer falsely accused of blasphemy

However, wholesale reform is beyond the reach of any one dividual, including the prime minister Many politicians, busi-nesspeople, intellectuals, journalists and even whisky-swillinggenerals would far rather a more secular Pakistan They shouldspeak out Yes, for some there are risks, not least to their lives orliberty But for most—especially if they act together—the eliteshave nothing to lose but their hypocrisy 7

in-When apple cut its revenue estimate for the last quarter of

2018 because of unexpectedly slow sales of iPhones,

mar-kets convulsed The company’s share price, which had been

slid-ing for months, fell by a further 10% on January 3rd, the day after

the news came out Apple’s suppliers’ shares were also hit This

week Samsung, the world’s largest maker of smartphones by

vol-ume, which also sells components to other smartphone-makers,

said its sales were weaker than expected for the quarter, too

Analysts reckon that the number of smartphones sold in 2018

will be slightly lower than in 2017, the industry’s first ever annual

decline All this is terrible news for investors who had banked on

continued growth (see Business) But step back and look at the

bigger picture That smartphone sales have peaked, and seem to

be levelling off at around 1.4bn units a year, is

good news for humanity

People have voted with their wallets to make

the smartphone the most successful consumer

product in history: nearly 4bn of the 5.5bn

adults on the planet now have one And no

won-der They connect billions of people to the

inter-net’s plethora of information and services

Phones make markets more efficient,

compen-sate for poor infrastructure in developing countries and boost

growth Yes, they can be used for wasting time and spreading

dis-information But the good far outweighs the bad They might be

the most effective tool of development in existence

The slowdown does not reflect disenchantment; quite the

contrary It is the result of market saturation After a decade of

rapid adoption, there is much less scope to sell handsets to

first-time buyers as so few of them are left That hits Apple the hardest

because, despite a relatively small market share (13% of

smart-phone users), it captures almost all of the industry’s profits But

Apple’s pain is humanity’s gain The fact that the benefits of

these magical devices are now so widely distributed is

some-thing to be celebrated

What about the people who still lack a smartphone? Sales of1.4bn units a year implies 2.8bn users who replace their handsetsevery two years, or 4.2bn who replace them every three years.The reality is somewhere in between, and replacement cycles arelengthening as new models offer only marginal improvements.Many phones are used for longer than three years, often refur-bished or as hand-me-downs So even with flat sales, the longergaps between upgrades mean that overall penetration is still ris-ing People who already have phones benefit, too For all but themost obsessive gadget fans, the slowing treadmill of upgradescomes as a welcome relief

Does that mean innovation is slowing? No The latest phonescontain amazingly clever technology, such as 3d face-scanners

and cameras assisted by artificial intelligence.But as with mature technologies such as cars orwashing machines, extra bells and whistles nolonger make a deep impression

More important is that smartphones supportextra innovation in other areas Deploying appsand services on an immature platform whoseprospects are uncertain is risky; on a matureone it is not Smartphones thus provide a foun-dation for today’s innovations, like mobile payments and videostreaming, and for future ones, such as controlling “smart”home appliances or hailing robotaxis

As computers become smaller, still more personal and closer

to people’s bodies, many techies reckon that wearable devices,from smart watches to augmented-reality headsets, will be thenext big thing Even so, finding another product with the scope

of the smartphone is a tall order The smartphone retains its mise as the device that will make computing and communica-tions universal The recent slowing of smartphone sales is badnews for the industry, obviously But for the rest of humanity it is

pro-a welcome sign thpro-at pro-a trpro-ansformpro-ative technology hpro-as become pro-most universal 7

al-Bad news for Apple Good news for humanity

The maturing of the smartphone industry should be celebrated, not lamented

First Republic Private Wealth Management includes First Republic Trust Company; First Republic Trust Company of Delaware LLC; First Republic Investment Management, Inc., an SEC Registered Investment Advisor; and First Republic Securities Company, LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC.

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Investment and Advisory Products and Services are Not FDIC Insured, Not Guaranteed and May Lose Value.

M ARC M C MORRIS, Co-Founder and Director, Carrick Capital Partners

M AR JORIE M C MORRIS, Founder and Director, The Helix School Foundation

“Our broker at First Republic knows us and understands us – and that is extremely valuable.”

(855) 886-4824 | ŔTUVTGRWDNKEEQO | New York Stock Exchange symbol: FRC

14 The Economist January 12th 2019

Letters are welcome and should be addressed to the Editor at The Economist, The Adelphi Building, 1-11 John Adam Street, London WC 2 N 6 HT

Email: letters@economist.com More letters are available at:

Economist.com/letters

Letters

Nonsense on stilts?

The speciousness of animal

rights is obvious when one

considers what animals do to

each other in nature (“Do they

have rights?”, December 22nd)

When a cheetah kills a gazelle,

are rights being violated? Is a

crime being committed? Is the

gazelle’s family entitled to

damages? Jurists who find

these questions perplexing are

more likely to find clarity in

basic moral philosophy than in

case law Especially helpful is

Immanuel Kant’s grounding of

duties and rights in our

accep-tance of a universal moral law,

our capacity to recognise the

rights of others and temper our

behaviour accordingly This

trait is uniquely human

The fact that animals can

feel pain or show glimmers of

human-like cognition or

behaviour does not confer

rights Laws protecting

ani-mals are perfectly justifiable,

not because they have rights,

but because we value their

welfare and are repulsed by

acts of cruelty against them

Upholding such laws does not

require the cascade of

non-sense that would ensue from

pretending that animals have

moral or legal standing

Thinkers of a certain bent

will find it irresistible to attack

the species barrier by

decon-structing human behaviour

into purely biological or

evolu-tionary factors At the rawest

levels of description, they may

have a point Still, the fact that

“animal law” seems to focus

exclusively on how people

treat them, rather than how

animals treat themselves, is a

tacit acknowledgment of a

moral distinction

henry stephenson

O’Fallon, Illinois

I was excited to see your article

on the advancement of animal

rights Your newspaper has

frequently called for a bolder

and more radical modern

liberalism, and this is an

obvi-ous issue in need of an update

Although animal welfare in

general remains complicated

(and I for one have no desire to

give rights to clams), species

such as great apes, dolphins

and whales have demonstratedconscious awareness andemotional experience beyondreasonable doubt Their basicright to life, without cruelty orextreme confinement, should

be a no-brainer for all liberalsseeking to advance happinessand freedom I would love to

see The Economist adopt this

radical, but entirely able, position

to Hutu officers organisingadult Hutus to slaughter theirTutsi neighbours Althoughmost of those who committedgenocidal acts in Rwanda wereindeed adults, there werenonetheless some children,including the very young, whowere involved as perpetrators

The participation of dren in acts of atrocity carrieswith it certain implications,particularly when it comes tohow countries deal with suchviolent crimes Regrettably,Rwanda is not the exception

chil-To provide just one recentexample, video propagandafrom Islamic State over thepast couple of years has shownchildren as executioners inSyria International efforts toprevent and respond to suchtragic events must not neglectchildren’s involvement

dr jastine barrett

Harpenden, Hertfordshire

God blessed the seventh day

Regarding the prospect of afour-day work week, anunderstanding of the past isindeed in order, but it is toosimple to say that “organisedlabour has led the charge forreduced working hours” (Freeexchange, December 22nd)

Christian clergy and lay leaders

on both sides of the Atlanticcollaborated with labour topush for shorter hours in the19th century Rabbi Bernard

Drachman of the Jewish bath Alliance campaigned for afive-day week in America asearly as 1910 In earlier times,Puritans passed legislation toensure workers had time forrecreation And laws dating to

Sab-958 in England and 1203 inScotland restricted labour onSaturday afternoons in order toprepare for the Sabbath

Those who wish to secure afour-day work week shouldnote that the weekend as weknow it has been broughtabout not only by organisedlabour, but also by organisedreligion

karl johnson

Ithaca, New York

Illustrator’s Fouc-aulp

The illustrated calendar in The

World in 2019depicts the wrongFoucault Léon Foucault,known for his pendulum andcelebrating his 200th birthday

in September 2019, died with afull head of hair and favouredthree-piece suits over turtle-necks Pictured in his stead,with trademark bald pate andspectacles, is Michel Foucault,

a French philosopher andliterary theorist Acolytes ofFoucauldian-discourse analy-sis will toast to the centennial

But it is not too late Indeed,given the events in Europe overthe past two years, an eu-wideemergency brake of some formwould probably be welcomedthroughout the eu Now weknow so much more aboutBrexit, that concession wouldcertainly clinch a vote forRemain in a re-run Come onAngela!

andrew robson

Chailey, East Sussex

I asked my daughter, whostudies classics, to give me aGreek word for a politicalsystem where the incompe-tent, the irresponsible, thecorrupt and the con artistsemerge in political parties andmanage to win elections Theterm she gave me was

“kakistocracy” I prefer hot’s more pedestrian and lesscacophonic term: “chumo-cracy” (December 22nd)

of incomprehensible jargon,and the recommendationswere delivered in clearly writ-ten prose, instead of a baffling45-slide PowerPoint deck.Nevertheless I’ll look for-ward this year to a progressreport on how things are goingwith outsourcing the rdo(reindeer delivery operations),changes to the ceca (chimney-enabled customer access)process, and the nonvt(naughty-or-nice verificationtransformation) project I amsure Bartleby’s imaginaryconsultancy firm will be happy

to help with these initiatives(for a juicy fee and LaplandAirways expenses, of course).nathaniel kent

London

Surely Bartleby’s “Yule sity” would be a member of theHolly League

Univer-charlie wilson

Oxford

Executive focus

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to securing the macroeconomic and financial stability in the ASEAN+3 region.

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Executive focus

The Economist January 12th 2019 17

1

fam-ilies pressed through the iron gates of a

factory that knocks out trainers in

Rawpindi towards the end of last year In the

al-leyway behind it the factory-owner was

dishing out biryani It was the Prophet

Mu-hammad’s birthday Children flocked

around great steaming pots, as employees

replaced those emptied with full ones In

all, the owner said, he would dole out a

tonne of rice and 800kg of beef The

mes-saging was hardly subliminal: this boss is

magnanimous, god-sent

For workers across the country feasts

such as this may be welcome But many say

they would prefer a pay rise A squeeze on

workers has been made worse by the

ef-fects of rising interest rates and a fall in the

Pakistani rupee in the past year of nearly

30% The economy, which a year ago was

growing at 5.8% annually, has slowed

sharply The cost of food, electricity and

clean water has shot up Factory workers in

Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city and

indus-trial heartland, say that, earning only

22,000 rupees ($160) a month, they can

barely make ends meet Life was alwaysprecarious It has now grown more so

Afaq Hussain has worked in the samebackstreet shoe workshop hammering onsoles for 32 years Last year the cobbler andhis wife were struck down with dengue fe-ver In municipalities with tolerable ad-ministration, the disease is largely avoid-able—a question of draining the pools ofstagnant water in which the mosquitoesthat spread the disease may breed Karachidoes not have such administration MrHussain had to fork out 3,000 rupees fortreatment “People are scared all the time,”

he says “If they are sick, they think: whowill pay?”

Rarely the bosses Few employers vide more than the stingiest health care Bytheir own admission, they see malingererseverywhere Unions are weak, when theyexist at all Good jobs even for skilled la-bourers are hard to find One Karachi tex-tile boss, who employs more than 500 peo-ple, puts it bluntly “They get a job and theydon’t like to make trouble,” he says “Afterall, where else are they going to get work?”

pro-In this context, the bosses’ nalling on the Prophet’s birthday is cheap.Yet spare a thought for businesses, too.They make money only in the face of steepodds, or with help from friends in highplaces In Karachi a cotton-mill-owner em-ploying 250 workers, a big rice exporter, theowner of a shoe factory and the head of afamily-run chain of small chemist shops(drugstores) all said that rising costs ofelectricity and water were extreme head-aches The drugstore boss complains that,with no electricity from the grid for up to 16hours a day, the use of diesel generatorsdoubles his energy bills The mill-ownersays higher prices for power and water haveadded 2 rupees a metre to the cost of pro-ducing his cloth, wiping out his thin mar-gins The businessmen complain that theyare losing out to competitors not just inChina but in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lan-

virtue-sig-ka The shoe-factory boss has just laid offhalf of his 70 workers

Hard business

The damning fact is that, even when nomic growth ran at a better clip for fiveyears and a handful of new power stations

eco-at last amelioreco-ated the country’s chronicenergy shortages, the real value of exportsfailed to grow Today few businessmen areconfident that exports can pick up even fol-lowing the currency’s devaluation

Asking what the government is doing tohelp elicits hollow laughs In parched Kara-chi, there is anger that the government

Tales of self-harm

K A R A CH I A N D R A WA LP I N D I

Why Imran Khan will struggle to make life better for Pakistanis

Briefing Pakistan

18 Briefing Pakistan The Economist January 12th 2019

2

1

cannot even keep water flowing With

wa-ter mains often sucked dry by politically

connected mafias, employers and

consum-ers are forced to pay through the nose for

water from tankers driven by those same

gangs As for bureaucracy and government

corruption, it seems to be getting worse

Port officials frequently demand bribes

from the drugstore boss for importing

beauty products The rice exporter lists 14

separate agencies that insist on receiving

bribes, ranging from civil defence to health

and safety

Imran to the crease

It is against this backdrop that Imran Khan

and the party he founded, Pakistan

Teh-reek-e-Insaf (pti), came to power after

elections in July The 66-year-old former

playboy and cricketing superstar, who was

once married to a British-Jewish socialite,

has had something of a remake as a devout

upholder of Islam That has drawn rural

conservatives to a movement that found its

early support among urban and often

secu-lar middle classes It sits oddly with those

familiar with Mr Khan’s hedonistic

procliv-ities, or his well-dressed crowd of

hangers-on—people who, as one political observer

who knows them puts it, “either want to

fuck him or fuck like him.”

Yet there is little doubting Mr Khan’s

personal honesty, or the pride he evinces in

the two cancer hospitals he has founded,

the first in 1994 His own living has long

been presumed to be underwritten by

benefactors Though hardly all homespun

frugality, Mr Khan is not deep-pocketed

like members of Pakistan’s usual political

clans Nor does he represent a

self-perpet-uating dynasty, as they do This is part of

his appeal For years he has railed against

nepotism and political corruption He won

national office at last thanks to his

anti-graft message finding a wide audience

among disenchanted Pakistanis

That and help, behind the scenes, from

the army’s top brass The army has always

played an outsized role in public life One

of its critics, Husain Haqqani, a former

Pakistani ambassador to America now atthe Hudson Institute in Washington, dc,writes in his recent book, “ReimaginingPakistan”, that not only does the army setitself up as the protector of the national in-terest, it also “defines national interest au-tonomously of elected civilians” and itdoes not “countenance any interpretation

of national interest other than the one it stitutionally advances.”

in-Key tenets of the state ideology the armyhas fostered are an Islamist religiosity; adoctrine of insecurity, tipping into para-noia, resting upon divining enemies cease-lessly at work to undermine Pakistan (nonemore so than nefarious India); and thearmy’s own praetorian role in the Pakistanistate The country’s nuclear doctrine—

Pakistan has possessed nuclear weaponssince 1998—flows from, and windsthrough, all three tenets So does a longpropensity, striking in a state with such aprickly nationalism, to play up its geopolit-ical importance in return for foreign aid

Mr Khan, for all that he paints himself

as a populist outsider, has become a vocalupholder of these tenets, and in return thearmy backed his rise First the generalswent after the prime minister since 2013,Nawaz Sharif, and his Pakistan MuslimLeague-Nawaz (pml-n) They deemed himinsufficiently biddable and last year en-couraged what was in effect a judicial coup

The generals then strong-armed the pressand television to back Mr Khan, while shut-ting off that oxygen for Mr Sharif

Nearer the election the generals helpedpliant politicians with large local follow-ings switch sides and bring their “votebanks” with them On election night theyhelped rig pti victories in a dozen or morecrucial seats The cowed media may men-tion none of this Some analysts even think

it an acceptable evil: at last a civilian ernment that does not rile the army can roll

gov-up its sleeves and get economic stuff done

That is certainly Mr Khan’s intention

He campaigned on a promise of what hecalls “Islamic welfare” There is little speci-ficity to the phrase But it is an appeal toPakistan’s downtrodden and a welcomerecognition of the price of poverty and so-cial injustice among several tens of mil-lions of Pakistanis at the bottom of the pile

By the un’s measure of human ment, Pakistan ranks the lowest in SouthAsia Pakistan accounts for one in every 13

develop-of the world’s unschooled, and most develop-ofthem are girls Some 21m Pakistanis have

no access to clean water

“Social protection” is a phrase on thelips of many of the new government’smembers In the planning ministry theparliamentary secretary, Kanwal Shauzab,

is a social scientist who did her fieldwork

in caste- and class-based discriminationagainst women in the southern part ofPunjab province, Pakistan’s most popu-lous She and Western-educated female ad-visers eagerly lay out what they intend toaccomplish in terms of human-develop-ment goals—reducing poverty, improvingeducation, providing sanitation and cleanwater The challenges are immense, andbegin with a palpable lack of zeal in theministry’s adjacent, somnolent offices

The buckle on the belt and road

Yet Mr Khan’s aspirations have careenedinto Pakistan’s immediate challenge: a full-blown balance-of-payments crisis Thecountry has an addiction to these, especial-

ly after budget-busting elections But thiscrisis has a particular feature, the influence

of China The previous government under

Mr Sharif came to office just as President XiJinping was laying out his grand plan to useChina’s surplus dollars and excess capacity

to create a web of globe-girdling ture, now known as the Belt and Road Ini-tiative (bri) The China-Pakistan Eco-nomic Corridor (cpec) is easily the biggestpart of the initiative

infrastruc-China has strategic as well as economicreasons to want to connect its landlockedhinterlands to the Indian Ocean Hugelyambitious plans were drawn up for powerplants, roads, industrial zones and the de-velopment of Gwadar, until recently a flea-pit on the Arabian Sea, into a modern port.Over $60bn in Chinese investment andloans was promised As the projects got un-der way, the tide of money pumped up do-mestic demand, inflated a property bubble,pushed up the value of the currency and led

to an unsustainable surge in imports Thecurrent-account deficit was 1% of gdp in

2015 By 2018 it had widened to over 5% ofgdp Foreign-exchange reserves have fall-

en sharply, previously brisk economicgrowth has slowed leaving Pakistan’s tocontinue trailing behind its neighbours(see chart) Inflation and interest rates arerising, too

Hyderabad Gwadar

Karachi

Quetta

Islamabad

Lahore AFGHANISTAN

TRIBAL AREAS

new roads

China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

Solar Hydropower

Sub continent

Source: IMF *Estimate

GDP, 2000=100

50 100 150 200 250 300 350

20 Briefing Pakistan The Economist January 12th 2019

damned if he was going cap-in-hand to the

imf, turning to Pakistan’s all-weather

friends, Saudi Arabia and China, instead

Saudi’s rulers opened the chequebook only

after an international furore over the

mur-der of Jamal Khashoggi made them eager to

improve their image They have promised

$6bn in loans and deferred payments for

oil The United Arab Emirates is offering

something similar As for China, on Mr

Khan’s first trip as prime minister to

Beij-ing in November, he had none of the firm

promises of financial aid that he had hoped

for And China dashed hopes for a

renegoti-ation of cpec deals—which are, after all,

commercial arrangements with

state-owned enterprises, not with the state

So Mr Khan has no choice but to turn to

the imf to bail out Pakistan, as it has done a

dozen times since 1988 Pakistan hopes for

up to $12bn In return the imf is asking for

action such as raising energy prices,

clamping down on tax evasion and

re-vamping the export sector The

govern-ment has not won a deal as swiftly as its

members had predicted Negotiators hope

for an agreement early this year

Pakistan can probably dig itself out of

its immediate hole, helped in part by recent

falls in the oil price—it is an energy

import-er The new finance minister, Asad Umar, a

former businessman, says that money

from Saudi Arabia and China solves his

cash-flow problems for the coming year

An imf deal would buy another couple of

years beyond that for a sweeping reform

programme Mr Umar claims it is less

about the final sums disbursed than about

securing a new “strategic” direction that

would make this bail-out Pakistan’s “last

imf programme”

Mr Umar gives the impression of trying

to fix a vast number of things at once But

three areas are a priority, he says The state

raises a pitiful sum from taxes: only 10.5%

of gdp Meanwhile, a thriving black market

in foreign exchange helps the siphoning of

ill-gotten wealth abroad So clamping

down on tax evasion is a must Much hope

is placed on technology coming to the

res-cue Mr Umar claims early success in using

data trawls to spot tax dodgers, identifying

them by spending patterns, for instance

The second area is helping Pakistan’s

beleaguered exporters But the task is huge:

in the past four decades Pakistani exports

have grown only one-fifth as fast as India’s

or Bangladesh’s Third, Mr Umar promises

to overhaul the state sector, taking

state-owned enterprises from the purview of

ministers and bureaucrats, for whom they

represent tempting targets for plunder and

misrule, and into a professionally run

holding company

Mr Umar’s aims are commendable Yet

one topic in need of urgent debate remains

out of bounds: cpec itself As Atif Mian, an

economist at Princeton University, argues,sustaining high imports, financed by ex-ternal borrowing, is magical thinking Suc-cess cannot be bought from outside with-out concentrating on domestic product-ivity growth and exports cpec causes thecurrency to become overvalued and Paki-stan to become less competitive globally It

is, Mr Mian says, Pakistan’s version of

“Dutch disease”

And the damage is significant even fore posing the question of servicing dol-lar-denominated Chinese debt To date,cpec has helped increase Pakistan’s exter-nal debt by half, to $97bn (32% of gdp),while debt-service costs outstrip the bud-get for development There are legitimatequestions too about the nature of the dealssigned with China No doubt Pakistanneeds Chinese coal-fired power plants Butthe electricity tariffs Chinese investors areguaranteed for years look exceptionallyhigh when solar power in sunny Pakistanoffers a cheaper long-run alternative

be-As for the loans China has made in turn for Chinese-built roads and the like,the interest rates Pakistan is charged areusually competitive and no one else wouldlend Pakistan the money But without opentenders for contracts, the concern, as MrMian puts it, is that Chinese companiescharge $100 for equipment but installpoorer kit that is worth, say, $80, a trickthat sharply raises the cost of capital

re-There are hints that the establishment

is having second thoughts about cpec Itmight explain why the army, behind thescenes—and now perhaps Mr Khan him-self—are working hard to mend fenceswith America Yet openly criticising cpecwas taboo under the previous governmentand remains so Mr Mian describes a “blan-ket ban” on any objective assessment Mis-givings about cpec are almost entirely ab-sent in the press In private Pakistanijournalists explain why To question cpec

is to conspire against the national est—which the army holds the monopoly

inter-of defining The sanction for media outfitsthat cross the army is closure

Sensitivity over cpec is understandablefor another reason China is Pakistan’sclosest diplomatic and military friend.China helped it become a nuclear state andacts as a counterweight to India, the oldfoe, as well as America, with which Paki-stan has troubled relations Both sides in-sist that the “Sino-Pak” relationship is, inthe words of an old phrase, “higher than theHimalayas, deeper than the ocean, stron-ger than steel and sweeter than honey” Butany questions about it would be embar-rassing The generals, with fingers in manypies, are surely keen to hide how hand-somely they are making out from cpec.The cpec taboo undermines the Pan-glossian argument that, now a civilian gov-ernment is at last aligned with the armedforces in Pakistan, much can be accom-plished As Mr Haqqani points out, an ob-session with national security makes ithard to propose economic solutions to eco-nomic problems

Restraint of trade

The economic boom to make that ment worthwhile can transpire only withvibrant trade ties with Pakistan’s neigh-bours, India above all Yet obstructing suchties is the country’s national-security pri-ority, in the generals’ eyes There are otherways in which the case is undermined Forall Mr Khan’s integrity, the pti and its allieshave plenty of sleazy politicians and busi-nessmen on the make

invest-A more subtle undermining concernsthe case of Mr Mian, the economist fromPrinceton On coming to office, Mr Khanappointed him to his economic advisorycouncil But then Islamist parties whichthe army had once fostered insisted on hisdismissal on the grounds that he is an Ah-madi The Ahmadis are a sect who revereboth the Prophet Muhammad and a 19th-century messiah They are often persecut-

ed Indeed, the constitution stipulates thatthey are not really Muslims (which they saythat they are), and mandates discrimina-tion against them Mr Khan gave in to pres-sure and sought the resignation of MrMian, a world-class economist who onlywants to improve the lot of ordinary Paki-stanis Thus, once again, does Pakistan

Plenty of guns, not much butter

Missing map? Sadly, India censors maps that show the current effective border, insisting instead that only its full territorial claims be shown It is more intolerant on this issue than either China or Pakistan Indian readers will therefore be deprived

of the map on the second page of this story Unlike their government, we think our Indian readers can face political reality Those who want to see an accurate depiction of the various territorial claims can do so using our interactive map at

Economist.com/asianborders

The Economist January 12th 2019 21

1

that the best time to release bad news is

late on Friday afternoons Hacks and their

editors have one foot out of the door;

no-body wants to put their weekend plans on

hold to start a new story America has

re-cently discovered that a similar rule holds

true for government shutdowns: if it

hap-pens just before Christmas, when federal

workers are already on holiday and nobody

is paying much attention to the news, then

the waste and pain will not seep into the

headlines for a couple of weeks

Now that quiet period has passed

Rub-bish is piling up in national parks; farmers

cannot get their loans processed;

food-stamp programmes are running out of

funds; tax refunds may be delayed; and

hundreds of thousands of federal workers

remain either stuck at home or forced to

work without pay To reopen the

govern-ment President Donald Trump demands

$5.7bn for his border wall Nancy Pelosi,

who presides over the most polarised

House of Representatives in recent

memo-ry, does not want to give it to him

If this shutdown, the third in the pastyear, stretches into next week it will be-come the longest in American history Howdid the world’s most powerful governmentbecome so dysfunctional? The roots of thisshutdown lie in two places: an attorney-general’s memo written in 1980, and MrTrump’s 2016 campaign

Before 1980, federal agencies often erated during funding gaps (meaning be-fore Congress had appropriated the re-quired money) They tried to stay lean, toavoid going too far into the red, but rea-

op-soned that Congress did not intend to closethem; it merely had not yet got around toformally providing their funding

In 1980, however, Benjamin Civiletti,then the attorney-general, opined that theonly way that agencies could avoid violat-ing the Antideficiency Act—which forbidsthe government from spending money thathas not been appropriated—is to cease op-erating until Congress funds them (theAct’s authority stems from a constitutionalprohibition against the governmentspending public money unless the people,via their representatives, have authorised

it to do so) The only exceptions concerned

“the safety of human life or the protection

of property”, which exempts active-dutymilitary, who are still working and gettingpaid, and federal airport-security workers,who are working but not getting paid

Mr Civiletti’s determination madefunding gaps less frequent They were nolonger technical and ignorable glitches;they became, in effect, temporary closureorders, which made them costly and em-barrassing But it also turned governmentfunding into a hostage-taking mechanism

In late 1995, the Republican-controlledHouse, led by Newt Gingrich, produced aspending bill with deep cuts to social-wel-fare programmes that were anathema tothen-president Bill Clinton Mr Clinton re-fused to sign it, and the government shutdown—first for six days, and then for 21.The shutdown ended when Congress and

24 MeToo and conservatism

25 The city of back-handers

26 Lexington: John Kasich

Also in this section

22 United States The Economist January 12th 2019

deal with modest spending cuts and tax

hikes In effect, Republicans caved

Although Mr Gingrich received most of

the blame for the shutdown (and Mr

Clin-ton was easily re-elected), it arguably

pushed the president’s agenda rightward

Still, the opprobrium resulting from the

government ceasing to function for nearly

a month was sufficient for Mr Gingrich

never to try it again

Another generation of Republican

in-surgents tried in 2013, when they insisted,

as a condition of passing a budget, that the

Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s

signa-ture achievement, be delayed or defunded

That shutdown, which lasted 16 days, also

ended with Republicans surrendering

without getting what they demanded But

neither did they pay a political cost; the

next year they took control of the Senate

Like these two previous shutdowns,

this one is Republican-led Unlike the past

two, however, it stems from the president

trying to impose his will on Congress,

rath-er than the invrath-erse Absent Mr Trump’s

in-sistence on $5.7bn for his wall, a spending

bill could easily pass both houses of

Con-gress “This is not a hard shutdown,” says

Michael Steel, who was a spokesman for

John Boehner, the House speaker during

the 2013 shutdown “Put any number of

bi-partisan senators in a room with a cocktail

napkin and they could figure this out.”

Instead of senators huddled around a

cocktail napkin, America was treated to Mr

Trump and Democratic congressional

leaders making their cases on prime-time

tv Mr Trump called the border “a pipeline

for vast quantities of illegal drugs”, though

most come through ports of entry and a

wall would not stop them The number of

migrants apprehended at the border roselate last year, but from record lows Overallnumbers are far below where they were adecade ago If there is a crisis, it is in Ameri-ca’s creepingly slow-moving asylum sys-tem Yet that is a far less compelling argu-ment than Mr Trump’s assertion thatforeigners are sneaking across the border

to behead American citizens, and that theonly way to stop them is to build a big wall

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader inthe senate, reiterated his party’s offer: con-tinue negotiating over border security andpass bills to reopen the other shutteredparts of the government

Most Senate Republicans would

happi-ly accept this deal Some who are up for election in two years, such as Cory Gardner

re-of Colorado and Susan Collins re-of Maine,have begun pushing for a resolution with-out a wall Even John Cornyn of Texas, themajority whip until recently, backed thesort of hybrid solution—physical barriers,along with technology, drones and morepersonnel—that Democrats could support

But far more Republican senators face election in solidly Republican states nextyear, and they fear a primary challengefrom the right more than losing to a Demo-crat Hence Mitch McConnell, the Senatemajority leader, vowed not to bring for-ward a bill that the president does not sup-port, despite having called shutdowns “afailed policy” in 2014, when he also urgedthe then-Democratic Senate to set “nation-

re-al priorities [rather than] simply waiting onthe White House to do it.”

For his part, Mr Trump feels he holds awinning hand Immigration hawkishnesshelped propel him to victory in 2016 and re-mains crucial to satisfying his base

Though a recent Reuters poll showed thatmost Americans blame him for the shut-down (perhaps because he accepted blame

in a televised interview), earlier pollingdata suggest that may fade by 2020 Duringthe two previous extended shutdowns, ap-proval ratings for the incumbent presi-dents both fell, but they rebounded rela-tively quickly Yet that pattern may nothold if this shutdown lasts months

Members of both parties fear that MrTrump will reach not for Mr Schumer’s sol-ution but a more drastic one: invokingemergency powers to circumvent Congressand build a wall using previously autho-rised military funds That would set a pre-cedent that terrifies conservative senators:

what is to stop a future Democratic dent from doing the same thing to dealwith climate change or guns?

presi-It would also precipitate a genuine stitutional crisis and a fierce court battle

con-Perversely, that could suit Mr Trump well

He may not get his wall, but he would get tokeep fighting for it, and he would still haveuseful enemies—judges, Democrats—toblame for it having not been built yet.7

Source: VoteView.com

Afford-able Care Act, better known as

Obama-care, has been a party piñata for the

Repub-licans They keep bashing it from all sides,trying to tear it apart But one of its provi-sions was embraced and even bolstered bythe Trump administration: as of January 1sthospitals are obliged to post online thestandard charges for all of their services The idea is, in theory, laudable Patients,who are otherwise mostly blind as to whattheir care will cost until the bill arrives,would shop around for lower prices Thebiggest winners at first would be theroughly 10% of Americans who do not have

Hospital prices are now public That is unlikely to push them down

Health economics

Shopping for a Caesarean

$10,000 baby

Source: International Federation of Health Plans

Average price of birth delivery

Private sector, 2015 or latest, $’000

United States Switzerland Australia France Britain Spain

1

The Economist January 12th 2019 United States 23

1

health insurance and the 43% covered by

cheap plans that require them to pay

sub-stantial amounts towards medical bills

be-fore their insurance kicks in (known as

high-deductible plans) As patients flock to

competitors who charge less, hospitals

would cut prices to win them

back—bring-ing America’s exorbitant prices closer to

those in other rich countries (see chart)

In reality, none of this is likely to

hap-pen The price lists that are being

pub-lished are of little practical use for patients

Each private insurer negotiates discounted

rates with each hospital, in contracts that

usually neither side is allowed to make

public An analysis of payments for

un-complicated births in California in 2011, for

example, found that discounted prices

paid by insurers were, on average, 37% of

hospitals’ list prices

Uninsured patients, who are most

like-ly to pay the list prices, face a

headscratch-er: working out which of the thousands of

items on the price lists, with descriptions

like “echo tee guid tcat icar/vessel

structural intvn”, might apply for their

treatment Even if they manage to nail

down the big-ticket items, they will still be

missing a major portion of the final bill,

be-cause the rates charged by physicians,

radi-ologists and other specialists are not

in-cluded in hospitals’ lists To dispel

confusion hospitals are posting, alongside

their price lists, disclaimers and videos

ex-plaining that they are useless

The predicament of patients trying to

get an idea of what something like a big

op-eration might cost them is laid bare by a

study conducted in 2016, in which

re-searchers called 120 hospitals posing as a

grand-daughter looking for information

on the cash price of hip replacement for her

grandmother Only eight of the hospitals

were able to provide a full price, inclusive

of physician charges; 53 were unable to

provide any estimate

Nearby hospitals often have widely

dif-ferent list prices, even for things as

stan-dard as an x-ray or an aspirin tablet Might

some hospitals lower prices when they see

what their competitors are charging? That,

too, seems unlikely Most states already

re-quire hospitals to publish some of their

prices When prices become public, they

may go up, not down, says Renee Hsia of

the University of California in San

Francis-co Antitrust textbooks teach that

transpa-rency can push up prices because firms

know that discounting might trigger an

immediate price war rather than boost

their market share

America’s health care market poses

par-ticular challenges Hospitals set prices

us-ing various multipliers and formulas that

are often outdated and not linked to costs

or quality—a process that the late Uwe

Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton

Uni-versity, once described as “chaos behind a

veil of secrecy” Studies of people in deductible plans show that when they haveaccess to prices they reduce their use of ser-vices but do not pay less for them Patientsusually go for tests to wherever their doc-tors refer them

high-The fallacy of pinning hopes on policiessuch as the new price-transparency rule isthat patients in America are viewed as con-sumers who can easily shop around, ratherthan people who are unwell and under du-ress, says Dr Hsia But knowing in advancehow much their care will cost would be astep forward.7

pon-der the fate of Tyler Barriss On January30th a federal judge will sentence the Cali-fornian to at least 20 years in prison fordozens of hoax 911 emergency calls, includ-ing one which resulted in the police inWichita, Kansas fatally shooting an inno-cent and unarmed young father But while

Mr Barriss’s mischief-making is over, atleast for a spell, police swat (special weap-ons and tactics) teams, which make use ofmilitary hardware and techniques, can ex-pect plenty more “swatting” calls, as bogusreports of violence have become known

Due to the lack of a uniform reporting

cate-gory, no nationwide tally exists But KevinKolbye, a former fbi swatting expert who isnow assistant police chief of Arlington,Texas, reckons annual swatting incidentshave climbed from roughly 400 in 2011 tomore than 1,000 today

Part of this increase can be chalked up tosmartphone apps and online services thatmask a caller’s location and identity, di-minishing the risk of the swatter beingcaught Another factor is the popularity ofstreaming videogame play to an online au-dience A swatter who targets a rival gamerduring a streaming session can watch thevictim’s reaction as his room is stormed bycops in tactical gear, weapons drawn Thevoyeuristic frisson thus obtained seems tohave outclassed the thrill of generating anews report of a swat raid on a celebrity’shome, an approach that was more common

in years past (Stars subjected to a swattinginclude Justin Bieber, Russell Brand, TomCruise, Miley Cyrus, Clint Eastwood andParis Hilton.)

Most swatters, then, are seeking kicks

or the settling of a score Some, however,are pursuing profit Drug dealers some-times swat rivals, hoping their unexpectedbrush with the law will end up reducingcompetition, says Robert Pusins, who untilrecently worked for the sheriff’s office inBroward County, Florida

The risk of violence seems to rise in theswatting of victims who have not commit-ted a crime In the confusion of a raid, alaw-abiding citizen is more likely to reckonthat his home must be under attack bythugs Thus unnerved, he is more likely tobrandish and use a weapon, which maydraw police fire, Mr Kolbye says During theresponse to a fake bomb threat in 2015, the

24 United States The Economist January 12th 2019

shot four times by a resident who,

investi-gators said, was not charged because he

be-lieved the intrusion was criminal (A

ballis-tic vest saved the officer’s life.)

Of late, swatters seem to have become

better at making their 911 calls appear to

come from near the supposed scene of the

crime, says Carrie Braun, spokeswoman for

the sheriff’s office in Orange County,

Cali-fornia But even fishy reports of violence

must be treated as real—“we will always

re-spond,” she says All this hits taxpayers

hard The bill for a swat raid complete with

bomb squad and paramedics can run into

six figures, according to the Michigan

As-sociation of Police

More than a few swatters end up

brag-ging online, an unwise move To make

prosecuting them easier, Congresswoman

Katherine Clark, a Massachusetts

Demo-crat, is pushing a bill in Congress that

would make swatting a federal crime In

2016, not long after she had introduced the

initial version of the legislation, police

with rifles appeared outside her house near

Boston A caller had said that a shooter was

more than older women who voted for

Donald Trump They have gone from barely

worrying about false accusations of sexual

assault, with only 8% agreeing in

Novem-ber 2017 that these were worse than

unre-ported assaults, to 42% saying so,

accord-ing to two polls conducted for The

Economist by YouGov, a pollster They are

now the most likely group to agree that a

man who harassed a woman 20 years ago

should keep his job, and that a woman who

complains about harassment causes more

problems than she solves

Two things stand out First, even

though Americans on average, and

Repub-licans in particular, have become more

negative about #MeToo over the past year,

the change among this particular group is

spectacular (chart) Second, a generational

gap now yawns between Republican

wom-en who are over 65 and those under 30, the

cohort least hostile to #MeToo within the

Republican Party

One obvious difference between the

two groups is that many of the over-65s

have grown-up sons In 2018 some of them

fell off their pedestals as hundreds of men

were publicly named and shamed over ual misconduct allegations Many morefeared that “some lady” from the pastcould, with one accusation, destroy themand their family This lady became person-ified in Christine Blasey Ford, when in Sep-tember 2018 she accused Brett Kavanaugh

sex-of sexual assault, threatening to derail hisnomination to the Supreme Court All thishelped fuel a backlash against #MeToo, andnot just among men Many Twitter threads

on #HimToo, the hashtag about false sations, were posted by worried mothers

accu-“We saw the split among Republicanwomen widen around the Kavanaugh hear-ings A lot of the rhetoric illustrated thegenerational gap,” remembers Jennifer Pie-rotti Lim, from Republican Women for Pro-gress, a campaign group “There’s a feelingamongst that generation that a little lightsexual assault is no big deal For women ofour generation that’s hard to understand.”

Carrie Lukas of the Independent en’s Forum, a conservative advocacy group,recognises that the movement has done inencouraging people to speak out againstprominent men who “people have knownwere problems”, but wonders whether ithas gone too far “I don’t think the mantra

Wom-‘believe all women’ is sufficient,” she says

“Men need to be able to make mistakes, andhave conversations with women and not bewalking on eggshells.”

Yet the biggest split on #MeToo, as withany question pollsters ask about gender isnot between genders or generations but be-tween political affiliations, says JulianaHorowitz from the Pew Research Centre

Democrats have barely changed their views

on #MeToo over the past year, even as publicans have grown more sceptical Nosplit separates the generation of Nancy Pe-losi and Elizabeth Warren from younger fe-male Democrats In fact boomer Clinton-voting women have increased their sup-

Re-port for #MeToo over the past year

The partisan gender gap has alreadywidened In 2016 Hillary Clinton won 54%

of women voters; in the 2018 mid-terms59% of women voted for Democrats Re-publicans appear unconcerned: a recentpoll found that 71% of likely primary votersexpressed no concern that only 13 of theparty’s 200 House members are women(the lowest number in 25 years) and 60%said nothing had to be done to recruit morefemale candidates

One explanation of this partisan gap isthat it reflects a difference of opinion overwhat true feminism is Some conservativewomen resist what they see as specialtreatment for women as vaguely patronis-ing There is another explanation, too MsPierotti Lim of Republican Women for Pro-gress remembers campaigning in Wiscon-sin and Michigan in 2016 and being aston-ished by the number of older women whowere afraid to even talk to her and who lettheir (Republican-voting) husbands fill intheir ballots.7

Republican women over 65 have

become the most anti-#MeToo group

#MeToo and conservatism

Sister sledging

Her too

Hey ladies

Source: YouGov *1,500 Americans surveyed

United States, “men who sexually harassed women

20 years ago should keep their jobs today”

% of adults agreeing*, by age

30-64 Over 65 Female

Male

voters

Clinton voters Sep 2018

Under 30

30-64 Over 65

Under 30

The Economist January 12th 2019 United States 25

and a scowl In his breast pocket he

folds a handkerchief, colourful and silky

For the past half century, since 1969,

Ed-ward Burke has run his fief, the 14th Ed-ward, a

gritty district in south Chicago, as an

old-school political boss No other councillor—

alderman, say Chicagoans—has amassed

such clout Since 1983, save a couple of

years, he chaired the city’s powerful

fi-nance committee A canny, financially

lit-erate figure, he also oversaw a

compensa-tion scheme for public workers, doling out

$100m a year with little oversight

Mr Burke was a fixture even as mayors

came and went The ex-cop played piano,

wrote local histories and profited

hand-somely by running a legal office that

helped corporate clients appeal against

their city tax bills (Donald Trump, for a

time, was a client) He was a noted figure,

lauded for adopting a child from a deprived

neighbourhood Yet if you asked about

Chi-cago’s machine—the system of patronage

jobs, political donations by businesses

seeking permits, corporate tax deals cut

over lunches in clubs—his was the first

name that sprang to everyone’s lips

Now, most likely, Mr Burke is done The

fbi lodged a 37-page criminal complaint

against him on January 2nd He denies all

wrongdoing But for much of 2017 the feds

bugged his phone, recording about 40 calls

a day They also trailed him That

excep-tionally long period suggests they showed

a judge strong cause for suspicion Agents

raided his office late last year They accuse

him of attempted extortion, saying he

withheld a permit for a restaurant owner to

renovate, while demanding a pay-off He

could face 20 years in prison

He is the biggest fish caught in recent

city history The fbi alleges that he pressed

the restaurant chain—reportedly Burger

King—to hire his private office to handle all

its tax affairs in Illinois The firm resisted,

but it did agree to serve up a whopper of a

$10,000 political donation One executive

spoke of “reading between the lines”,

grasping that he needed to pay to avoid

trouble from powerful Mr Burke The cash

reportedly went to Toni Preckwinkle, the

front-runner (until now) in the mayoral

race, to be held next month She says the

campaign rejected it, so did nothing

wrong And she is returning a big pot of

money Mr Burke raised separately for her

For years Chicago’s political elite lauded

Mr Burke and took his donations, despitehis dubious past He co-led a racist cam-paign to stymie reforms by the city’s firstblack mayor, Harold Washington, in the1980s Previous federal investigations into

“ghosts” who padded city payrolls hadnabbed people close to Mr Burke

Now he is alone Rahm Emanuel, themayor, has stripped him of his committeepost and promises an audit of his work MsPreckwinkle, who runs the DemocraticParty in Cook County, has booted him from

a party post Other aldermen declare selves shocked, shocked “We are not allcrooks,” said one, plaintively, this week

them-Burke’s little platoon

Politics in Illinois encourages conflicts ofinterest that would be criminal elsewhere

“The real crime is what is legal,” goes acommon Chicago refrain Mr Burke couldwork as a public official, setting policies forcompanies, while also touting for businesswith the same clients to submit appealsagainst the city A predecessor on the fi-nance committee did the same MichaelMadigan, speaker of the statehouse, haslong done something similar

Criminality among the city’s 50 men is also astonishingly common DickSimpson of the University of Illinois, inChicago, estimates that there have been

alder-200 councillors since 1969, when Mr Burkefirst got elected Of them, 33 have been im-prisoned for bribery, extortion, fraud or

more One notorious catch, Edward “FastEddie” Vrdolyak, is an ex-boss of the Demo-cratic Party in Chicago Recently other offi-cials, including an ex-boss of Chicago’sschools who pocketed $2m in kickbacks,have been imprisoned

“We are the most corrupt metropolitanregion in America,” says Mr Simpson.Studs Terkel, a shrewd author, once de-clared Chicago is really the “most theatri-cally corrupt” city in America Nothing isdone by halves The Justice Departmentsays it recorded 1,642 federal public corrup-tion convictions in Illinois’s northern judi-cial district between 1976 and 2013, morethan in any other district nationally AustinBerg, co-author of a newly published book

on Chicago politics, says the autocraticpower of the mayor and aldermen is thecore problem A city commission called thesystem an “anachronism” already in 1954 Will anything change after Mr Burke’sfall? A survey in 2016 found over 90% ofChicago business leaders saw cronyism inthe city government Small firms, especial-

ly, consider that a drag Mr Emanuel ises a clean-up in his final weeks One may-oral candidate, Bill Daley (himself from anotorious clan of Chicago mayors) said thisweek that he wants most of the aldermanposts scrapped

prom-Chicago could adopt practices of betterrun places Annual “menu money”, inwhich each alderman gets roughly $1m todispense in his ward, should end The cityneeds a smaller city council; more transpa-rency; a powerful inspector general; a char-ter and a set of ethics to ban politiciansfrom enriching themselves with side busi-nesses City departments should take overzoning powers from aldermen Gerryman-dering of city districts should end Will any

of this come soon? Not likely Chicagoansbrag theirs is the “city of big shoulders” It isalso a city of back-handers.7

CH I C A G O

Chicago’s opaque political system is set up to produce corruption

Chicago corruption

On the make by the lake

Edward Burke: councillor, pianist, suspect

26 United States The Economist January 12th 2019

Ohio had just chaired his last cabinet meeting and was

impa-tient to leave the office which he has occupied for the past eight

years and will vacate permanently this week Several hours later,

after an extended discussion of his state, America, why he lost in

2016 to Donald Trump, the damage done by his presidency, politics

on the right, golf, faith and Mr Kasich’s electric car (“It’s like

driv-ing a space rocket!”), Lexdriv-ington bade him farewell at a party for his

security detail on the other side of Columbus He had reached it via

the governor’s office, car, house and garage, with pauses to chat

with Mr Kasich’s wife and teenage twin daughters (“C’mere girls, I

brought you a Brit ”) along the way

The governor, who is Mr Trump’s biggest Republican critic,

does not stand on ceremony He kicks up a conversational

fire-storm, racing from topic to topic, showing the same fervent

inter-est in a controversial dam project as in his home suburb’s

connec-tion to the Underground Railroad and the future of the West

Unlike many politicians, he is also able to surprise Bullish and

irascible, he is most interested in his own views, trusts his gut

where the evidence fails him, and sweeps counter-arguments

aside: ignore the polls, evangelical Christians are not the solid

Trump constituency many say, he insists, “and I happen to know

this” Yet he periodically backs up, as if suddenly irritated by his

own certainty “Forget that—what do you think?” “Do you think

any of us really knows what we’re doing?”

A more original politician than he appeared to be in 2016, when

his upbeat Reaganite message found few takers, Mr Kasich’s

go-verning record reveals the same mix of intensity,

single-minded-ness and sporadic eccentricity Inheriting a state in economic

cri-sis, including an $8bn budget shortfall, he slashed spending,

privatised services and accepted protest as proof of concept Doing

the right thing, no matter the political cost, is one of his mantras

That usually means the conservative thing Fairly solidly pro-life

and pro-gun, Mr Kasich is not the squishy centrist he is sometimes

portrayed as—except when he is When it comes to helping the

poor, incarcerated and addicted, he has long argued that the end

justifies the means His decision to expand Medicaid despite

op-position from Republicans illustrated that Since the election, he

has also been thumbing it to Republican orthodoxy more often

He signed off on modest gun and abortion controls and paigned on health care alongside his Democratic counterpart fromColorado, John Hickenlooper Ideological fixity on the right, hesays, mainly reflects a lack of new ideas “That’s where my partyfell short Maybe there is something in the conservative dna thatmakes it easier to be against something than for it.” He believes MrTrump’s success was based on filling the void It follows that heconsiders Republicans to be open to a course correction now “Peo-ple are going to get serious about what they want to see in thecountry,” he says “So do I think someone like me could stand upand change the whole debate? I do.” Mr Kasich has suggested hewill run against Mr Trump in 2020, ideally as a Republican, or else

cam-as an independent, if there is enough money and other ment available to suggest he can win

encourage-As things stand, there won’t be His rather self-serving tion of why he lost in 2016 is a clue to that Mr Kasich says he wasdrowned out by the media’s obsession with Mr Trump But journal-ists gave him more time than most Republicans Even after hismainstream rivals were eliminated, he raised little money, andonly won his own state As Mr Kasich acknowledges, a resentfulRepublican primary audience was not in the mood for his talk ofbipartisan problem-solving But it also spurned his ideas It turnedout many Republicans had long preferred Mr Trump’s talk of bor-der walls and protectionism to Mr Kasich’s support for immigra-tion and trade The surveys he disdains suggest they still do Kasichvoters tended to be Republicans hostile to Mr Trump, and are thosemost likely to have quit the party since his election Mr Kasich isstill popular in Ohio, but more with Democrats than Republicans.After his previous break from politics—following an 18-year spell

explana-in Congress—he worked for Fox News and Lehman Brothers He isabout as likely to return to one as the other His party has left him.His record in Ohio, which had 89 cents in its rainy day fund in

2011 and now has $2.69bn, points to the cost of that It is no dence that the most successful Republican governors tend to bemoderates, or that they are generally found in states, such as Mas-sachusetts, Maryland and Texas, where Republicans need inde-pendent or Democratic voters to win statewide As the RepublicanParty becomes increasingly inhospitable to such figures national-

coinci-ly, it is not obvious how it can retain them at the state level Either

it will have to reverse course from Trumpian nationalism, whichmay take longer—perhaps including a couple of crushing presi-dential election defeats—than Mr Kasich predicts Or else theDemocrats may seize the opportunity they have been given to ex-pand their coalition It is not hard to imagine Mr Kasich in thesame party as Mr Hickenlooper “He thinks about things prettymuch the same way I do,” Mr Kasich says

A moderate by any other name

A third possibility is that Democrats continue marching to theleft—creating an opportunity for a third-party candidate to surgethrough the middle It seems unlikely; Democratic extremism isoften exaggerated and independent candidates face big financialand other barriers Mr Kasich seems nonetheless most intrigued

by this prospect, and in the event of a presidential face-off tween, say, Mr Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders, it would bewrong to rule it out But he might in that case consider a word ofadvice He is an innovator who in 2016 came across as rather astick-in-the-mud To assemble a new centrist coalition, Mr Kasichshould unleash the political cross-dressing maverick that he is.7

be-John Kasich: conservative orphan

Lexington

Ohio’s departing governor is a credit to his party and Donald Trump’s biggest critic

The Economist January 12th 2019 27

1

pres-idents are supposed to be sworn in

be-fore the national assembly, the country’s

legislature But the ceremony that will

be-gin Nicolás Maduro’s second six-year term,

planned for January 10th, is to take place at

the supreme court That is because the

op-position-controlled assembly regards Mr

Maduro’s election last May as a farce and

his second term as illegitimate The

nomi-nally independent court, by contrast,

re-mains an obedient servant of the regime

The change of venue is a characteristic

manoeuvre by Mr Maduro, who is keeping

power by increasingly dictatorial means

That is his one talent After a

cata-strophic first term, Mr Maduro is arguably

the world’s least successful president (see

charts on next page) But the seeds of

disas-ter were planted by his predecessor, Hugo

Chávez, who died in 2013 An eloquent

pop-ulist, Chávez thought that the best way to

help the poor was to ramp up government

spending while throttling markets He

seized private businesses, imposed price

controls, borrowed lavishly and sacked

competent managers at pdvsa, the

state-owned oil firm that is Venezuela’s mainsource of hard currency, for not supportinghim politically

Chávez was lucky Oil prices were highduring most of his 14 years in office Thatkept goods on the shelves and budget defi-cits under control When he died, the econ-omy was headed for a steep decline, butthat was not yet apparent Mr Maduro casthimself as the “son” of Chávez, who still in-spired devotion among poor Venezuelansand gullible leftists abroad He won a dis-puted presidential election against Hen-rique Capriles, a centre-left state governor

In 2014 oil prices began to slide

Mr Maduro doggedly adhered to

cha-vismoeven as conditions turned against it

To continue paying Venezuela’s tional creditors he slashed imports, lead-ing to shortages and hunger He printedmoney to finance massive budget deficits

interna-Both measures stoked inflation, which wasprobably more than one million per centlast year He kept the official exchange rate

of the bolívar artificially high, ostensibly tomake essential imports affordable In fact,the regime denied honest importers access

to cheap dollars, giving them instead toloyalists, some of whom became billion-aires The black-market (ie, true) value ofthe bolívar collapsed gdp has dropped bynearly half since Mr Maduro took office

He responded to the crisis either withhalf-measures, such as inadequate devalu-ations of the official bolívar, or policies thatmade things worse, such as new price con-trols As reserves of foreign exchangeplummeted, in 2017 he partially defaulted

on bonds issued by pdvsa and the ment The government has avoided full de-fault only by mortgaging oil, gas and goldfields, mainly to Chinese and Russianstate-controlled firms

govern-Last August Mr Maduro removed fivezeros from the currency and relaunched it

as the “sovereign bolívar” But without anyaction by the government to rein in deficits

or alleviate shortages, it has lost 95% of itsvalue against the dollar Banks are alreadyrefusing to accept two-bolívar notes, thelowest denomination, although they arebrand new

Even if oil prices bounce back,

Venezue-la is unlikely to benefit much That is cause the government has looted pdvsa.Under Chávez, in addition to paying forpopular social programmes it providedpetrol to Venezuelans nearly free and oil tofriendly governments, such as Cuba’s, oneasy terms Investment and explorationsuffered pdvsa’s decline sped up under MrMaduro, who has appointed as its presi-dent a major-general with no experience inthe oil industry Scavengers, including em-

28 Protecting scarlet macaws

30 Bello: Brazil’s confused foreign policy

Also in this section

28 The Americas The Economist January 12th 2019

2

1

ployees made desperate by the collapse in

their incomes, have begun to pilfer

ma-chinery Now in partial default on its

bonds, Venezuela produces less oil than it

did in the 1950s Output per citizen is where

it was in the 1920s

The consequence is misery Electricity

and water supplies are faltering because of

corruption, underinvestment and

absen-teeism by workers who cannot live on their

salaries Violence has soared and health

care has all but collapsed A tenth of the

population, 3m people, have emigrated,

largely to neighbouring countries such as

Colombia At least 2.5m have left since

2014 (A minority apply for asylum.)

Depending on what happens to oil

in-come and remittances, 5m more could

leave, according to a study by the Brookings

Institution, a think-tank in Washington

“My daughter is just 15 and she’s already

hinting she wants to go,” says Carlos

Val-buena, an office worker in Caracas “What

do I tell her?” he wonders

The answer hinges on how long Mr

Ma-duro will remain in power That, in turn,

depends on how long the regime can

re-main united under pressure from its foes

and from the stresses it has placed on itself

On January 4th the Lima group, which

in-cludes the biggest Latin American

coun-tries and Canada, said it would stop

recog-nising Mr Maduro as president in his

second term and urged him to cede power

to the national assembly That gesture was

weakened by the refusal of Mexico, under

its new left-wing president, Andrés

Ma-nuel López Obrador, to sign the statement

Peru has now joined the United States

and the European Union in barring

mem-bers of the regime from visiting and

con-ducting financial transactions Other

members of the Lima group may follow

More painful are American sanctions that

stop firms from dealing in newly issued

debt That is making it difficult for

Vene-zuela to reach agreements with creditors

The Lima group’s endorsement of the

national assembly is a fillip to the divided

and ineffectual opposition The alliance is

in good-enough shape that on January 5th

it carried out a redistribution of top jobs inthe legislature under a pact reached afterthe parliamentary election in 2015, Vene-zuela’s last fair election Juan Guaidó, afounder of Voluntad Popular (PopularWill), one of the most confrontational op-position parties, became the assembly’spresident The party’s leader, Leopoldo Ló-pez, is under house arrest and its nationalco-ordinator, Freddy Guevara, has takenrefuge in the Chilean embassy since 2017

In his acceptance speech, Mr Guaidódamned Mr Maduro’s presidency as illegit-imate and called on the army to help “re-store the constitutional order” Mr Guaidówill be “the head of the struggle for change

in Venezuela”, predicts Luis Vicente León, apollster and political analyst in Caracas

But the main threat to Mr Maduro

comes from “inside chavismo”, says Mr

León Until now, loot from oil production,smuggling and drug-trafficking, which thegovernment tolerates, has held the regimetogether A network of Cuban spies alerts

Mr Maduro to plots against him But cash isbecoming scarce and plots may be prolifer-ating In August some people apparentlytried to kill Mr Maduro with explosive-lad-

en drones as he addressed a gathering ofnational guardsmen The government hastortured dozens of soldiers accused of plot-ting against it, according to Human RightsWatch, an ngo

Defections from chavismo may pose a

bigger danger Subject to sanctions, somemembers of the regime may fear beingtrapped in Venezuela when power shiftssuddenly They may be tempted to strike adeal with the opposition, probably mediat-

ed by an outside group, leading to somesort of transitional government Mr Leónsays that tension between those prepared

to negotiate and those who refuse couldlead to the government’s “implosion”

The regime has already suffered severalhigh-profile defections, especially bymembers of the judiciary The latest came

on January 6th, when Christian Zerpa, ajudge on the supreme court, appeared inMiami to denounce Mr Maduro His rule

“has no other name than a dictatorship”,declared the once-loyal justice That is anembarrassment, but not a serious threat It

is from his friends, rather than from hisservants on the supreme court, that Mr Ma-duro has most to fear 7

The economic cost of Maduro…

Sources: DolarToday; IMF; Energy Intelligence Group *Replaced by sovereign bolívar †Purchasing-power parity, current prices

Bolívar per $, black- market

exchange rate, inverted log scale

0 5 10 15 20

Bolívar*

Sovereign bolívar

0 1 2 3

…and the human one

Sources: UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation; UNHCR

Annual asylum applications from Venezuelans

’000

Under-five mortality per 1,000 live births

Nicolás Maduro assumes office

0 30 60 90 120

0 10 20 30

Latin America Venezuela

Hondu-ras is not notably infested with toes, but swarms with cocaine traffickers.They use the sparsely populated region as atrans-shipment point for drugs headed forthe United States (The area gets its namefrom the Miskito people, descendants of amix of shipwrecked slaves, English seafar-ers and indigenous people.)

mosqui-The region holds another treasure eted by rich foreigners To spot it, just look

cov-up Splodges of red, blue and gold amidstthe trees in Mabita, a Miskito hamlet four

hours’ drive from the coast, are guaras—

large, loud parrots known to speakers as scarlet macaws The ancientMayans thought they flew between Earthand the heavens and honoured them withstatues They are Honduras’s national bird.Once common across Central America,they are extinct in El Salvador and rare else-where in the region The 500 or so on theMosquito Coast are the last big population,says Marlene Arias of the Forest Conserva-

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30 The Americas The Economist January 12th 2019

2

fre-quently associated with diplomacy

than with military feats,” notes Rubens

Ricupero, a former minister, in his

mon-umental history of his country’s dealings

with the world This legacy is above all

the achievement of the Baron of Rio

Branco, the foreign minister from 1902 to

1912, who through peaceful negotiation

settled the country’s borders with all ten

of its neighbours (in some cases

expand-ing its territory)

The values Rio Branco espoused—

peace, moderation, trust in international

law, non-intervention and what would

now be called the pursuit of soft power—

became integral to Brazil’s idea of itself,

Mr Ricupero argues And Itamaraty, as

the foreign ministry is known (from the

palace in Rio de Janeiro it formerly

occu-pied), came to be seen as the Rolls-Royce

of Brazilian government, its prestige

based on meritocracy and knowledge

So the appointment of Ernesto Araújo

as foreign minister in the new

govern-ment of Jair Bolsonaro has come as a

shock to the Brazilian intelligentsia Mr

Araújo is a career diplomat, but a fairly

junior one Aged 51, he only recently

achieved ambassadorial rank His

mis-sion, he said, is “to liberate Brazilian

foreign policy” and Itamaraty “through

truth” But this truth “cannot be taught by

analytical deduction”, he added Rather,

it is religious in nature “God is back and

the nation is back,” he has written

Mr Araújo’s foreign policy will

con-front what he denounces as “globalism”,

a sneering term for openness to the

world Diplomats should read the New

York Timesless and Brazilian authors

more, he said

Mr Bolsonaro wants to pull Brazil out

of the Paris climate accord His

govern-ment has aligned itself with

populist-nationalists in other countries—above allDonald Trump, but also the leaders of Italy,Hungary and Poland Mr Bolsonaro hasseemed to entertain the idea of invitingthe United States to set up a military base

Like Mr Trump, he has declared himself afoe of China He visited Taiwan during lastyear’s election campaign

Certainly, Itamaraty has sometimescombined sophistication with do-nothingcomplacency And in their critique offoreign policy under governments led bythe Workers’ Party (pt) from 2003 to 2016,

Mr Bolsonaro’s people have a point The ptabandoned some of Rio Branco’s values Itspriority of “south-south” links was often aveil for anti-Americanism It failed tostand up for democracy in Latin America,preferring to ally itself with left-wingdictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba

But Mr Araújo risks making the samemistake—of basing policy on ephemeralideological affinity, rather than on under-lying national interest His assault on

“globalism” also exposes a contradiction atthe heart of Mr Bolsonaro’s project Thenew president’s powerful economy min-

ister, Paulo Guedes, promises liberalreforms, including privatisation andopening Brazil to trade and competition.The best way to do that is not to ally itselfslavishly with the protectionist-in-chief

in the White House Mr Bolsonaro’sstance on climate change has alreadydented the chances of the EuropeanUnion concluding a long-delayed tradeagreement with Mercosur (to whichBrazil belongs)

Mr Bolsonaro heads a ramshacklealliance of populist-nationalists (notablytwo of his sons), religious zealots, busi-ness lobbies and the security forces MrAraújo owes his job to the first twogroups The armed forces—represented

by seven retired generals in the cabinet—espouse a different kind of nationalism,grounded in hard-headed geopolitics.They are interested in co-operation withthe United States against organisedcrime, but will resist automatic align-ment with Mr Trump Then there is MrGuedes, who has seized control of tradepolicy from Itamaraty The economicteam has no interest in quarrelling eitherwith China, a big investor with whichBrazil has a trade surplus, or with Arabcountries (by moving Brazil’s embassy inIsrael to Jerusalem, as Mr Bolsonaro haspromised)

Faced with these more organisedrivals, some think Mr Araújo may not lastlong Yet even if he does not, he has madehis mark For the first time since the early1970s during the cold war, Brazilians havebeen offered an extreme right-wingforeign policy, notes Matias Spektor, aninternational-relations specialist atFundação Getulio Vargas, a university.Even if modulated, bits of it are likely to

be applied by Mr Bolsonaro It is a longway from Rio Branco, and is unlikely to

do much for Brazil’s soft power

The contradictions of Brazil’s new foreign policy

tion Institute, a Honduran government

agency They are under threat

Poachers, many from nearby Jamaica,

climb the pine trees where the guaras nest

and pinch the chicks before they learn to

fly Fanciers in China, Australia and the

Middle East buy them online for up to

$6,000 In 2014 not one newborn guara

reached adulthood in its native habitat

Four years earlier, LoraKim Joyner of

One Earth Conservation, an American

par-rot-conservation group, had enlisted the

residents of Mabita, which consists of a

score of wooden huts, to patrol the forest

At first little happened That changed in

2015 when the group started paying ers 200 lempiras ($8) a day They begancamping in the forest to chase poachersaway Last year 103 nests were left undis-turbed in the area, says Ms Joyner About

villag-150 baby guaras survived

Once scarcely seen, now they are where, says Anaide Pántin López, a resi-dent of Mabita who manages the patrollers

every-This has disadvantages The birds devourthe wild mangoes and guavas that the vil-lagers once enjoyed, says Ms Pántin, cra-dling a piglet on her porch “In fruit season,

the humans don’t taste anything,” shegrumbles

But there are compensations The

mon-ey from patrolling has seeded a cash omy in Mabita The inhabitants have used

econ-it to build a small stone church Five othervillages in the area have joined the scheme,which is financed by the United States Fishand Wildlife Service And the folk of theMosquito Coast seem to get as much plea-

sure from watching guaras as those who

pay to have them stolen from their habitat

“It is so beautiful to see them flying in the

The Economist January 12th 2019 31

1

the Tokyo satellite town of Kunitachi lies

Yasuyuki Ibaraki, eyes closed and

breath-ing laboured Yukio Miyazaki, his doctor,

who visits fortnightly from a local clinic,

suspects that he does not have much time

left: he has brain damage from a cerebral

infarction, a tumour in his digestive

sys-tem and is unable to swallow or talk Reiko,

his wife, feeds him through a tube to his

stomach and clears phlegm from his

throat “He is from a close-knit family and

is a quiet man, so I think it is better for him

to be here rather than in a hospital,” she

says, over green tea and grapes

Life expectancy in Japan is the highest

in the world, at 84 This is good news for its

people, but means that an ever-higher

share of the population is elderly Fully

28% of Japanese are older than 65,

com-pared with 15% of Americans and 21% of

Germans More old people, in turn, means

higher health-care costs Last year the

gov-ernment budgeted ¥15trn ($138bn, or 15% of

its total expenditure) for health care and

nursing, excluding the charges it levies for

the public health-insurance scheme Withpublic debt at 250% of gdp, and debt ser-vice consuming a further 24% of spending,the government is looking desperately forways to cut costs It reckons caring for peo-ple at home is one of its best options

All Japanese pay a monthly premium tothe public insurance scheme, eitherthrough their employer or the local mu-nicipality In return they are entitled totreatment and drugs from public and priv-ate doctors and hospitals, although theymust also pay a portion of the cost of treat-ment (a co-payment, in American par-lance), subject to a cap In 2000 Japan intro-duced an additional public insurancescheme for long-term care for those over

65, into which people must pay from theage of 40 It works the same way The pre-miums and co-payments cover around60% of the cost of the services provided;the government pays for the rest And it isthe old who cost the most The governmentreckons that the average annual cost ofhealth care for someone over 75 is

¥942,000, compared with just ¥221,000 foreveryone else

By the standards of ageing nations, pan has managed to curb medical costsfairly well, says Naoki Ikegami of St Luke’sInternational University in Tokyo The gov-ernment sets fees for services to keep costsdown (although that encourages providers

Ja-to perform unnecessary procedures Ja-tomake more money: Japan has more ctscanners relative to its population than anyother country) It has also promoted theuse of generic drugs, which are cheaper

Life-giving, budget-busting

Nonetheless, the country has crept up tosixth place in the oecd’s ranking of theshare of gdp spent on health care, behindFrance and America, but ahead of Italy andSouth Korea—two other ageing countries(see chart on next page) It is not just thatthe number of old people is increasing;spending per person is rising, too, as peo-ple live longer with diseases like Alz-heimer’s and diabetes

Japan has promoted home care formany years, but it is pushing it harder now.The policy is especially beneficial given

32 The king of Malaysia abdicates

33 Affirmative action for all in India

33 Refugees in the outback

Also in this section

34 Banyan: Democracy in Taiwan

32 Asia The Economist January 12th 2019

three times longer than in the Netherlands,

for instance The health ministry reckons

that 1m people will receive care at home in

2025—one-and-a-half times the current

to-tal The number of special nursing units

ex-clusively for home visits has risen from

7,473 in 2014 to 10,418 in 2018

Last year a government panel suggested

raising the amount doctors are paid for

home visits and making consultations

conducted via video-conferencing services

eligible, too It also proposed new rules to

encourage care at home Hospitals should

be obliged to talk to social services when

they discharge a patient, for example

Some municipalities are already

offer-ing good care in the community

Ono-michi, a small provincial city that is even

older than the country as a whole, is one Its

medical facilities have 15-minute “care

conferences” with doctors, nurses, family

members and even dentists, to discuss

how they will go about looking after

peo-ple “It used to be hard for hospitals to tell a

patient to return home as there was no

sys-tem for that; that has changed,” says

Hi-sashi Katayama, a doctor

Community care for specific diseases is

improving, too Take dementia, which

cur-rently affects 5m Japanese (4% of the

popu-lation), and will afflict 6-7% by 2030

Rath-er than provide only institutional care and

medicine, some towns, such as Matsudo,

north-east of Tokyo, have set up cafés to

of-fer advice and companionship to patients

and their carers Day centres that give

re-spite to families tending to elderly relatives

are common Much more could be done:

only 13% of Japanese die at home, although

most say they want to

But more widespread home care will

not be enough to make Japan’s health care

affordable The government of Shinzo Abe

wants to revamp the social-security

sys-tem, which it reckons will help reduce

health-care costs Raising the retirement

age, for example, will keep people active,

healthier and paying tax for longer The

government also wants to try to reduce the

incidence of diseases that affect older ple, but have their origins in behaviour at ayounger age “We have tended to focus onthe old, but we need to look at the younger

peo-to prevent disease,” says Kazumi kawa of the economy ministry He is partic-ularly focused on giving people more in-formation on what causes diabetes, which

Nishi-is on the rNishi-ise in Japan, or exercNishi-ises that canstem the progression of dementia

People are likely to have to pay more forhealth care, too Co-payments for many ofthose over 75 are only 10%, compared with30% for everyone else The government

should start by doubling that to 20%, saysShigefumi Kawamoto, managing director

of Kenporen, the national federation ofhealth-insurance societies “Some elderlypeople don’t have resources, but many do,”

he avers The government could excludesome items from coverage, he says, such asover-the-counter drugs

Meanwhile, back in Kunitachi, Dr zaki talks to Reiko about her husband’scondition She is worried that her husband

Miya-is getting worse, she says, and Miya-is anxiousbetween visits The doctor promises to

and unexplained On January 6thSultan Muhammad V, Malaysia’s king,stepped down from the throne It was thefirst time a Malaysian king had abdicat-

ed He had only reigned for two years

The king presides over one of theworld’s most peculiar monarchies, estab-lished at independence in 1957 Malaysia

is a federation made up of 13 states Thetitular head of the government in nine ofthem is a sultan (democratically appoint-

ed chief ministers actually run theshow) The nine sultans choose one oftheir own to serve a five-year term asking whenever the job becomes vacant

In practice, the nine states take it inturns The king’s job is largely ceremoni-

al, although he can delay legislation andrefuse a prime minister’s request todissolve parliament

No reason was given for the tion, but many suspect the king’s love lifehad raised too many eyebrows In 2008,when still crown prince of Kelantan, themost conservative and devoutly Islamicstate in the country, he had divorced hiswife, a Muslim princess from neigh-bouring Thailand In 2016 he became thefirst king to ascend to the throne un-married Then, in November, he took atwo-month leave of absence followingmedical treatment During that periodthe 49-year-old snuck off to Russia andmarried Oksana Voevodina, a 25-year-oldformer Miss Moscow

abdica-The wedding poses an “existentialquestion” for the monarchy, says FrancisHutchinson of iseas-Yusof Ishak In-stitute, a think-tank in Singapore Sul-tans are supposed to be defenders of theculture and religion of the country’sethnic-Malay majority Older and ruralMalays in particular hold sultans in highesteem and see them as a cultural an-

chor One view holds that in a state out a sultan, society becomes nihilistic.Modern royals are thus expected to be-have with a certain decorum—althoughmany of their forebears married glamor-ous young foreigners At any rate, KingMuhammad’s conduct must have jarredwith some The other sultans are thought

with-to have issued an ultimatum, forcinghim to quit

The election of a new monarch,scheduled for January 24th, may cause afurther hiccup The next in line under thesystem of rotation is the sultan of Pa-hang, who served as king once before, 40years ago He is elderly and in ill health,however His family is reported to becontemplating getting him to abdicate,

to allow his son to become sultan andthen king in short order Typical: youwait 60 years for an abdication, and thentwo come along at once

Monarchical merry-go-round

The king of Malaysia

New head of state wanted Only sultans need apply

His kingdom for a queen

The Economist January 12th 2019 Asia 33

1

Af-ghans and the Africans Since 2016, odd Yazidis have washed up in WaggaWagga, a regional centre south-west ofSydney Its primary school has had to hireinterpreters to communicate with families(fully a fifth of its students are refugees).The local college teems with parents learn-ing English and new trades Doctors havehad to brush up on illnesses rarely found inthe area Few locals seem fussed about thechanges And to those fresh out of warzones, “Wagga” is an idyll “My children aresafe,” says Ismail Darwesh, a Yazidi whofled Islamic State’s attempt to wipe out hispeople, a religious minority in Iraq and Syr-

400-ia “Everything you want you can get here.”The refugees have been sent to WaggaWagga under a scheme which brings bene-ficiaries from foreign camps to rural Aus-tralia (most settle in urban areas) The hope

is that they can offset the population cline that threatens many outback settle-ments with extinction, as birth rates falland youngsters head for cities WaggaWagga’s Multicultural Council says thepopulation is only growing thanks to thenew arrivals Immigrants are helping tostem shrinkage in another 150 localities.The scheme helps big cities, too, by eas-ing the pressure on roads, schools and hos-pitals there Thousands of Iraqis and Syri-ans descended on Sydney’s westernsuburbs after extra visas were dished out tothem in 2016 and 2017 Many have struggled

de-to find work, and conservatives grumbleabout ghettoisation A recent report fromthe Centre for Policy Development, a think-tank, found that just 17% of “humanitarianentrants” have jobs after 18 months in Aus-tralia Yet remote towns are crying out for

Canberra

Wagga Wagga

Sydney

Walla Walla Pyramid Hill

Melbourne Nhill

New South Wales

Victoria

Tasmania

A U S T R A L I A

Bass Strait

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

250 km

confusingly call it, has been a defining

feature of modern India The constitution

allows the government to make “special

provision for the advancement of any

so-cially and educationally backward classes

of citizens” Since it came into force in 1950,

“reservations” (quotas) have often been

de-manded and doled out By setting aside

government jobs and places at universities

for members of communities that had

been oppressed for hundreds if not

thou-sands of years, the thinking ran, the

coun-try would soon rid itself of the iniquities of

caste, and with it the need for reservations

Instead, Indians have been mired in a

zero-sum competition for official favour

ever since The first beneficiaries were

“scheduled castes and tribes”, in particular

untouchables (now known as Dalits)—

those at the bottom of the social order

In-evitably, the considerably less

disadvan-taged “other backward classes” (obcs) soon

began to clamour for quotas of their own

Political parties sprang up to demand new

or bigger reservations for different castes

It was only in 1992 that the Supreme Court

appeared to put a stop to the scramble by

ruling that no more than 50% of jobs or

university spaces could be reserved under

caste-based quotas But on January 7th,

with general elections due in just three

months, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party

(bjp) came up with a new way to expand

reservations: to set aside a further 10% of

jobs and university places for relatively

im-poverished Indians, of whatever caste or

religion A motion to change the

constitu-tion to that end cleared both houses of

par-liament in just two days, a record, with

al-most no dissent

The scheme’s details remain hazy, but

reports suggest that any family earning less

than 800,000 rupees ($11,375) a year would

be eligible That is a generous sum in a

country where the average income per

per-son was $1,976 in 2017 Indeed, 800,000

ru-pees is the level of income that defines the

“creamy layer”—families wealthy enough

that the courts have barred them from any

sort of reservation, whatever their caste or

tribe All but the richest, in other words,

will now be eligible for a reservation

The bjp used to oppose excessive

reser-vations, since it derived much of its

sup-port from higher castes who felt that their

opportunities were being diminished by

their lower-caste neighbours, some of

whom were no needier than they were In

2006 much of India erupted into protestsagainst reservations More recently, in-stead of calling for the abolition or reduc-tion of reservations, relatively prosperouscastes have agitated for inclusion in thequotas The bjp’s new policy looks like asop to such important “vote banks” as thePatidars of Gujarat or the Rajputs of Raja-sthan, who are too well-to-do, by and large,

to be considered backward, but poorenough to resent that

These groups are also numerousenough to be central to the efforts of Naren-dra Modi, the prime minister, to win a sec-ond term And they are agitated about lack

of opportunity The Centre for Monitoringthe Indian Economy, a think-tank in Mum-bai, reckons that the number of people inwork fell during the past fiscal year, even asthe working-age population swelled

To be fair, the bjp is not alone in its ery The state of Tamil Nadu reserves fully69% of university places and governmentjobs for disadvantaged castes—an appar-ent breach of the Supreme Court’s rulingthat has been the subject of long litigation

brib-Other states have created reservations forwomen, the disabled, religious minorities,former soldiers and so on Congress, themain opposition party, proposed some-thing similar to the new scheme years ago

The leader of another opposition party saysthat now that the 50% ceiling has beenbreached, the reservation devoted to obcs,for whom his party claims to speak, should

be doubled to 54%, in proportion with theirshare of the population

The irony is that quotas will not helpmuch In November the national railwaysreceived 19m applications for 63,000 lowlyposts That meant plenty of disappoint-ment to be shared among every caste 7

D E LH I

Almost all Indians will soon qualify for

affirmative action

Anti-meritocracy in India

Quotas for all

Marching for mooching

34 Asia The Economist January 12th 2019

2

words newly emblazoned across

the floor of the grandest old building in

Taipei The slogan is part of an exhibit

about the history of the structure, which

was built to house the offices of the

colonial governor sent from Japan It

later served as the seat of administrators

dispatched from Beijing and then of the

dictators who ruled Taiwan after its split

from China in 1949 For the past 22 years,

however, it has hosted Taiwan’s

demo-cratically elected presidents The ground

floor is open to the public every weekday

morning—no booking required

Such openness is one of the many

ways in which power does indeed rest

with the people in Taiwan On a recent

visit Banyan faced tighter security

get-ting into his hotel than into the offices of

members of parliament He was also

slightly befuddled to be told by Audrey

Tang, the minister in charge of digital

outreach, that she practised a policy of

“radical transparency” and that

tran-scripts of all her meetings, including any

interviews, are published online ten

working days after the event (she leaves

the room when the cabinet starts talking

about national security)

Then there is the law on referendums,

which was amended in 2017 to make it

easier to get them on the ballot Even

though there are competitive elections, a

free and diverse press and an ingrained

culture of mass protest about everything

from nuclear power to public pensions,

the ruling Democratic Progressive Party

(dpp) decided that it was not easy enough

for ordinary people to make their voices

heard Now any question for which

activists can muster the signatures of

1.5% of the electorate earns a spot on the

ballot At nationwide local elections in

November, nine made the cut The

gov-ernment must act on the results, providedthe turnout is high enough—which it was

By any standard, let alone that of mostcountries in the region, democracy inTaiwan is thriving Yet, by the admission ofTsai Ing-wen, the president, it faces apotentially fatal threat: “China’s attempts

to use the openness and freedom of ourdemocratic system to interfere in Taiwan’sinternal politics and social development”

Her government, which did very badly inthe elections, accused China of meddling

in them by spreading disinformation,steering money to the opposition andinducing Taiwanese media to provideslanted coverage China’s president, XiJinping, seemed implicitly to acknowledgesuch a campaign earlier this month when

he gleefully declared that China had won

“a great victory in frustrating the Taiwanindependence movement”—an apparentreference to the electoral defeat of MsTsai’s dpp, which would like to abandonthe idea that Taiwan and China will even-tually be unified and instead officiallydeclare Taiwan a separate country

Ms Tang talks excitedly about

counter-ing Chinese disinformation by gettcounter-ingthe government to respond faster toonline falsehoods She wants officialdenials to appear within four hours MsTsai says she has instructed the securityservices to prepare countermeasures.That is all well and good, but it is reallyanother way of saying that the govern-ment does not know what it can do BigTaiwanese firms have invested heavily inChina It is the easiest thing in the worldfor the Chinese government to signal tothem that, if they want their investments

to prosper, they should donate money tocertain politicians back home, or evenpurchase a media outlet that propagatesviews considered distasteful by theChinese leadership, to institute friendli-

er coverage

There are plenty of ways for China toinfluence humbler voters, too It cut offthe flow of package tourists to signal itsdisapproval after Ms Tsai was elected in

2016, hurting small businesses Analystsexpect a flood of tourists to Kaohsiung,the third-biggest city and a dpp strong-hold, after it unexpectedly chose a mayorfrom the opposition Kuomintang, whichadvocates warmer relations with China.And since a tenth of working-age Tai-wanese live in China, and 29% of exports

go there, voters are reluctant to nise their looming neighbour

antago-There is a horrible irony in the factthat Taiwan has succeeded in instituting

a model democracy in which all bigdecisions are up to voters except the onethat seems most important: whetherTaiwan should be a country at all Indeed,the referendum law makes that explicit,

by allowing votes on any subject exceptcross-strait relations Taiwan may havetransferred power to its people, in short,but China has already begun to yank itaway from them

Even as Taiwan perfects its democracy, China is sabotaging it

people to fill vacancies on farms, in

abat-toirs and to look after the elderly The cost

of living is lower than in Sydney or

Mel-bourne and, for farmers like Mr Darwesh, a

quiet life is appealing anyway

To stay afloat, some outback towns have

taken to recruiting migrants for

them-selves A piggery in Pyramid Hill, in

north-ern Victoria, started sponsoring workers

from the Philippines a decade ago They

now make up a fifth of its 500-odd

popula-tion, keeping not just the business afloat,

but also the local school Another town in

the same state, Nhill, lured 160 Burmese

refugees from Melbourne with jobs at afood company, adding perhaps A$40m($28m) to its economy A group of residents

in Walla Walla, a dot in New South Wales, isnow scouting for refugees from Sydney

“We have jobs, we have housing and wehave education,” says Andrew Kotzur, whoruns the local steelworks “We just needmore people to sustain them.”

Asylum-seekers and farm labourersmake up a tiny portion of the immigrantspouring into Australia The conservativecoalition government is keen to rusticateothers, too Scott Morrison, the prime min-

ister, has suggested that some of Australia’s500,000 foreign students could be sent toregional universities The population min-ister, Alan Tudge, added that visa restric-tions and incentives could be used to pushskilled migrants out of Melbourne and Syd-ney Almost all the best-qualified arrivalssettle in those two cities, but luring themout will not be easy It is partly owing to mi-gration that Sydney and Melbourne arethriving Foreign accountants and it geekschoose them for well-paid work andswanky suburbs Rob them of both, and farfewer would come to Oz at all 7

The Economist January 12th 2019 35

1

used to pulse with life as workers got off

their shifts These days the complex that

churns out roughly half of all Apple

smart-phones is quieter A staff dormitory just

be-yond its gates is empty, its entrance sealed

with barbed wire A barbecue restaurant, a

noodle shop and, fittingly, a mobile-phone

outlet have all closed At a karaoke bar

where workers would croon into the wee

hours on rest days, the owner was recently

seen packing up his speakers

The giant complex on the edge of the

central city of Zhengzhou is run by

Fox-conn, Apple’s Taiwanese manufacturing

partner It remains one of the world’s

busi-est factories But it is well off its peak, when

as many as 350,000 people kept production

humming around the clock Workers say

they are down to eight hours a day, five days

a week That means they are not doing the

overtime that accounts for much of their

pay “It feels like they’re forcing us to quit,”

says a six-year veteran

Cao Yingying, a woman at a nearby

re-cruitment centre, says they stopped hiring

for Foxconn in late October because of

Ap-ple’s disappointing sales They still haveother electronics factories as clients, butthey are all suffering “Washing machines,fridges, vacuum cleaners Everyone nowhas these, and they last longer,” she says

“So factories have fewer orders.”

A slowing economy is putting pressure

on jobs in China (though Apple’s woes mayinvolve other factors, too—see Businesssection) The official unemployment rate isstable at around 5%, but as always this fig-ure is a poor guide Surveys in the manufac-turing and service sectors show that com-panies have been cutting staff since at leastSeptember Wage growth is tepid comparedwith the sizzling norm of a few years ago InNovember profits at industrial firms fellfor the first time in nearly three years

When China’s leaders met in December

to map out economic policy for 2019, they

said their priority would be to stabilise ployment They are anxious about socialstability in a year studded with sensitiveanniversaries Among them will be the30th of the Tiananmen protests, which in-volved economic grievances as well as po-litical ones Suppression of labour unresthas become even harsher in recentmonths In one case, police detained morethan 30 students and activists who hadtried to help workers organise a union at afirm in the southern city of Shenzhen

em-Worries about jobs are, so far, focused

on the export sector Trade matters less toChinese growth than it once did, but it still,directly and indirectly, supports as many

as 180m jobs, nearly one-quarter of formalemployment, the government estimates.The trade spat with America has plungedfirms into uncertainty Exporters cut theirdemand for new hires in the third quarter

by 53% compared with a year earlier, say searchers at Renmin University in Beijing

re-In December export orders fell at theirsharpest rate in more than three years

A second area of concern is the tech sector As investors turn cautious, jobsare coming under threat The starkest ex-ample is Ofo, a bike-sharing company pre-viously feted as an innovator Today it isbattling to survive Search engines, onlinetravel agencies and e-commerce websiteshave all reportedly trimmed staff Thiscould be bad news for this year’s recordnumber of university graduates (students

high-in Zhengzhou are pictured at a job fair lastyear) Wang Xing, head of Meituan Dian-

36 HIV on the rise

37 Chaguan: Something old, something new

Also in this section

36 China The Economist January 12th 2019

food-deliv-ery app, captured the gloom last month

with this line on his micro-blog: “2019

might be the worst year of the past decade,

but it might also be the best year of the

coming decade.”

Industries undergoing cyclical slumps

are a final area of concern With the

stock-market down 30% in the past year,

finan-cial firms, espefinan-cially brokerages, have cut

staff A property slowdown has led several

big developers to freeze hiring

How would China cope with a big rise in

unemployment? In 2008 when the global

financial crisis struck, millions of

mi-grants left coastal factories and returned to

the countryside They did not have to wait

long for prospects to improve Half a year

later the government revved up growth

with a massive stimulus programme

A similar exodus is less likely this time

The economy is profoundly different, in

ways that should cushion workers from the

slowdown Services, from restaurants to

couriers, now account for more of the

economy than manufacturers, and they are

more labour-intensive But service jobs are

even less secure than those in factories

Workers in China’s vast gig economy—

driving cars for hire, delivering food or

trucking packages between cities—rarely

get overtime pay or unemployment

insur-ance, says Geoffrey Crothall of China

La-bour Bulletin, an ngo Older people

strug-gle On a street in Zhengzhou, a man in his

late 40s glumly surveys a board plastered

with job ads “They want young lads for thecourier jobs Faster on their bikes, faster ontheir smartphones,” he says

China’s economic situation differs fromthe financial tsunami of 2008 in anothercrucial way This time the troubles havebuilt up gradually, giving the governmenttime to ready its defences It has alreadystarted to help beleaguered companies InDecember the State Council announcedthat firms which refrain from firing staffcan get 50% refunds on unemployment-in-surance payments Officials have hintedthat they will offer subsidies for those buy-ing home appliances, a boost for manufac-turers And after initially taking a hard line

in its trade dispute with America, Chinahas softened somewhat That helped pavethe way to talks between the two countriesthis week in Beijing that augur well for adeal, however fragile

The government is also boosting itsown recruitment At a labour centre innorthern Zhengzhou, once used for hiringFoxconn workers, the biggest ad is for jobs

in Hami, a city in Xinjiang, the ern region where officials have incarcerat-

north-west-ed vast numbers of ethnic-Uighur Muslimsfor “re-education” Hami is looking for aux-iliary police “Join us to realise yourdreams”, says the poster, with a picture ofofficers brandishing machine guns Appli-cants, who must be between 18 and 35, arepromised monthly salaries of at least 6,100yuan ($890), roughly the wages at Foxconn

central city of Hefei, used to believe

that only people who injected drugs could

contract hiv But then a man he had sex

with revealed that he had tested

hiv-posi-tive Mr Wang visited a local ngo and took a

pinprick test to determine whether he, too,

was infected Happily, he was not But the

experience was terrifying “It never

oc-curred to me that someone around me

could actually get hiv,” he says

Many others are less fortunate In

No-vember China’s Centre for Disease Control

said that 850,000 people were known to be

hiv-positive, 12% more than a year earlier

and almost three times the number in 2010

An official study found that new cases of

hiv among students aged between 15 and

24 rose by more than one-third every year

in 2011-15, mostly as a result of gay sex

The virus may not be spreading as fast

as these figures suggest The rapid increase

is largely the result of better detection

Over the past decade the number of healthfacilities offering hiv tests has quadru-pled In 2016 China launched a five-yearplan to combat hiv and aids It increasedfunding to ngos providing free self-testingkits to high-risk groups, such as gay menand sex workers It also gave ngos money

to provide hiv-positive people with freemedicine In 2015 nearly 70% of those diag-nosed with hiv were receiving antiretrovi-ral drugs In 2017 just over 80% were

Most people in China are infectedthrough heterosexual activity Sex betweenmen has also become a big contributor, re-sulting in about one-quarter of transmis-sions (see chart) The proportion of sexual-

ly active gay men infected with hiv is now

much higher than that of female sex ers Social media have made it easier for gaymen to find casual partners The countryhas the world’s largest gay social-network-ing app, Blued On January 6th the servicesaid it was suspending registrations forone week after a Chinese magazine report-

work-ed that boys under 18 had contractwork-ed hivthrough encounters facilitated by the app(Blued says it will step up enforcement ofmeasures to prevent minors from joining) But social media can also spread aware-ness of hiv Blued has added a red ribbonicon to its platform, clicking on which of-fers information about hiv services ngosalso use WeChat, a messaging app, to urgepeople, gay and straight, to get tested Suchtactics may be helping: 200m tests wereperformed in 2017, up 38% from 2015.Encouraging people to come forward isstill difficult, however The governmentreckons that 400,000 people may have thevirus but not know it, ie, less than 70% ofcases appear to have been detected unaidsbelieves that less than half of gay men car-rying hiv in China are aware of it Discrim-ination may be deterring some from beingscreened A survey of 2,000 people withhiv found that 12% had been refused medi-cal treatment and 15% had been deniedwork, presumably because of prejudice Officials’ efforts to make free testingavailable outside the public health systemsuggest they are aware of the problem.Those tested at state hospitals typicallyhave to pay 60-100 yuan ($9-15) ZhengHuang, who manages an hiv-related ngo

in Shanghai, says gay people like to use itstesting services not only because they arefree, but because most of the staff are gay hiv prevalence is low in China com-pared with the West The proportion ofpeople believed to have the virus is only0.09% In Britain it is 0.15% and in America0.34% But the leading role of sex as a mode

of transmission is common both to Chinaand the West Preventing infection ratesfrom climbing in China will require shat-tering taboos and teaching young peopleabout how to have safe sex 7

hiv infections are being spotted more quickly in China

AIDS

Testing times

Teachers, take note

China, HIV transmission modes, % of total

Source: Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention

*1985-2005 average

0 20 40 60 80

Heterosexual intercourse

Sex between men

Intravenous drug use Other

The Economist January 12th 2019 China 37

universi-ty student, feels a need to belong Unlike many of his peers, Mr

Chen has found a spiritual home: China of the Wei and Jin

dynas-ties, about 1,800 years ago So deep is this bond that on special

oc-casions he wears flowing, wide-sleeved robes inspired by

third-century dress One moment of connection stood out, when he

wore robes to a museum in Shaoxing, the eastern city where he

studies There he found a sculpture depicting sages from the Wei

and Jin era His own clothes were “exactly like theirs”, he recalls

happily He saluted the statues and told them: “Dear ancestors, I’ve

heard so much about you It is my good fortune to see you today.”

The teenager developed his passion at high school in Pingliang,

perched in the hills of Gansu, an inland province Though a rather

small, sleepy spot, Pingliang is home to a Han culture association

Such clubs are spreading fast They celebrate the Han ethnic group

to which more than nine out of ten people in China belong

Enthusiasts claim that a million Chinese, mostly youngsters,

regularly wear Hanfu, or robes inspired by traditional Han dress.

The unplanned emergence of any social movement in China

pre-sents Communist bosses with a choice: scramble to the front of the

parade and claim to lead it, or ban it For now, the parade

contin-ues State media hail Hanfu as a welcome complement to calls

from President Xi Jinping to revive traditional culture and values

In April 2018 the Central Committee of the Communist Youth

League, a recruitment channel for party members, declared a first

“Traditional Chinese Garment Day” The league urged young

Chi-nese to don ancient finery to demonstrate “cultural confidence” to

the world There was a caveat, however The league’s

commemora-tive day honours what it calls Huafu, or “Chinese dress” That

en-compasses not only Han traditions but those of China’s 55 official

ethnic minorities, from such places as Tibet, Inner Mongolia or

the restive Muslim region of Xinjiang The league’s caution reflects

wariness about overt Han chauvinism, which threatens official

narratives about a unified, multi-ethnic China

In truth, clumsy Communist propaganda extolling national

unity arguably helped create a hunger for Han traditions At big

party events, ethnic-minority delegates typically attend in

bright-ly coloured folk costumes trimmed with silks, furs or jangling

sil-ver jewellery, even as Han delegates appear in Western suits andties This both patronises minorities and renders the Han an in-visible nationality—representatives of a sort of generic modernity

As Mr Chen shares his story, the slight, bespectacled teenager iswearing robes of lilac and white, embroidered with blue clouds, anoutfit he says is Jin-dynasty day-wear All around are thousands of

fellow enthusiasts attending a Hanfu cultural festival held

annual-ly in Xitang, a quaint, canal-side town near Shanghai

Hanfuwearers vary in their devotion to historical accuracy MrChen has brought along a classmate whose look combines a black-and-white military uniform, 21st-century sneakers and an air offaint embarrassment “I think this is Han dynasty,” the classmatemumbles, when asked The colours are more Ming, says Mr Chen,gently correcting his friend’s dates by about 1,100 years

Enthusiasm counts for more than precision On this sunny tival weekend a local Starbucks boasts baristas in toga-like robes, awarrior in chain-mail queuing for coffee, and outside, a Taoistpriest in a tunic and cloak outfit he calls “a bit of messed-up fu-sion” Luling Manman, an author invited to the festival as an expert

fes-on ancient etiquette, defines Hanfu as “all forms of clothes we Han

people have worn over the course of 5,000 years” Others take anarrower view, describing a tradition cut cruelly short when thelast ethnic-Han dynasty, the Ming, was overthrown in 1644 InEuropean terms, that is like wrangling over a school of fashion thatsupposedly began in Neolithic times and flowered in the MiddleAges, and may or may not have ended during the English civil war

Since the Hanfu movement emerged in the early 2000s, some

members have framed it as a way to restore Han customs pressed by ethnic Manchu warriors who conquered China fromthe north and ruled as emperors of the Qing dynasty from 1644 un-til 1911 Han nationalists scorn such “Chinese” traditions as tight-

sup-fitting qipao dresses or high-collared jackets precisely because

they are derived from Manchu, Qing-era fashions

The visible Hans

At the Xitang festival, it should be said, brooding nationalists areoutnumbered by youngsters having uncool, goofy fun Blushingstudents giggle their way through a lesson in ancient dancing Ear-nest, robe-wearing young men take photographs of each otherplaying the flute or practising archery Children take part in a fash-ion show, swishing perilously along a catwalk in too-long finery.The festival organiser is Vincent Fang Wenshan, a Taiwaneselyricist behind some of the most famous Mandarin pop songs ofrecent times A dapper 49-year-old in black embroidered robes, MrFang urges younger enthusiasts to eschew Han chauvinism and to

be open to modernised Hanfu He sighs that some purists will not

tolerate any dress not found in ancient wall paintings, and draws awistful comparison with Japan, where traditional customs andmodern culture co-exist easily Wearing a kimono on a Japanesebus causes no astonishment, notes Mr Fang, lamenting that a gap

of several centuries separates Han traditional culture from the

modern world He would like to see Hanfu fans bridge that gap.

Historians might quibble with some of Mr Fang’s details Plenty

of Han traditions actually survived under the Qing The country’ssharpest break with tradition came during the first decades ofCommunist rule, when leftist zealotry made it safest to wear blue

and green Mao suits But that is to take the Hanfu movement too

literally, perhaps Look past the invented costumes and the dodgyhistory, and something simpler and more poignant appears: a

Something old, something new

Chaguan

Why young Chinese are sporting 1,800-year-old fashions

38 The Economist January 12th 2019

1

ev-ery hour Soon the police station in

northern Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, was

so full that detainees were flowing onto the

lawn Atif, an activist picked up around

noon on December 31st, says he saw at least

1,000 arrested that day Many were beaten;

others had their hair shaved off Lawyers

and doctors were singled out for insults

Atif is one of tens of thousands of

Suda-nese who have taken to the streets in recent

weeks What began as a riot over the price

of bread in the eastern city of Atbara on

De-cember 19th has billowed across the

coun-try By some estimates, at least 40 people

have been killed by security forces during

nearly 400 protests The government says

it has detained at least 800 people (the real

figure is surely far higher) Yet this has

done little to muffle what is now a

nation-wide uprising against the rule of Omar

al-Bashir and his 30-year-old kleptocracy

The seeds of the current crisis were

sown in late 2017, when the government

announced plans to end wheat subsidies

The aim was to plug a budget deficit

fore-cast to hit almost 5% of gdp this year When

the price of bread doubled a year ago,

trig-gering protests, the government tried to verse course and reintroduced some of thesubsidy But the economy—already strug-gling following the secession of South Su-dan, which took away 75% of Sudan’s oil re-serves, in 2011—has nosedived It shrank byabout 2.3% in 2018 Unable to pay its bills,the government has printed money Infla-tion, at around 70%, is now the secondhighest in the world after Venezuela

re-Ordinary Sudanese face shortages ofbread, fuel and basic medicine “You stand

in line at the bank waiting for cash that willbarely buy you anything,” says Abuzar Os-man, a 28-year-old photographer who wasarrested last month “We now spend ourlives standing in queues.”

Calls for regime change are widespread

District offices of Mr Bashir’s National

Con-gress Party (ncp) have been burned On uary 6th protesters marched on the presi-dential palace to deliver a petition for MrBashir to resign The president, who came

Jan-to power in a coup in 1989 and later wonsome dodgy elections, plans to stand foranother term in 2020 At least eight partieshave withdrawn from the ruling coalition.Can he last? Mr Bashir is no stranger tounrest His regime has fought rebels andcommitted genocide against civilians inthe south and in the Darfur region It hassurvived many protests before Yet the lat-est ones seem to have rattled the regime

Mr Bashir has promised to stop cuttingsubsidies and to increase state spending by39%, partly on higher salaries for publicemployees He has called the protesters

“traitors, sell-outs, agents and saboteurs”.The government has accused rebels fromDarfur of conspiring with Israel to destabil-ise the country Since late December morethan 50 Darfuri students have been round-

ed up and detained in unknown locations.His tactic of blaming Darfuri rebels hashad little success Protesters from the re-gime’s traditional strongholds in Khar-toum and the north have chanted “We areall Darfur” while marching And eventhough the police have shot and arrestedpeople, the demonstrations have shownlittle sign of abating If anything they seem

to be getting better organised The protestmovement is now largely led by the Suda-nese Professionals Association, a coalition

of trade unions including those ing doctors, lawyers and journalists

represent-Some have likened the protests to

Su-Sudan

“We are all Darfur”

K H A RTO U M

Sudan’s genocidal regime is under siege

Middle East & Africa

39 Congo’s election shock

The Economist January 12th 2019 Middle East & Africa 39

2

1

dan’s previous uprisings against military

dictatorships, in 1964 and 1985 Then, too,

middle-class folks helped turn isolated

ri-ots into a broad movement for political

change Both of Mr Bashir’s predecessors

stepped aside once it was clear the army

was backing the protesters But Mr Bashir

may prove harder to dislodge “The army

has been his for 29 years,” notes Alex de

Waal of Tufts University He has a knack for

playing factions against each other Senior

officers may also fear prosecution for war

crimes in Darfur should Mr Bashir go And

he has a formidable spy agency which, for

now, remains loyal

Even so, he is running out of options Inrecent years Sudan has moved away fromIran, an old ally, and grown closer to SaudiArabia and the United Arab Emirates Theirfinancial largesse helped to mask Sudan’seconomic malaise But neither appears in-clined to bail out the regime, perhaps be-cause Mr Bashir is an unfaithful ally (Hehas made overtures to their regional rivals,Turkey and Qatar.) Broke and alone, Mr Ba-shir faces protesters who keep returning tothe streets, despite tear gas and bullets

“The people’s rage is infinite,” says BrahimSnoopy, a film-maker “We don’t knowwhat will happen next.” 7

woman, tears streaming down her

cheeks “We have waited years for this

moment!” Two young girls behind her

gyrated their hips and sang, “Bye-oh

Kabila,” again and again

In the early hours of January 10th,

days after the result was scheduled to be

released, the Democratic Republic of

Congo heard that it had a new

presi-dent—Félix Tshisekedi, the son of a

charismatic opposition leader who died

two years ago Moments after the news

was announced, Mr Tshisekedi walked

out of his office and prayed in front of a

photograph of his father His shrieking

supporters jostled around him He is

popular in the capital, Kinshasa

The declaration marks the end of the

ruling party’s long stay in power and

means that President Joseph Kabila and

his preferred successor must admit

defeat Mr Kabila, who had refused to

step down when his term expired in 2016,

has ruled Congo badly for nearly 18 years

The vast country has never seen a

transi-tion of power via the ballot box All its

former leaders either fled or were killed

The fact that the election went ahead at

all—and that an opposition candidate

was declared the winner—is astonishing

But many voters think they have been

cheated nonetheless Mr Tshisekedi was

not the man tipped to win A respected

Catholic ngo that had deployed 40,000

observers to monitor the election on

December 30th said on January 3rd that

its tallies showed a clear winner

Al-though it did not publicly name him, it

told Western diplomats that Martin

Fayulu, a former oil executive, had won

He also came top, by a wide margin, in a

pre-election opinion poll

The electoral commission’s count was

rather different It said that Mr kedi had won with 7.05m votes Mr Fay-ulu was behind him on 6.37m The un-popular ruling-party candidate,Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, receivedjust 4.36m “These results have nothing

Tshise-to do with the truth at the ballot box,” MrFayulu said in an interview with RadioFrance International “It’s a real electoralcoup, it’s incomprehensible.”

Critics say that Mr Kabila was ate to keep Mr Fayulu away from thethrone because he was backed by two ofthe president’s biggest adversaries(Mọse Katumbi, a businessman, andJean-Pierre Bemba, a former warlord,who were both barred from standing) MrFayulu appeared to represent real

desper-change He had campaigned on a mise to reduce corruption and enforcethe rule of law—an obvious threat tothose who have looted this giant, miner-al-rich country for decades

pro-Mr Tshisekedi, by contrast, is thoughtless likely to shake things up, or to askawkward questions about Mr Kabila’sbusiness empire and the dazzling wealth

of his cronies “The Kabila camp wasnever afraid of Félix,” says Kris Berwouts,the author of “Congo’s violent peace”

“They consider him a weak personality.”

Mr Tshisekedi, for his part, said, “I paytribute to President Joseph Kabila andtoday we should no longer see him as anadversary, but rather, a partner in demo-cratic change.”

The election result will surely becontested France has queried it How-ever, the declaration of an oppositioncandidate as winner may give regionalbodies such as the African Union enough

of an excuse to call it free and fair Congobadly needs a change But this was notwhat most voters had in mind

The Kinshasa surprise

Congo’s election

K I N S H A S ACongo unexpectedly announces that an opposition leader has won the election

on January 7th a small group of juniorarmy officers seized the national radio sta-tion in Gabon, an oil-rich country in cen-tral Africa, and declared a coup They saidthey were motivated by the “pitiful sight”

of Ali Bongo Ondimba, Gabon’s 59-year-oldpresident, delivering a televised addressfrom Morocco, where he has been conva-lescing since November after suffering astroke The attempt to unseat him wasshort-lived: by midday, most of the coup-plotters had been rounded up and the gov-ernment was back in control

The drama in Gabon is a throwback tomore turbulent times Coups have becomerarer across Africa—a sign that basic demo-cratic norms are more widespread thanthey were But checks and balances onpresidential power are often still weak, somany African leaders have been able tocling to office far longer than is possible inmore competitive polities Five have died

in office since 2010—all of natural causes.Seven of the current crop have been in pow-

er for over two decades Mr Bongo, whoseprevious jobs include minister of defenceand funk singer, has been in power for onlyten years, but his family has run Gabonsince 1967; he inherited the top job whenhis father died

Mr Bongo is not the only African dent who rules from his sickbed Muham-madu Buhari, Nigeria’s septuagenarianpresident, spent much of 2017 abroad re-covering from an undisclosed illness Lastmonth he was forced to deny that he haddied and been replaced by a body double

presi-He is standing for re-election in February

Coups are getting rarer in Africa, and its presidents’ average age is rising

African presidents

Till death do us part

The old keep hold

Sources: Jonathan M Powell; press reports

Africa Presidents’ age Average, years

Coups

By decade

45 50 55 60 65 70

0 10 20 30 40

90s

Failed Successful

40 Middle East & Africa The Economist January 12th 2019

of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, their 81-year-old

autocrat He is rarely seen in public, but

may run for a fifth term this year

In the past such frail leaders would have

made easy pickings for a young upstart

plotting a coup But the most recent

suc-cessful coup in Africa, in which the

Zimba-bwean army deposed 93-year-old Robert

Mugabe in 2017, marks the exception rather

than the rule From 1980 to 2000 there were

38 successful coups in Africa Since then

there have only been 15 This is partly

be-cause presidents have grown more adept at

coup-proofing their regimes Many place

relatives in key roles, keep the army weak

and play factions off against each other

The spread of democracy in Africa has

also helped stave off putsches The African

Union (au) has adopted a policy of “zero

tolerance” towards coups, though it

some-times turns a blind eye if given a

semi-plausible excuse to do so In Zimbabwe, for

example, the generals detaining Mr

Mu-gabe insisted that they were protecting

rather than overthrowing him The au did

not point out that this was an obvious fib

Mr Mugabe was not popular

In other cases, though, the au’s policy

has undoubtedly deterred some coups, andhelped to foil others In Burkina Faso, forinstance, it played a big role in forcing sol-diers to hand power back to civilians afterthey deposed the president in 2015

The decline in coups is a good thing Butpolitical competition for the top spot is stillconstrained Most African countries havepresidential term limits But since 2000ten countries’ leaders have simply changedtheir constitutions to stay in power Omaral-Bashir, Sudan’s ruler since 1989, recentlysaid he would follow suit, even as his gov-ernment tear-gassed protesters

As a result, the average age of Africa’spresidents has risen steadily, from 52 in

1980 to 66 today This is not just because tocrats are living longer In noisy democra-cies, too, political parties are often domin-ated by older figures who are reluctant toleave the limelight Mr Buhari’s main chal-lenger in elections next month is also over

au-70, and has run for president four times fore Tunisia democratically replaced a 69-year-old president with an 88-year-old in

be-2014 The continent’s greying leaders are in

no hurry to leave, a sentiment expressedfunkily by Mr Bongo in his 1977 song “I

Amer-ica is being ripped off “We have spent

$7trn—trillion with a T—$7trn in the

Mid-dle East,” he told a crowd last year,

exagger-ating slightly “You know what we have for

it? Nothing Nothing.” To right this

per-ceived wrong, Mr Trump has long favoured

seizing Iraq’s oil But after he hinted at the

idea with the Iraqi prime minister (who

de-murred), his aides admonished him “We

can’t do this and you shouldn’t talk about

it,” said H.R McMaster, the national

securi-ty adviser at the time, according to reports

Still, Mr Trump may be getting what he

wants from Iraq in other ways

When America reimposed sanctions on

Iran last year it gave some countries extra

time to stop buying Iranian oil before they

would lose access to the American market

Most were given 90-day exemptions In

November Iraq, which shares a long border

with Iran, was given half that time to cut off

electricity and gas imports As it negotiated

for extensions, American companies made

a push for Iraqi contracts In December,

Rick Perry, the energy secretary, led

Ameri-ca’s largest trade delegation to Iraq in over a

decade “It was a quid pro quo,” says an man “You give us priority and we’ll giveyou an exemption.”

oil-The strategy seems to be working eral Electric, an American company, hasmuscled in on a big contract to upgradeIraq’s decrepit electricity grid, which hadbeen earmarked for Siemens, a Germanfirm American companies have alsosigned deals to supply Iraq with grains andpoultry, important Iranian exports Chev-ron and Exxon, American oil giants, haveavoided the inconvenience of a biddingprocess by negotiating directly with Iraq’soil ministry for large concessions A previ-ous Iraqi government put off a decision onExxon’s bid to help boost Iraq’s oil exportcapacity and build a desalination plant

Gen-Now it is said to be a priority

Iraq is more stable, secure and rich than

it has been since America’s invasion in

2003 Having helped to roll back the dists of Islamic State (is), Mr Trump thinksAmerica is owed something for the coun-try’s success Beyond that he is not terriblyengaged with Iraq When he flew there inDecember, Mr Trump wished his troops

jiha-happy Christmas, boasted about givingthem a pay rise, then left—without seeingIraq’s leaders A meeting with Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the new Iraqi prime minister, fellthrough after Mr Trump insisted that hecome to America’s base in the desert west

of Baghdad

Mr Trump’s withdrawal from Syria hassome Iraqis thinking that they could benext to see American troops go On January9th Mike Pompeo, America’s secretary ofstate, tried to reassure them In a meetingwith Mr Abdul-Mahdi (at the prime minis-ter’s office) he discussed continuing Amer-ica’s co-operation with the Iraqi securityforces He also emphasised “Iraq’s energyindependence”, according to a statement.Officials in Iraq interpret such talk as an ef-fort to get it to stop buying gas from Iran—and to start hiring American companies todevelop Iraq’s gasfields

If America’s intention is to prise Iraqaway from Iran, it will have a difficult time.The neighbours get along, for the mostpart, and trade a lot Iraq depends on Iranfor food and power When Iran cut electric-ity to Iraq last summer, for want of pay-ment, southern Iraq over-heated and prot-ests brought down the government.American firms would not be able to re-place the supply from Iran in the shortterm Iranian forces are also helping tokeep Iraq secure from is, which is resurfac-ing in some areas

Bickering between Iraq’s big politicalblocs—the Iran-leaning Fatah and anti-Iranian Saairoun—reflects tussling be-tween America and Iran over the composi-tion of Mr Abdul-Mahdi’s cabinet Thepositions of defence, interior and justiceminister remain vacant A return to insta-bility would imperil America’s contracts.But Mr Trump is happy enough for now InDecember he gave Iraq 90 more days to

Washington is trying to get more out of its relationship with Iraq

America and Iraq

Crude deals over oil

What’s in it for Donald?