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October 08, 2011
October 07, 2011
Economist: Chronic Diseases
Chronic diseases in developing countries
Growing pains
Poor countries are developing the diseases of the rich, with lethal consequences
Sep 24th 2011 | KAMPALA AND NEW YORK | from the print edition
THE Uganda Cancer Institute is on a hilltop with a fine view of the verdant capital, Kampala. But most of its patients are too ill to stand. They have spent their life’s savings for a chance of a cure, but most die within weeks of being admitted. “They come too late,” says Jackson Orem, the clinic’s director.
Of Ugandans who die of cancer, 96% never see a medical practitioner. The country’s health-care system was designed to treat infectious diseases: the institute’s neighbour is a big tuberculosis unit. Non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart and respiratory ailments have not been priorities. Dr Orem’s institute has the only cancer unit for the country’s 34m people. Kidney failure (a result of diabetes) is a death warrant. Uganda has only seven dialysis machines. The cheapest transplant (in India) costs $40,000.
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Time was when people in poor countries were too hungry and hardworking to be obese, could not afford cigarettes and mostly died before the ailments of ripe middle age kicked in. Non-communicable diseases were a rich-world problem. Not any more. Affluence and urbanisation mean new kinds of unhealthy lifestyles. Developing countries already bear more than 80% of the burden of chronic illnesses. Their share will grow—at a time when older diseases are still ravaging the poor. In India over two-fifths of children under five are malnourished, yet obesity is mushrooming. The leader of the main opposition party, Nitin Gadkari, is the latest public figure to be fitted with a gastric band.
Old and new diseases compound each other. Diabetics are three times as likely to contract tuberculosis. Burkitt’s lymphoma, a cancer common in equatorial Africa, is linked to malaria. HIV patients on antiretroviral treatment are at a higher risk of developing diabetes and cancer. Two-thirds of Mr Orem’s cancer patients in Uganda also have HIV. “None of the HIV resources went to cancer—a very big mistake,” he says. Julio Frenk, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, highlights the contradiction between spending thousands of dollars on each patient with AIDS but not offering “pennies” for those with diabetes.
The World Health Organisation expects deaths from non-communicable diseases to rise by 15% between 2010 and 2020, with jumps of over 20% in Africa and South-East Asia. The number of Chinese diabetics is expected to double by 2025. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, chronic illnesses are likely to surpass maternal, child and infectious diseases as the biggest killer by 2030. Most of them stem from sugar, fat, smoke and sedentary lifestyles. But they also include sickle-cell disease, a blood disorder that is the biggest non-communicable killer of Africa’s children. It is easily treatable, but almost always goes undiagnosed.
The countries concerned are woefully unprepared. Their health-care systems are designed for acute problems, not least because that is what foreign donors pay for. Less than 3% of aid for health goes to chronic illnesses. Many patients without health insurance delay treatment until it is too late. Many of the drugs needed are no longer covered by patents, but tariffs, poor distribution and high mark-ups still make them costly and scarce. The demands on health authorities are also greater. The right jab can protect a child for life, but chronic diseases may require lifelong medication. A big cause of diabetes is unhealthy diet—but that stems from a complex overlap between brain chemistry and food-industry practice. Even rich countries find this hard to change.
A feeble response ensures that non-communicable diseases kill people earlier in poor countries than in rich ones. This has a grave impact not just on health, but on growth. According to the World Economic Forum, poor and middle-income countries will lose $7.3 trillion in output from heart disease, cancer, diabetes and lung disease by 2025 (see chart)—an annual loss of about 4%.
So far the world’s response has been to have meetings, most recently a UN summit in New York on September 19th-20th. The only other summit devoted to health was on HIV in 2001. A sense of crisis then brought a decade of dramatic progress. Heart disease does not arouse the same passion. The meeting passed a “political declaration”, but could not agree on targets for reducing non-communicable diseases. The declaration’s wording on drugs was opaque, reflecting stalled negotiations.
With no clear global lead, countries muddle along. Mr Orem’s institute in Kampala spends most of its money on drugs. He says a budget rise from $2.5m to $8m would help to train nurses and improve palliative care. But money is scarce and even the simplest tasks are tricky. It can take a month for a patient outside Kampala to get results from a biopsy.
Ala Alwan of the World Heath Organisation suggests that even simple steps can make a difference, such as reducing salt in foods, offering inexpensive drugs and raising tobacco taxes. This last is perhaps the single best way of curbing cancer and diseases of the heart and lungs, as well as raising money for health care. But James Sekajugo of the Ugandan health ministry says it is hard to fight the tobacco industry: “a very rich group here”. His country is trying to stop cancer before it starts. The ministry is considering spending more on vaccines against cervical cancer, one of the most deadly cancers for women.
Some hope to build on arrangements in place for treating HIV (itself now a chronic condition, not a death sentence). A programme in western Kenya called AMPATH once treated only HIV patients. Now it offers care for those with such illnesses as cancer and diabetes. Its door-to-door screening programme for HIV now tests for blood pressure and blood sugar. America’s PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), is trying to fight HIV by boosting broader health care.
The most sustainable efforts will be those that provide care and make money, too. In India Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Centres, a business, charges middle-class patients to subsidise care for the poor. Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical giant, is testing models for diabetes treatment in countries such as India, South Africa and Brazil (it also provides free insulin to AMPATH in Kenya). Help now, it reckons, and profit later. Novo Nordisk, the world’s biggest insulin manufacturer, is especially ambitious. In China it has given training to doctors and education for diabetics. Last year the firm controlled 63% of China’s insulin market. Now Lars Rebien Sorensen, its chief executive, wants to replicate the programme in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Chronic diseases are already a huge market. Sadly, it is also a growing one.
from the print edition | International
October 04, 2011
September 30, 2011
FT: Lunch with the FT: Shi Yongxin
September 9, 2011 5:17 pm
Lunch with the FT: Shi Yongxin
By Jamil Anderlini
The abbot of Shaolin Temple, labelled as the ‘CEO monk’ by the Chinese media, talks about balancing business and Buddhism
With my iPod headphones plugged in, the abbot of Shaolin keeps his expression perfectly neutral as his eardrums are assailed by the thumping beats of the Wu-Tang Clan.
“I don’t get it,” says Shi Yongxin in his heavily accented Mandarin, after politely listening to the pioneering 1990s rappers from the New York borough of Staten Island who, in homage to kung fu movies of the 1970s, described themselves as coming “straight from the slums of Shaolin”.
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- Lunch with the FT Toby Young
- Video Putting the cash into kung fu
- Lunch with the FT Diego Della Valle
- Lunch with the FT Amanda Staveley
- Lunch with the FT Angelina Jolie
We’re sitting in the restaurant of the Shaolin Temple, a Unesco world heritage site nestled in a wooded valley in the shadow of Mount Song in China’s central Henan province. This small monastery is the 1,500-year-old cradle of Zen Buddhism and the spiritual home of kung fu, where for centuries the temple’s monks have practised martial arts so they can uphold justice in society and cultivate their own search for enlightenment. Outside in the warm sunshine, tourists wander the temple grounds and watch incredible displays of strength and acrobatic kung fu, performed at regular intervals by the world-famous fighting monks.
It’s hard to imagine a place less compatible with the violent tirades of one of hip-hop’s greatest ensembles. But I’m trying to explain to his eminence that, even though he is unaware of the Wu-Tang Clan, many people who came of age in the west in the 1990s first heard about his temple from songs such as “Shaolin Worldwide”, and lyrics such as:
The Jedi, only use the Force if ya force me
Shaolin What? Don’t get it f**ked up and cross me
Rappers gettin’ stuck for actin’ stuck up and flossy
“People tell a lot of tall tales about the Shaolin Temple,” the abbot says with the composed demeanour of the deeply religious. “They are not familiar with and don’t represent the real history of Shaolin, the Shaolin culture or the inherited essence of Shaolin.”
If this sounds accurate in the case of RZA, Ghostface Killah, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan, it is also a criticism that many in China have levelled against the abbot himself. The 46-year-old is a highly controversial figure. Since he became, in 1999, only the 30th monk in the temple’s long history to be ordained a full abbot, he has faced relentless attacks for accepting expensive gifts and for commercialising the ancient temple. For those who denounce him through the Chinese internet, the abbot’s initiatives are a sad reflection of society’s crude materialism in a country where, in the past few decades, the crumbling of communist ideology and the rush for wealth have left a spiritual and moral vacuum.
Buddhism is the dominant religion in China, with as many as 300m believers across the country. Like other forms of Buddhism, Zen emphasises letting go of worldly cares and working towards enlightenment through meditation and practice of the Buddha’s teachings, which include a ban on harming any sentient beings. As its home, and the centrepiece of many kung fu novels and films, the Shaolin Temple has become an integral part of Chinese popular culture. In fact, it is probably one of the most famous global brands to have come out of China in any industry, thanks in no small part to the abbot, whom Chinese media have dubbed the “CEO monk”.
VIDEO
To see a video of the Shaolin Temple and the abbot, go to www.ft.com/shaolin
The temple’s business ventures include investments in its famous globetrotting kung fu performance troupes, renting out the Shaolin name for films, cartoons and stage productions, and an early stage investment in a possible line of traditional Chinese medicines. It has also sent monks to set up more than 40 Shaolin kung fu and meditation centres in countries across North America, Europe and elsewhere, but the abbot says these and most of Shaolin’s other “cultural activities” barely break even. Instead, he says, the vast majority of the temple’s “few dozen million renminbi” in annual income comes from tickets sold to the roughly 2m tourists that visit the site every year. The temple keeps 30 per cent of the ticket revenues and hands 70 per cent over to the local government.
The temple has registered its trademark across the world in an attempt to stop people from using its name to promote concepts that do not fit with its Buddhist precepts. But the main battleground is in China, where intellectual property protections are weak and companies making everything from soft drinks and chopsticks to electrical machinery and buses have appropriated the Shaolin brand. Even liquor producers and makers of pork sausages have taken the name, despite the fact that strict Zen Buddhism prohibits the consumption of meat and alcohol.
The overwhelming number of infringements and the weak protection offered by China’s justice system mean it is simply not worth going after every offender, but the abbot is optimistic that things will change for the better eventually. “Now if we are to engage in a lawsuit to protect our rights, we will have to spend a lot of money and time and the result will not necessarily be satisfactory,” he says. “Once Chinese citizens are like western citizens, in an environment where the awareness of law is firm, people will naturally abandon using the name of Shaolin Temple.” I’m struck by how similar his vocabulary is to that of a typical Chinese chief executive.
Nevertheless, he explains, the creation in 1998 of the Henan Shaolin Temple Industrial Development Company, saw the temple become the first Chinese religious group to register a trademark for its name, “We’re using legal and commercial means to protect our intellectual property, protect our brand and protect our own inheritance,” he says.
The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt many times since it was established in the fifth century and, following the communist victory in 1949 all of its surrounding farmland was confiscated and redistributed among the masses, leaving the monks with no way to feed themselves. In the disastrous cultural revolution of 1966-1976, the monks who remained at the temple were beaten, persecuted and forced to disperse, but when the terror ended some returned and set about reviving their traditions, including the practice of kung fu.
Since his arrival at the temple in 1981, aged 16, the abbot has dedicated his life to its restoration and revival. I get the feeling he has had to make many compromises in order to protect and promote his monastery and its heritage. But, as he points out, the Vatican is a multinational corporation with its own bank, and Shaolin’s annual income doesn’t even put it in the top 100 on the list of richest temples in China.
We wish everyone could lead a simple life and not chase luxury lifestyles in the way the awful nouveau riche do
“We don’t have much savings in the bank but there is a lot of grain stored in the barn, enough for two years, so if there is a disaster in society the Shaolin Temple could hold out for two years or so,” he adds. It is an astonishing insight into the historical legacy that has forced him to hone his business skills.
The menu for our lunch has been arranged by the temple’s veteran chef, and as our waiters arrive with the first dish – a delicate selection of vegetarian morsels called “three treasures to welcome guests”, made from baked bran, pickled radish and dried tofu – the abbot’s phone rings and he reaches into his flowing crimson gown to retrieve a buzzing Samsung mobile. He politely dismisses the person on the other end of the line and I notice his immaculately manicured fingernails and also that his earlobes are unusually large, a physical trait that in China is said to indicate competence and bring good fortune and riches.
As the bowls keep coming, the abbot is careful to point out that he normally eats very plain food. In fact, that morning I had been allowed to attend dawn prayers and join him and his monks for a hearty meal of rice porridge, vegetables and steamed buns, served by trainee monks who couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. At that meal, the abbot sat with the others on wooden benches in silence as they scoffed down their food in less than 15 minutes.
Having spotted his phone, I decide now is the time to ask him about his penchant for gadgets and expensive gifts, including a Volkswagen SUV and an iPad he is often seen using in public. “The Volkswagen is worth less than Rmb 1m [£98,000] and it was given to me by the local government because we have brought them a lot of profits,” he tells me with only the slightest hint of exasperation breaking through his Zen composure. “We attract a lot of visitors and students so the government awarded me a car to encourage me to do a better job.”
He says the iPad and other gadgets are all gifts from devotees but that he tries to use such things until they are broken and unusable before replacing them. “I’m not doing what I do for other people but for society, for the masses; it’s not for me personally or for the local government but if there is a need in society or among the ordinary folk, then I should do what I can.”
Samadhi restaurant
Shaolin Temple,Henan Province, China
‘Three treasures to welcome guests’: with bran, pickled radish and shredded dried tofu
‘Vegetarian shark fin soup’: with pumpkin and bean flour noodles
‘Rose salad roll’: spring rolls with melon, radish and vegetarian ham
‘Floating fragrance in a Buddhist pot’: with cabbage and tofu
‘Blossoming smile of enlightenment’: with fried eggplants, tofu, vegetables
’Buddha jumps over the wall with Zen in his heart’: oily soup with ginseng, mushrooms, wolfberry
Set menu price: approx £80 per person
(After negotiations that lasted almost an hour, I was allowed to pay the bill, as per the rules of the Lunch with the FT. This was a breach of Chinese etiquette but the transgression was eventually forgiven)
We tuck into a dish of cabbage and shredded dried tofu with the delightful name of “floating fragrance in a Buddhist pot” but I notice that the abbot is hardly touching his food. The mention of his dealings with the local government is an illustration of the difficult relationship in China between organised religion and the officially atheist ruling Communist party. The Chinese government only recognises five official religions – Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism – and requires that these be organised into institutions supervised by “patriotic associations”, in turn supervised by the State Administration for Religious Affairs and the Communist party’s United Front department.
Other world religions, such as Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism or Baha’i, are not recognised by Beijing, and nor are countless underground Catholic and Protestant “house churches”. The government tends to tolerate much of this “unofficial” religious activity as long as it is a private matter, but any hint of political organisation will bring a crackdown.
The Shaolin abbot doesn’t need to worry about this. He has been a member of the National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, since 1998 and vice-chairman of the official Buddhist Association of China since 2002. Ordinarily, the abbot and other senior monks at the temple will decide who can be ordained as a monk and the temple will then register them with the provincial religious affairs bureau. But the position of abbot must be directly authorised by the religious affairs authorities, almost all of whom are atheist Communist party members.
I ask his eminence why he thinks he was chosen and his answer is simple: “Because I am obedient. I’m willing to donate myself and serve the people.” To “serve the people” is a traditional communist slogan that regularly trips off the tongue of party bureaucrats. He explains that this subservience of religion to the state has always existed in China and in many other countries as well. “Throughout history it is the same: religion must respect the emperor, respect the government. If a religion doesn’t respect the government, it will have difficulty surviving,” he says. “We have to rely on the government to publicise and promote us. The government has a lot of power and it’s difficult to promote ourselves without it.”
There he goes again, speaking like an executive from a global marketing firm.
As the waiters place a fried eggplant and tofu dish called “blossoming smile of enlightenment” in front of us, I ask him how he responds to the critics who say he is too fond of mixing the sacred and the profane.
“Our aim is to promote Buddhist culture, to baptise human souls and purify people’s minds,” the abbot says. “What we have done so far [in terms of commercialisation] is actually quite conservative because we don’t want to get too mixed up in the affairs of society or over-exploit Shaolin Temple.” He describes how a proposal in 2009 by the local government to list the temple on a domestic or international stock exchange was abandoned after he and the other monks voiced strong objections.
On the abbot’s instructions, the flow of dishes has slowed and most of his plates have been cleared without him tasting more than a spoonful or two. Throughout our lunch it feels as if he is trying to convince me that he is not the materialistic villain he is often portrayed as in China. More than once he mentions the fact that he and each of his monks live a plain existence, normally surviving on just Rmb 7 (70p) per day.
His explanation of the pressures he faces in a modern Chinese society is, however, persuasive. “We hope we can improve the bad atmosphere of modern society through the influence of the Shaolin Temple; over the years we have seen society pollute the earth and overexploit resources and people’s desires continuously grow,” he says. “We wish everyone could lead a simple life like us monks and not chase after famous brands and luxury lifestyles in the way the awful nouveau riche in our country do.”
One of the last dishes is laid in front of us and the abbot breaks into a beatific smile in appreciation at the irony of its name. It is a vegetarian version of “Buddha jumps over the wall”, an oily soup that usually includes meat and seafood and is supposed to taste so good that it can tempt even devout monks to jump the monastery wall and renounce their monastic vows.
“See, that shows you how open and sympathetic Chinese Buddhism is,” he says. “In other cultures or religions, if somebody used this kind of name for such a sacrilegious dish there would be a huge fight.”
Coming from a religion where monks who have sworn not to harm sentient beings wield swords and practise cracking skulls with their fists, this too is persuasive. For the abbot, temporal dealings – including business – appear merely a necessary diversion on the path towards enlightenment.
Jamil Anderlini is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief
Timeline: A brief history of the Shaolin Temple
AD495 Shaolin Temple (literally “temple in the forests of Shaoshi mountain”) is built by Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei dynasty as a place for the Indian monk Batuo to live, translate Buddhist scriptures and preach to his followers.
AD618-907 A band of 13 Shaolin monks is reputed to have saved the life of the future Tang dynasty Emperor Li Shimin. When Li took power, he showered favours, land and wealth on the temple and it experienced a golden age.
1368-1644 During the Ming dynasty, the temple houses more than 3,000 monks. It declines under the Manchurian Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
1928 Chinese warlord Shi Yousan attacks the temple and a fire rages for 40 days, destroying nearly all relics and records. Despite having been looted, burned and destroyed many times over the centuries, the temple has only been abandoned – briefly – in the seventh and tenth centuries.
1950s-1970s The temple’s lands are seized during the communist land redistributions and most monks driven away. During the cultural revolution that follows, the handful of monks who remain are beaten and persecuted or forced to renounce their vows.
1981 Shi Yongxin, born Liu Yingcheng, arrives at the Shaolin Temple to train as a monk.
1987 Begins running the temple after the previous abbot’s death. In 1998, he is selected as a representative to the National People’s Congress, China’s rubberstamp parliament.
1999 Ordained as the temple’s abbot.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
September 23, 2011
Economist: Malaysia
Banyan
The haze and the malaise
Ethnic politics makes Malaysia’s transition to a contested democracy fraught and ugly
Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition
SKYSCRAPERS and lampposts in Kuala Lumpur are still festooned with flags left over from independence day festivities at the end of August. Fittingly, this week they were shrouded in the annual “haze” of smog from forest fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Malaysia’s politicians are not in the mood to celebrate nationhood and unity. Rather, with an election in the offing, everything is a chance for political point-scoring.
That includes independence itself. One huge banner in the centre of the capital shows the country’s six prime ministers since the British left in 1957, with the incumbent, Najib Razak, in the foreground, gazing into a visionary future. All six hailed from the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which has led the “Barisan Nasional” (BN) coalition government ever since 1957. Some opposition politicians now complain that the official narrative of Malaysia’s history ignores the role of non-UMNO freedom fighters. Since the most recent general election, in March 2008, the opposition has had a real chance of winning power. For the first time since independence in 1957, the BN lost its two-thirds majority in Parliament that allowed it to amend the constitution on its own. No longer a one-coalition state, the opposition argues, Malaysia has to rethink its own history.
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The next election is not due until 2013. But, out of tradition and political calculation, Mr Najib is expected to call it earlier—and to win it. Some think it could come this year, after a generous government budget in October. A crowded calendar of regional summitry makes that awkward, and Mr Najib has other reasons for delay. Since he took over in 2009, he has launched a plethora of initiatives to improve Malaysians’ lives and a “Performance and Delivery Unit” to implement them. Results take time.
Three factors, however, argue for a hasty dash to the polls. The first is that Mr Najib, who took over UMNO and the prime ministership after the BN’s unprecedentedly poor showing in 2008, still had an approval rating of 59% in a recent survey. That is well below his initial popularity, however, and he will not want to mimic Britain’s Gordon Brown in delaying too long before seeking his own mandate. Second, economic storm clouds are gathering in the West. Malaysia’s economy is still growing at over 4% a year, but is vulnerable to a downturn in external demand.
Third, the opposition coalition is in some disarray. Its figurehead, Anwar Ibrahim, is on trial for sodomy, illegal in Malaysia, and many expect him to go back to jail soon, as he did (for the same alleged offence) in 1998. He is a divisive figure. But without him, there is no obvious opposition candidate for prime minister. The president of his party is his wife, and its most impressive politician is his 30-year-old daughter, Nurul Izzah. The other components of the coalition are the Democratic Action Party, which draws its support from the Chinese minority, and an Islamic party known as PAS, whose religious conservatism alienates many liberal Malays. So there is even talk of a revival of the prime ministerial ambitions of Razaleigh Hamzah, a veteran UMNO rebel, as an opposition rallying point.
The government helpfully provided another rallying point with its cack-handed crackdown on an NGO-led protest in Kuala Lumpur in July calling for electoral reform. Mr Najib has since agreed to a parliamentary committee to look into the demands, which are mostly unexceptionable: to clean up voters’ lists, allegedly swollen with “phantoms”; to extend the election-campaign period, at present just seven to nine days; to tighten up the postal-vote system; and so on. But he has not agreed to postpone an election until after the committee has ruled.
Whatever technical reforms are made before the next election, it will still be dominated by the original sin of ethnic discrimination set out in the country’s 1957 constitution. This was designed to allay the fears of the majority ethnic-Malay population of being marginalised by Chinese and Indian minorities, which now make up respectively 23% and 7% of the population of 28m. Perks, much extended after race riots in 1969 (still often referred to in Malaysia as if they happened yesterday), gave Malays privileged access to public-sector jobs, university places, stockmarket flotations and government contracts.
Both government and opposition talk of dismantling these privileges, which have contributed to corruption and large-scale emigration. Mr Najib has indeed started tinkering with Malay privileges, much to the outrage of the UMNO right and a vocal Malay-rights ginger group known as Perkasa. Ibrahim Ali, Perkasa’s front man, argues that, with the Malay vote split, the minorities have disproportionate electoral power, to which the mainstream parties pander.
Malay power
That is nonsense. As elections loom, it is the Malay voter whose opinion matters, and he is assumed to resent any effort to curtail his privileges. And that means that both coalitions have to resort to defending the indefensible: a system in which families that have lived in Malaysia for generations are told to tolerate discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, to bolster allegedly fragile racial harmony. Malays and minorities alike lament that the races are living increasingly separate lives—studying in different schools, eating different foods and going to different parties. The divide is further widened as more Malays, who, constitutionally, are all Muslims, become religiously conservative.
The Malaysian malaise stems from the congruence of two seemingly conflicting trends. One is the healthy development of pluralist competition in a system that had seemed stuck for ever in an UMNO-dominated quasi-democracy. The other is the sharpening of ethnic and religious dividing lines. It is alarming that, instead of seeing competitive politics as a way of bridging the ethnic divide, too many Malaysian politicians see the ethnic divide as a way of winning the political competition.
from the print edition | Asi
Economist: Military Matters; Conscription, Grief, National Sentiments
Conscription
A farewell to arms
Military service lingers in countries that are poor or small, but elsewhere it is on the way out
Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition
Your country needs youPERKY breasts and fluttering eyelashes may no longer help Thailand’s famed ladyboys (pictured) to avoid the draft. The top brass has just requested the removal of the “permanent mental disorder” label that usually bars transsexuals and transvestites from being conscripted. The army is ready. It says “Type 1” men are normal, “Type 2” have surgically enhanced breasts, and “Type 3” have had a full sex change.
Thailand is one of some 70 states, mostly people-rich and cash-poor, that retain conscription. But the subject arouses strong emotions in other countries. After last month’s riots in Britain, tabloid papers and some politicians said restoring conscription would bring alienated and rowdy youngsters into line. Elsewhere, official enthusiasm can be ferocious. In April an Egyptian military court gave Maikel Nabil, a blogger, three years in jail for insulting the military. Among other causes, he campaigned against conscription.
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Newly independent South Sudan is a rare example of conscription being introduced (in the hope of supplanting private militias). But the big picture is one of retreat. Even 200 years ago, economists such as Adam Smith and the German Johann von Thünen denounced conscription: the latter blamed it for fuelling Napoleon’s recklessness in Russia. More recently two economists, Panu Poutvaara and Andreas Wagener, said making young people become soldiers was as odd as “forcing all citizens to work as nurses, heart surgeons or teachers.” Their research on members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (a rich-country club) over the 40 years since 1960 concludes that conscription hampers growth.
Making youngsters forfeit part of their productive or educational potential can depress an economy just as heavy government debt or high income taxes do. But people may eventually get some benefit (such as pensions) from sacrificing cash. When the young give up their time, the compensation is harder to quantify. Another study found that Britain’s two-year national service (which ended in 1960) cut later earnings by between 5% and 8%.
Conscription has withered recently, especially in Europe. Germany, Sweden and Serbia have scrapped it within the past year, following Italy, Spain and Poland earlier in the decade. Its heyday, says Christopher Donnelly, a former NATO official now at the Institute for Statecraft and Governance, a think-tank, came when “labour was cheap and when you knew what you were fighting against”. For most rich countries now, warfare is expeditionary and high-tech; lightly trained conscripts are not much use for this.
Universal military duty still makes sense for small countries like Israel that may need to fight all out for national survival. More than 80% of Finns backed it in a recent survey. In neighbouring Estonia (also hard bitten by history) support is well over 90%, says Luukas Ilves, a defence ministry official. He recently finished military service himself (raising eyebrows in Russia, where conscription is only for the hapless: Mr Ilves’s father is Estonia’s president). At the start, he says, “you do a lot of push-ups; an angry drill-sergeant wakes you at 6am; you eat mess-hall food.” But it all helps to integrate Estonia’s Russians and gives conscripts “a sense of proprietorship” about the country.
In societies divided by language, ending conscription means losing such benefits. It can mean other costs too: German charities lament that young men no longer do community service to avoid the army. Research in France, which began phasing out conscription in 1996, suggests that male educational achievement fell: people used to dodge the draft by going to university. A tax on the time of the young, paid in lost earnings or education, may indeed have good side-effects. Whether these are worthwhile, and if military service is the best way to create them, are questions for politicians, not economists.
from the print edition | International
Britain and its war dead
Grief, and its consequences
Sep 8th 2011, 17:43 by Bagehot
FOLLOWING on from my previous blog posting, here is this week's print column:
PUBLIC grief can be hard to express in a holiday town, built around the promise of heedless fun. Yet late last month, the seaside resort of Weymouth put on a remarkable, heartfelt homage to James Wright, a 22-year-old local man killed fighting in Afghanistan. Mourners report, with pride, how the town’s main church was filled to capacity by his family, school friends and neighbours, as well as by his comrades from the Royal Marines. Several hundred more people gathered outside.
Military traditions were observed. A Royal Marine firing party offered a three-gun salute, a bugler the Last Post. Elsewhere though, the personal and the informal reigned. A cannon fired from a Victorian fort on Weymouth Bay signalled a minute’s silence throughout the town, organised not by the authorities but by a caretaker at Marine Wright’s former secondary school. Further calls for quiet were broadcast at Morrisons supermarket and at the town’s department store. Along the faded Regency seafront, souvenir stalls halted trading, led by staff at a sweet shop where Marine Wright once worked. Oblivious to the grieving around them, tourists chattered, some—it is said—thinking that the cannon’s boom marked a lifeboat launch. Townsfolk lined the pavements in silence, in places three or four deep. Later, the funeral procession was applauded by those along its route.
In Britain, public sympathy for the military has not been this intense for many years, arguably since the Falklands conflict of 1982. It was headline news in late August when hearses bearing casualties of the Afghan conflict stopped driving down the high street of Wootton Bassett, a market town that for four years has saluted the war dead with tolling bells and flag-bearing veterans. The prime minister, David Cameron, thanked Wootton Bassett on the nation’s behalf, and vowed to monitor whether mourning families felt welcome on a new route to be used by funeral cortèges (chosen after a change of the airbase used for repatriations).
Set against that intense support for the troops, polls consistently show the British opposed to the war in Afghanistan (though only a minority want the troops home immediately, with a larger number hoping for a swift-ish exit that denies the Taliban total victory). A 2011 poll by YouGov found the “cost in human lives” the top reason for opposing the war.
A single column cannot offer a scientific survey of this phenomenon. Nor can it offer adequate memorial to Marine Wright, by all accounts a remarkable athlete, soldier and family man, whose death stunned friends who thought him “invincible”. Instead, hopefully, some broad hints can be drawn from the response of one southern English town to a military death (the 378th in Afghanistan since 2001).
Graham Winter is mayor of Weymouth and the neighbouring isle of Portland, and he taught James Wright at primary school. Mostly, he ascribes the turnout at the marine’s funeral to the young man’s popularity and high profile in a small community. But he also notes a trend of rising attendance at veterans’ events. There were large crowds at a homecoming parade in July for Royal Tank Regiment troops back from Afghanistan. The underlying cause, he suggests, is growing awareness of the dangers faced by troops overseas, rammed home by press reporting. That awareness should not be confused with endorsement of government policies, the mayor says: if asked why troops were in Afghanistan, many “would find it hard to answer”.
On the Esplanade, Hazel Coleman, a sixth-form student with a part-time job at a souvenir shop, observed the minute’s silence for Marine Wright. But she says—not unreasonably—that the war has “gotten more complicated over the years”, so she only “vaguely” knows why troops are still in Afghanistan. To her, the public mood is “about respect, and people dying”.
The Wootton Bassett effect
During interviews in Weymouth, the example of Wootton Bassett comes up a lot. Locals needed no persuasion to organise a minute’s silence, says the school caretaker behind the tribute, Geoff Bright. But, he admits, there was a sense of: “If Wootton Bassett can do it, so can Weymouth, no getting away from it.”
Whatever the model is, it is not Falklands Britain. Trawl through archive copies of the local newspaper, the Dorset Evening Echo, covering the period of that conflict, and a barely-recognisable country swims into view. In 1982 deaths are reported briskly, and upper lips are still stiff. Opening a large Falklands homecoming fete, a naval officer declares tersely: “I wish you could have seen how our chaps behaved under not ideal circumstances.” Returning troops are greeted with a mixture of amateurish cheer, bunting and alcohol: there are endless reports of “champagne welcomes”, an improbable “sherry reception” for commandos, and—in Dorchester—1,000 free pints of beer.
Three decades on, a new tolerance for public emotion has strict limits, however. One of Marine Wright’s former teachers, now retired, caused anger by telling local reporters that, as well as pride, he also felt sorrow at a “futile waste of a young life”. A “totally inappropriate” comment, retorts a serving school colleague.
Yet if the current public mood is patriotic, it is not deferential. Phil Thomas, headmaster of Marine Wright’s old school, senses local communities sending a message to the government: “We are recognising these individuals, they are dying on your behalf, make sure you have your policies right.”
Such talk alarms British military commanders. They yearn for public support for the troops, not sympathy, and fret about a debilitating focus on individual losses. A visit to Weymouth suggests they are too late. Overt grief is part of life now, stoked by a public and media hungry for human interest. Will it make future wars harder to fight? Probably. But there is no going back.
September 22, 2011
FT: Vietnam sees more women filing for divorce
September 5, 2011 3:50 pm
Vietnam sees more women filing for divorce
By Ben Bland in Hanoi
Just a few months after getting married, Nguyen Thu Trang knew that she had made a big mistake. But, in a Confucian society that places a high value on female obedience to men, she was fearful about how her family and friends would react if she sought a divorce.
“Divorce is often seen as a black mark on a family and I worried about what people would say,” says the 24-year-old office worker from Hanoi. “When I told my mum what I wanted to do she cried every day, but I had to think of my own happiness.”
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Ms Trang, who went to university in Switzerland, is one of a rapidly growing number of young, professional Vietnamese women filing for divorce, emboldened by increasing financial independence and the shifting social values that have accompanied communist Vietnam’s integration into the global economy. She has since remarried and subsequently helped a number of her friends pluck up the courage to leave unhappy marriages.
In many Asian countries, divorce rates have been rising as women become more economically independent and more willing to challenge traditional, socially conservative values.
In China, the divorce rate has doubled in less than a decade, rising from 0.9 per 1,000 people in 2002 to 2 per 1,000 people last year, according to government statistics cited in the state media
Vietnam has also seen a particularly sharp rise in the number of divorces, which have increased by nearly 50 per cent since 2005, when legal reforms made it easier for couples to divorce in cases where there is mutual consent. While marriage remains the dominant social unit in Vietnam with 72.7 per cent of people aged over 15 married or widowed and only 1.7 per cent divorced, that figure is rising.
There were 88,591 divorces last year in the country of 87m people, according to the supreme court, a rapid increase from 79,769 in 2009 and 65,351 in 2008.
This nascent social transformation is being driven by women, who make up the majority of divorce petitioners, with economic pressures, lifestyle differences, adultery and abuse cited as the main causes, according to social researchers.
“Traditionally, Vietnamese women were expected to accept what befalls them,” says Tran Thi Van, assistant representative of the UN Population Fund in Vietnam. “But changes in their status and income have made modern Vietnamese women more independent and less influenced by tradition.”
Rapid economic growth has created more opportunities for women to earn a good independent income, especially in urban areas, where divorce is far more prevalent.
“Many of the cases I see involve younger people,” says one divorce lawyer. “Our open economy and society is leading to more westernised thinking.”
He adds that while many Vietnamese men seek respite from a difficult marriage by visiting a brothel, for women the only way out is through divorce.
The jump in the number of cases is flooding Vietnam’s inefficient court system and the government is considering a proposal to set up dedicated family courts, according to a legal official.
In one recent high profile divorce, a court in Hanoi refused to rule on how one of the country’s wealthiest couples should divide their $500m of assets, arguing that judgment should be made in a separate civil case.
Researchers believe that the scale of marital problems in Vietnam is much worse than the official statistics suggest because enduring discrimination deters many women from leaving unhappy and sometimes abusive marriages.
“Like with many of my friends, my husband cheats on me all the time but my mother says it is my own fault for not satisfying him and that I must keep the family together,” says one 32-year-old Hanoi businesswoman and mother of two.
Vietnam’s socially conservative and overwhelmingly male leaders are concerned about the jump in divorce numbers, one of various social changes that threaten to undermine traditional control structures. In a typical example of government propagandists’ attempts to tackle the issue, local state-owned TV in the province of Hung Yen, bordering Hanoi, aired a talk show entitled “How to reduce the divorce rate” to mark Vietnamese family day on June 28.
However, Nguyen Thanh Tam, a researcher at the Hanoi-based Institute for Family and Gender Studies, thinks officials are wrong to push back against divorce.
“It won’t lead them anywhere,” she says. “How can you tell a 30-year-old to stay in a marriage when it has stopped functioning?”
Rather than undermining Vietnam’s progress, Vo Thi Hao, an outspoken writer, argues that the growing cohort of empowered, divorced women will drive the country forward.
“After divorce, women with a good education, a career and a good social network do much better because they are freed,” says the 55-year-old divorcee, who wrote a popular collection of short stories called 101 Stupid Mistakes by Men. She believes the divorce rate will continue to rise sharply as traditional social values ebb away.
“Many of my friends say that staying in an unhappy marriage is like unpaid prostitution,” she says. “In Vietnam today, if it wasn’t for fears about the harm to personal reputation, up to 80 per cent of women would file for divorce”.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
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