Smart Reads January 9, 2012

January 9, 2013 2:39 pm by Amie Tsang
  • Chinese miners are flocking to Ghana, but the shooting of a 16-year-old Chinese boy has highlighted the environmental and social tensions in Africa’s second biggest gold producing country.
  • Zombie businesses propped up by government-backed bank loans often spend all their cash servicing debt, prompting fears that a lack of “creative destruction” could be holding back growth in Europe.
  • Sebastian Mallaby argues in today’s comment pages that rising productivity and “insourcing” mean there is a possibility of the US following in Sweden’s steps with a manufacturing revival.
  • Chinese Communist party officials and rebel editors from the Southern Weekend newspaper reached a tentative compromise on Tuesday night in their stand-off over censorship.
  • Evan Osnos has given some thought to how this particular act of censorship escalated into protests and what it means for China.
  • The post-Fukushima cleanup has been criticised for its sloppiness — explaining the lack of specialists and foreign companies involved, the deputy director at the environment industry said, “Even if a method works overseas, the soil in Japan is different… And if we have foreigners roaming around Fukushima, they might scare the old grandmas and granddads there.”
  • Meanwhile Japan and China are in an escalating arms race as they expand their drone programmes in efforts to assert dominance over the East China Sea.
  • The UN is also planning to deploy a fleet of surveillance drones, as part of its peacekeeping operations.
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Posted in China, Foreign affairs, Global economy, Japan, Smart Reads, World affairs |
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