News In Asia
India
India hosted the G20 summit in New Delhi in September, bringing to an end its year-long presidency of the multilateral club. During the conference, the US, India and the Gulf States announced a plan to build a new trade route to rival the Chinese Belt and Road. The Indian government also trialled an alternative name for the country – Bharat.
India-Canada relations are in crisis after the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, citing US intelligence reports, claimed that agents of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s spy agency, were behind the assassination of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia. Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who had become a Canadian citizen, was gunned down in a parking lot in March. He was a prominent advocate for the creation of a separate Sikh state, Khalistan. The crisis threatens to draw in the US, which has been cultivating an alliance with India, and Britain, as both Canada and India are members of the Commonwealth.
Kerala, in southern India, is dealing with a sudden outbreak of Nipah virus. The disease, which comes from bats, has a 75% fatality rate, and can spread asymptomatically. Its initial symptoms are similar to Covid.
China
The two-year saga of beleaguered property developer Evergrande, the world’s most indebted company, continued. The company, founded in 1996, had borrowed heavily to build thousands of apartment complexes, many of which were sold but never finished. Thousands of its customers have since found themselves paying mortgages for non-existent homes. The company first defaulted on its debts in 2021, triggering a rolling crisis in the country’s massive real-estate sector. A huge chunk of Chinese wealth is held in property, and there are fears of international financial contagion on the scale of the 2008 meltdown should Evergrande, or its equally troubled competitor Country Garden, collapse. The company’s chairman and senior executives are reported to have been arrested, as the central government has stepped in to try and prevent a fiscal implosion.
The 19th Asian Games opened in the eastern city of Hangzhou. So far, Chinese teams have dominated the league tables, bringing home 105 gold medals, to Japan’s 26 and South Korea’s 25. In a break with tradition, the opening ceremony relied on digital effects rather than fireworks, meaning that those gathered outside the stadium to watch had to do so on their phones instead. The games will close on 8th October.
Typhoon Haikui hit the southern coast. In Maoming, a small city in Guangdong province, at least seventy crocodiles broke loose from a farm during flooding and swam around a residential neighbourhood. They were quickly recaptured.
Two builders in Shanxi province, northern China, drove their bulldozer through part of the Great Wall to get to work faster. Archaeologists have determined that the damage is irreparable, and the pair have been detained.
East Asia
Travis King, an American soldier who dramatically absconded to North Korea by charging across the DMZ in July, has been expelled by the secretive country. King, 23, was facing disciplinary charges in the US after serving time in a South Korean prison for a drunken rampage in downtown Seoul. As part of a deal brokered by the Swedish embassy, King was transferred to Chinese authorities, who then delivered him to the US embassy in Beijing. He is being held at an American base in Japan while the Army decides what to do with him. King has not been charged with desertion, as psychologists have yet to determine if he is mentally fit to stand trial.
Japan is considering the creation of English-speaking special business zones in Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo and Fukuoka to encourage international investment and attract foreign asset management firms. The scheme, which will see administrative procedures being carried out exclusively in English, alongside the slashing of red tape and the lowering of corporate taxes, is hoped to help Japan compete with Hong Kong and Singapore. Both have successfully leveraged low taxes and English-speaking populations to become financial powerhouses.
Southeast Asia
Indonesia hosted the annual ASEAN summit in Jakarta. The bloc, which has maintained peace in ‘the Balkans of Asia’ for thirty years, faces increasing challenges, particularly from a failure to solve the ongoing civil strife in Myanmar. Its members, most of whom are neutral, are also finding it more difficult to maintain their positions in the face of US-China tensions. US President Joe Biden skipped the summit, sending his deputy Kamala Harris in his place. The vice-president, who is almost as prone to gaffes as her boss, confused North and South Korea during her keynote speech, praising her country’s ‘very important relationship with the Republic of North Korea’.
Biden instead flew to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, for talks with the country’s ruling Communist Party. American strategists have been attempting to build an alliance with Vietnam for nearly a decade as a counterweight to Chinese ambitions. Although the visit was meant to project confidence in the United States, the increasingly frail president – thought to be running again in 2024 – did not help matters when he went off-script during a question-and-answer session with friendly journalists. Translators were left momentarily baffled when he deployed a favourite phrase of his, ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’, in a discussion about climate change. Asked if he planned to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping, he abruptly responded ’I tell you what, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed now’. Aides then cut off his microphone, and began playing light jazz before ushering him off stage – still talking.
A cult headed by a man claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ has taken over a remote island in the Philippines, where it is said to be holding nearly 1500 children hostage. There have been allegations of widespread sexual abuse by the cult’s diminutive leader, Jey Rence B Quilario, and his deputies, who have organised their roughly 3000 followers into a well-armed militia.
Central Asia
Prosecutors in Switzerland have charged Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of former Uzbek strongman Islam Karimov, with multiple counts of corruption, and accuse of her of operating a vast transnational crime syndicate between 2005 and 2013 that laundered money and solicited bribes in Uzbekistan, Russia, Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands, the US and the UK as well as in Switzerland. Karimova, who once owned $20 million worth of luxury property in London, play-acted as a socialite, fashion designer and pop singer before being imprisoned in 2014 after a change of government in the former Soviet state. She remains in prison in Uzbekistan, and it is not clear if she will be extradited.
The Russian military is apparently recruiting soldiers from Nepal, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to make up numbers for its war in Ukraine and stave off the need to call a general mobilisation. Russia has suffered somewhere between 80,000 and 300,000 casualties since invading Ukraine in February 2022, and has long sought to outsource the worst of the fighting – initially to regular battalions drawn from minority regions like Buryatia, and latterly to the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, many of whom were violent prisoners who had been promised their freedom in exchange for six months at the front line. However, Wagner has been stood down since a short-lived rebellion in June, and its two leaders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, were killed in a plane crash last month. This may explain the drive to recruit foreigners. The Nepalis appear to be contractors who freely enlisted; many of the Central Asians are thought to be press-ganged migrant workers, or prisoners offered the same deal as Wagner’s troops. A handful of Cubans have also turned up in Ukraine, claiming to have been duped into service.