Grito de Dolores (declaration of independence from Spain)
As we approach the U.S. national holiday on 4 July, here's a reminder of another national holiday.
Each year on the night of September 15, the President of Mexico rings the bell of the National Palace in Mexico City and repeats a cry of patriotism based upon the "Grito de Dolores," ending with the threefold shout of ¡Viva México!
On the morning of September 16, or Independence Day, the national military parade starts in the Zócalo, passes the Hidalgo Memorial and ends on the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s main boulevard.
Similar celebrations occur in cities and towns all over Mexico.
As we approach the U.S. national holiday on 4 July, here's a reminder of another national holiday.
Russia Day, 12 June, celebrates the declaration of sovereignty in 1990, but Russian Army Victory Day (May 9) is still a bigger celebration. It marks the end of World War II and victory over Germany.
As we approach the U.S. national holiday on 4 July, here's some consideration of other countries' national holidays.
Iran recognizes 1 February as the beginning of 10 days of celebrations all across the country known as "10-Day Dawn", which culminate on 11 February, in ceremonies marking the anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution. (However, in 2010, 11 February was a day of clashes between government forces and protestors in Tehran.)
Sue Witmer who teaches at Northeastern High School in Manchester, PA, pointed out this article which asks about change in Mexico. Instead of asking what's going to happen when the PRI returns to power, Guillermo Trejo asks whether there's a change in political culture taking place.
The writer of this Op-Ed, is an assistant professor of political science at Duke University.
The rise of a social media-based student movement is shaking up Mexico's July 1 presidential race. This is happening just as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI — which ruled for seven decades until its defeat in 2000 — seems poised to return to power.
The movement, led by students from the country's leading private universities in Mexico City, aims to prevent the return of a PRI government and to democratize the mass media. Spreading rapidly throughout the country since May, it already has had a measurable impact, particularly among young voters and independents who represent 30% and 42% of the electorate, respectively…
What is surprising this time is the unprecedented rise of a social movement led by students from Mexico's leading private universities — middle-class and well-to-do students who will land elite jobs after graduation. Movements led by students from public universities historically have been associated with the radical left and have not always enjoyed wide voter support. This movement led by private students, however, seems to be attracting the sympathies of the average voter rather than frightening him or her. Polls show approval rates for the movement ranging from 41% to 47%.
Known as YoSoy132 ("I am number 132"), the movement began as a response to the contentious visit in May by Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI presidential candidate, to the Ibero-American University — a Jesuit school in Mexico City. Calling him "assassin," students harshly reminded the PRI candidate of his poor human rights record while governor of the state of Mexico. His police forces had brutally repressed protesters in a 2006 clash in the city of San Salvador Atenco. He defended his actions then as maintaining law and order, which angered the students, who chased him off campus.
Echoing Mexico's authoritarian past, PRI officials and Televisa — the leading network of Mexico's television duopoly and a close ally of the PRI — called the students professional agitators and accused them of working for the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD. In the 1980s, this type of state response would have discredited the students. But after this incident, 131 Ibero students uploaded a video on YouTube showing their university IDs and condemning the PRI and Televisa for manipulating information. A second video, #YoSoy132, showing students from other private and public universities supporting their 131 Ibero peers appeared shortly after and has gone viral…
The first time I read about too much political participation, I did a double take. Too much participation in a democratic political system? Then I went back and reread that part of the chapter. Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, does a good job of explaining and offering examples of hyperparticipation. It might well complement the textbook your students are supposed to be reading.
TRAVELING in Europe last week, it seemed as if every other conversation ended with some form of this question: Why does it feel like so few leaders are capable of inspiring their people to meet the challenges of our day? There are many explanations for this global leadership deficit, but I’d focus on two: one generational, one technological.
Let’s start with the technological…
The wiring of the world through social media and Web-enabled cellphones is changing the nature of conversations between leaders and the led everywhere. We’re going from largely one-way conversations — top-down — to overwhelmingly two-way conversations — bottom-up and top-down. This has many upsides: more participation, more innovation and more transparency. But can there be such a thing as too much participation — leaders listening to so many voices all the time and tracking the trends that they become prisoners of them?
This sentence jumped out from a Politico piece on Wednesday: “The Obama and Romney campaigns spend all day strafing each other on Twitter, all while decrying the campaign’s lack of serious ideas for a serious time. Yet at most junctures when they’ve had the opportunity to go big, they’ve chosen to go small.”
Indeed, I heard a new word in London last week: “Popularism.” It’s the über-ideology of our day. Read the polls, track the blogs, tally the Twitter feeds and Facebook postings and go precisely where the people are, not where you think they need to go. If everyone is “following,” who is leading?
And then there is the exposure factor. Anyone with a cellphone today is paparazzi; anyone with a Twitter account is a reporter; anyone with YouTube access is a filmmaker… And, if you’re truly a public figure — a politician — the scrutiny can become so unpleasant that public life becomes something to be avoided at all costs…
As for the generational shift, we’ve gone from a Greatest Generation that believed in save and invest for the future to a Baby Boomer generation that believed in borrow and spend for today…
When you have technologies that promote quick short-term responses and judgments, and when you have a generation that has grown used to short-term gratification — but you have problems whose solutions require long, hard journeys, like today’s global credit crisis or jobs shortage or the need to rebuild Arab countries from the ground up — you have a real mismatch and leadership challenge…
Back in 1993, Steven Metz, then Chairman of the Regional Strategy and Planning Department and Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, authored a book titled The Future of Insurgency. The synopsis begins with, "Security professionals and strategists are discovering the post-cold war world is as rife with persistent, low-level violence as its predecessors."
That describes the insurgency in Nigeria very well. Google Boko Haram or search for it in this blog. The leaders of Boko Haram have recently added the idea of secession from Nigeria to their wish list.
The questions that observers have to ask center around the ability of the Nigerian state to combat the insurgency. That, of course, involves issues of capacity, governance, legitimacy, political socialization, and political integration.
In other words, the insurgency of Boko Haram has to be a conscious part of any study of Nigerian government and politics.
A radical Islamist sect unleashed multiple attacks in northeastern Nigeria, killing at least 25 people, authorities said Tuesday as fears swelled about the government's inability to corral rising sectarian violence…
"The terrorists are trying to show that they can't be stopped," said Yobe State police chief Patrick Egbuniwe, who said the dead included three policemen and two soldiers.
The Islamist Boko Haram sect, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the Hausa language, is waging an increasingly bloody fight with Nigeria's security agencies and public. More than 580 people have been killed in violence blamed on the sect this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.
The violence came a day after Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a trio of deadly church bombings Sunday in the northern state of Kaduna, which, along with ensuing reprisal killings, left at least 70 people dead and over 100 wounded…
As China heads toward a once-a-decade change of its top leadership, its vaunted embrace a generation ago of markets and economic openness — which catapulted the country from isolated poverty to its place as a global export powerhouse — is also at a turning point.
After nearly a decade of President Hu Jintao’s focus on strengthening the state, a broad consensus of Chinese economists says the country is overdue for another big push to encourage private enterprise and to foster a shift toward a more consumer-driven economy…
But that seems increasingly unlikely. Publicly controlled enterprises have become increasingly lucrative, generating wealth and privileges for hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and their families. And in a clear sign of its position, the government has moved to limit public debate on economic policy, shutting out voices for change…
Zhang Weiying
Few people illustrate this conundrum better than Zhang Weiying, a 53-year-old Peking University professor who is probably the closest China has to an economic dissident.
A cause célèbre in Chinese economics circles, Mr. Zhang was fired a year and a half ago from his post as dean of the university’s Guanghua School of Management…
“Before 2003, the idea of reform was dominant,” Mr. Zhang said in an interview last month. “Now it’s much harder to make that case.”
Challenging the system, Mr. Zhang contends, has been the key to China’s economic success. Today, he says, that would mean reducing the party’s control over important sectors of the economy...
Mainstream criticism of this trend, however, is limited. A propaganda department directive this year explicitly banned the term “monopoly” to describe state-owned enterprises. Journalists say they regularly have articles kept from publication if they discuss the deadening effect of state control over so many industries.
This contrasts with the first two decades of China’s economic opening, when the overall trend was toward relaxing state control, and pro-market economists were household names.
In 1994, Mr. Zhang co-founded the influential China Center for Economic Research at Peking University. In 1997, he moved to the university’s Guanghua management school and two years later was named dean.
His rise tracked a second era of economic liberalization. Mr. Deng brought in reformers like the now-retired President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji to scale back state control, moves that eventually paid off with China joining the World Trade Organization in 2002.
But when they retired, replaced by Mr. Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, the atmosphere changed. Economic modernization was seen as causing social unrest, which rose steadily during the 2000s. In response, the country put in place a “stability maintenance” apparatus to tamp down criticism…
“They began to speak of the need for a harmonious society,” Mr. Zhang said, referring to the watchword of the era of Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen. “Gradually people said you shouldn’t reform so much because you’re just causing trouble.”…
[There is] a growing belief within China’s leadership that it has little more to learn from the West, especially after the global financial crisis of 2008 and China’s success in riding it out. “We’re suddenly so important,” Mr. Zhang says, with more than a touch of sarcasm in his voice. “Look at America. It has problems. We don’t have problems.” …
As you prepare to pay attention to a presidential election in Mexico, think about the tenuous coalition in London, ponder the transition going on in Beijing, the balancing acts in Abuja, and the infighting in Tehran, do you want another example to offer as a comparison to the other countries your students study?
Following the death of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Nayef, heir to the throne, in new successor will be determined by the king and a family council known as the Allegiance Council.
Defence minister Prince Salman, likely to be named heir apparent.
The council has a representative of each line of the al-Saud ruling family born to King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the kingdom's founder. As well as his surviving sons, it includes his grandsons representing kings and princes who have already died or are not well enough to participate.
It must be headed by the eldest son of the kingdom's founder beside the king or crown prince…
The king nominates one, two or three candidates to become crown prince and the Allegiance Council votes to approve his choice or select one of his nominees. If the council does not find any of his candidates suitable, it can produce its own nominee from the sons or grandsons of Ibn Saud. In a departure from historical practice, the council has the ultimate say on succession instead of the king...
China launched Saturday Shenzhou-9 spacecraft with the country's first female astronaut aboard…
Main tasks of the Shenzhou-9 mission include the manual docking procedure conducted between the Shenzhou-9 and the orbiting space lab module Tiangong-1…
A successful manual docking will demonstrate a grasp of essential space rendezvous and docking know-how, a big step in the country's manned space program to build a space station around 2020...
While it seems that Putin is doing his best to recreate the Soviet system of governance, one of his supporters wants to return even farther into the past. What's next? Tsar Vladimir?
Russia’s new culture minister had already riled liberals who viewed him as the odd monarchist who is also somehow an apologist for Stalin.
Vladimir Medinsky, a best-selling author, then decided to aggravate the Communists, too, when he called for burying Lenin’s preserved corpse and renaming streets after the murdered czar’s family.
Mr. Medinsky, appointed as minister last month, reopened the long, simmering debate about Lenin’s corpse and street names as tensions mounted between the opposition and the government over Tuesday’s rally. His critics said he was aiming to deflect criticism of his appointment…
Mr. Medinsky, 41, has been a government bureaucrat since the 1990s and closely affiliated with the pro-Putin United Russia party for the past decade. He is co-founder of an organization that lobbies for the elimination of Soviet place names, and has said that Russia needs a “real czar.” He was chosen by Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. colonel, who has made repeated efforts to unite the Communists and czarists in Russia...
Reporters are not social scientists. A sociologist would insist on reliable statistics and a representative sample. Thomas Erdbrink, writing in the New York Times, needs only a couple examples and some street level analysis to identify a trend in Iran. Granted, if it is real, the changes are setting the stage for major changes down the road. And that's why the guys in charge of things in Iran are concerned. The question remains: How real is the social change?
There are no official statistics on the number of women living by themselves in big cities in Iran. But university professors, real estate agents, families and many young women all say that a phenomenon extremely rare just 10 years ago is becoming commonplace, propelled by a continuous wave of female students entering universities and a staggering rise in divorces.
The shift has left clerics and politicians struggling to deal with a generation of young women carving out independent lives in a tradition-bound society, away from the guidance of fathers and husbands…
In the not-so-distant past, single women had to endure severe social stigmatization, suspected of having loose morals or dismissed as spinsters who were failing to fulfill their role in life.
But that is changing in the big cities, in large part because of their sheer numbers, but also because of the prevalence of satellite television, social media and cheap foreign travel, many Iranians say, which have helped to change attitudes.
University enrollments have been rising strongly in Iran over the last decade, and women now account for nearly 60 percent of the total. Having raised their horizons in four years of college, many of these women have trouble finding husbands they consider their equals.
In the same period, divorces have increased by 135 percent, forcing society, if not its leaders, to begin to accept single women...
Politicians and clerics are warning that an entire generation is growing up with values that are anathema to the traditional ones upheld by the state.
For those in power, who promote motherhood as a holy virtue, but also see higher education as a nationwide ambition, marriage is the only solution for the growing number of single women…
But the enormous increase in broken marriages, combined with the higher wages that come with a university degree, is allowing many women to redefine success. Increasingly their parents agree.
“To my surprise, my parents also wanted me to live by myself,” said Nazanin, 35. Her above-average income as a manager of a cosmetics company allowed her to rent an apartment after she left her husband because of his drug addiction…
At her work everybody is divorced, said Nazanin, who did not want her family name mentioned for reasons of privacy. She recently moved into a new apartment building where everybody is over 30 and single.
“Society has no option but to accept us,” she said. “I hope the state will follow.”
How… to explain the rise of Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), an insurgent… outfit devoted to Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union? Once a near-irrelevance, UKIP haunts the thoughts of politicians across Westminster. The explanation lies in Mr Farage’s talent for turning both Britain’s voting system and its traditions of pomposity-pricking mockery to his advantage.
UKIP does not need to win a single House of Commons seat at the next general election to have an outsized impact. The party just needs to threaten, credibly, to siphon off enough Conservative votes to deny David Cameron’s party victory in a decisive number of seats: a disastrous fate in a first-past-the-post system…
Battered by grim economic news and a string of government U-turns, the Conservatives are some ten points behind Labour in the polls. Almost two-thirds of Tory voters say that they would like to leave the EU. On the party’s right, the fact that Mr Cameron wants to stay in the union… fuels suspicion that he is not a proper Conservative…
Though UKIP draws some support from the left… recent gains have come disproportionately from Tory ranks…
At a recent public meeting outside Bristol, in south-west England, Mr Farage played the packed room (Tory-faithful types, ranging from pensioners in blazers to brawny small businessmen) like a virtuoso…. Mr Farage told the crowd what it wanted to hear. Britain is run by “college kids”. The dead of two world wars are being betrayed by Westminster politicians “impotent” to defend democracy. Britain has turned its back on its “kith and kin” in the Commonwealth. It is an “outrage” that eastern Europeans can come and claim benefits…
In short, UKIP is trying something ambitious: upbeat protest politics for angry, anti-political voters. Will this achieve Mr Farage’s short-term goal of supplanting the Lib Dems as Britain’s third party? It may not matter. Mr Farage’s real dream is to reshape Britain, by pulling the Conservatives to the right and bouncing Mr Cameron into a referendum on EU membership. If he pulls that off, his insurgency will be no laughing matter.
[The] New York Maternity Center… located in a house on a quiet residential street in Bayside, a leafy neighborhood in New York's borough of Queens, will be filled from May through December, Chen said. It contains nine rooms, decorated with floral wall stickers and framed photos of smiling babies.
"The number of pregnant women coming from China will increase by more than 50 percent, compared with numbers in previous years," [director Nancy] Chen said. "I have received phone calls and e-mails from China almost every day since February. This year is so busy that we don't even need to do any promotion in China."…
Owners of two other maternity facilities in the city report similar increases…
The number of middle-class women from China taking part in "birth tourism" has been on the rise since 2007, when the US government started issuing B-2 non-immigrant visas to mainland Chinese, Chen said. By law, babies born in the US are automatically granted citizenship, even if they do not have relatives living in the country…
Before spreading east to New York, maternity centers like Chen's were mainly in West Coast cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, and most were owned and operated by immigrants from Taiwan.
Aimed at the Chinese mainland market, maternity centers in New York have a choice of packages for pregnant visitors' varying requirements. The cheapest is 90,000 yuan (about $14,000), while the most expensive package costs up to 800,000 yuan ($127,000)…
Two stories from Mexico suggest that the dominant television networks can be bought by politicians and that perhaps there will be more competition for the established networks in the future.
Mexico's biggest television network sold prominent politicians favourable coverage in its flagship news and entertainment shows and used the same programmes to smear a popular leftwing leader, documents seen by the Guardian appear to show…
The documents, which appear to have been created several years ago, include:
An outline of fees apparently charged for raising Peña Nieto's national profile when he was governor of the state of Mexico.
A detailed media strategy explicitly designed to torpedo a previous presidential bid by leftwing candidate Andres Manuel
López Obrador, who is currently Peña Nieto's closest rival.
Payment arrangements suggesting that the office of former president Vicente Fox concealed exorbitant public spending on media promotion…
In a country where newspaper readership is tiny and the reach of the internet and cable TV is still largely limited to the middle classes, Televisa – and its rival TV Azteca – exert a powerful influence over national politics…
Mexico's broadcast regulator is moving to increase competition in television by ordering an auction of two new nationwide channels in a market now dominated by two large networks.
Wednesday's statement from the commission says it will be the first auction of television frequencies in the country's history. It says Mexico is seeking to diversify TV content and offer alternative outlets for information and entertainment.
By many measures, this country has made great strides in recent decades toward becoming a middle-class society, with broader access to education, consumer goods and professional careers that promise upward mobility.
And yet, while prosperity has expanded here, researchers and polling experts say Mexico remains stricken with a form of social poverty that presents a vexing obstacle to the emergence of a more developed, democratic neighbor on the southern U.S. border.
It is a deficit of social trust, characterized by weak levels of confidence in public institutions — police, courts, politicians — but also the erosion of interpersonal trust among neighbors and co-workers.
Mexico’s trust gap is considered especially threatening as the country struggles to keep the corrupting powers of billionaire drug cartels from further undermining democracy and the rule of law. If Mexicans don’t trust police and political leaders, and they’re too wary of fellow Mexicans to join citizen campaigns and social movements, scholars say, there may be no one left to turn to…
Compared with historic, brutal, high-stakes presidential elections here in the past, this has been an important but blah campaign season in Mexico. But recent protests by college students and other young people have added a spark.
Members of the under-25 demographic are calling out the country’s duopolistic media companies and politically cozy broadcasters as propaganda masters and kingmakers — while warning that the front-running candidate, the telegenic Cheshire Cat named Enrique Peña Nieto, is an empty suit…
[T]he stakes, for Mexico, and the United States, are high: a possible comeback by Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran Mexico with an autocratic combination of corruption and coercion for 71 years until it was tossed out in 2000…
At a dozen large rallies over the past two weeks in several major cities, thousands of young people took to the streets to protest what they see as media manipulation and thwarted democracy. One of the signs read: “Peña Nieto — the television is yours, the streets are ours!”
Peña Nieto, 45, is married to a soap-opera star from the Televisa network, and his critics say he has received overwhelmingly favorable coverage from the No. 1 broadcaster, which reaches 70 percent of Mexican households…
The student movement started May 11 when Peña Nieto was jeered during an appearance at the Ibero-American University for his role as governor of the state of Mexico in calling in police to put down a 2006 protest by flower vendors, which resulted in mass arrests and left two dead. After some in the audience shouted “assassin,” Peña Nieto left the stage.
Ibero-American University is a private college attended mostly by the well-to-do children of Mexico’s elites, called “fresas,” or strawberries…
At a protest this week, the students presented a letter to the interior minister, Alejandro Poire, demanding that he force all broadcasters, radio and television, to air the second, and likely last, presidential debate, scheduled for June 10.
The broadcast of the first debate on May 6 stirred controversy when TV Azteca declined to air it on its major channels — because there was a semifinal soccer match at the same hour. The station’s billionaire owner, Ricardo Salinas, taunted critics via his Twitter account that the sports event would get higher ratings.
Shannon K. O'Neil, writing in Foreign Affairs, suggests that Mexico's new political culture will limit the opportunities for the PRI to return to its old ways even if its candidate wins the presidency.The details in the article are worth your time and probably your students' time as well.
After voting the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) out… twelve years ago, the country looks poised to bring it back… The same goes for Mexico's congress. With every seat up for grabs, the PRI looks to make headway and perhaps gain a majority in both houses.
Political rivals and anxious commentators question whether a PRI victory will return Mexico to its less than democratic past. After all, for decades the PRI maintained control by buying votes, co-opting the opposition, and, at times, wielding a heavy repressive hand…
Whether the PRI set to take power is a new version of its old self is less important than the fact that Mexico's democratic institutions will hem in the next president, regardless of party or personal preferences.
Today, the PRI casts a wide ideological umbrella, encompassing just about everyone from market-friendly technocrats to progressive nationalists. It embraces polling gurus and media-savvy political operatives alongside traditional union and campesino bosses. These various groups have coalesced behind Peña Nieto, determined to move past their embarrassing third-place finish in the 2006 elections…
Mexican democracy has evolved in ways that make a return to wholesale PRI dominance unlikely. Consider how the role and power of the legislative and judicial branches have changed since the 1990s. During the old PRI's heyday, Congress was little more than a rubber stamp, with the PRI's delegates rarely questioning the edicts of their president. Now, Congress is a real fulcrum for negotiations and debates between Mexico's three main parties. Even if the PRI gains a majority in both houses, the administration will need the support of at least a segment of the opposition to pass the big-ticket items on the agenda -- energy, tax, labor, and political reform -- some of which would require constitutional changes. Unlike the PRI of the past, whoever wins will need to work with the opposition in order to govern.
Likewise, the Supreme Court is more powerful than in decades past. It now provides a check on the president and on vested interests…
On a broader scale, over the last 12 years, power has been increasingly decentralized, making a return to the PRI's historical hallmark, the "imperial presidency," virtually impossible. Once upon a time, a leader such as Carlos Salinas -- president from 1988 to 1994 -- could dismiss half of the sitting governors during his term without a hint of blowback. Today states and their elected leaders are autonomous, both politically and increasingly economically, from the federal government…
Civil society is stronger in Mexico today, too. A few decades ago, if the PRI found itself displeased with news coverage, it could literally stop the presses, as it held a monopoly on newsprint. Now Mexico has developed a vibrant and fiercely independent press, led by El Universal, Reforma, and La Jornada. Mexican voters and society have also gained a stronger voice, using social media and information now publicly available through Mexico's freedom of information law to shame corrupt bureaucrats and politicians…
In the Russian political culture there has never been public competition between political ideas or groups. Is there any reason to expect things will be different in the 21st century?
Russia’s lower and upper houses of Parliament approved a draft law on Wednesday imposing steep fines on people who organize or take part in unsanctioned meetings, apparently in an attempt to bring down the curtain on the large antigovernment street protests that began six months ago.
If approved by President Vladimir V. Putin, the draft law will increase existing fines… [for] individuals up to $9,000 and organizations up to $30,000 for taking part in a demonstration that harms people or property.
Such fines would be devastating to most Russians, who earn an average yearly salary of $8,500…
On Monday, when Mr. Putin was asked about punitive measures against protest leaders that occurred during a summit meeting with the European Union, he said Russia was not doing anything that was not common practice in the West.
“As far as I know, at present they are all free, and they are apparently preparing for new protest actions,” he said. “That’s normal. But the one thing we should do is to bring our legislation into line with the norms of European law, which is in place in many European countries to regulate similar actions, and which are obviously democratic, but at the same time create a certain regime for carrying out mass actions.”…
Maria Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said she did not expect the new fines to be imposed broadly. But the threat of prosecution will hang over all future gatherings, dissuading masses of newly active protesters, like students and office workers.
“My sense is this government will stop short of a head-on crackdown across the board,” she said. “This is not Putin’s style. His intention should not be to intimidate the whole population, but to divide them, and isolate the group that is defiant and most active, and send a message to others who are not so committed that they had better not participate.”
Economists say that efficiency demands that factors of production be flexible and adaptable. China has tried to keep its labor supply flexible without granting workers who move the same benefits due people who stay where they're told to be. Can it work?
THE greatest wave of voluntary migration in human history transformed China’s cities, and the global economy, in a single generation. It has also created a huge task for those cities, by raising the expectations of the next generation of migrants from the countryside, and of second-generation migrant children. They have grown up in cities in which neither the jobs nor the education offered them have improved much.
This matters because the next generation of migrants has already arrived in staggering numbers. Shanghai’s migrant population almost trebled between 2000 and 2010, to 9m of the municipality’s 23m people…
Many have ended up in the same jobs and dormitory beds as their parents did. A survey by the National Bureau of Statistics found that 44% of young migrants worked in manufacturing and another 10% in construction. This and another recent survey suggest that young migrants are dissatisfied with their lot and, despite large pay rises for factory work in recent years, with their salaries, too. Those who grew up partly in the cities with their parents have expectations of a comfortable life that are more difficult to satisfy. Their ambitions frustrated, many do something their parents did not: they leave one job, and find another. And then leave again.
One obstacle to a better job is their parents. In China’s system of household registration (known as hukou), children born to rurally registered parents count as rural, even if their parents have migrated to the city, and regardless of where they themselves were born. In 2010 Shanghai was home to 390,000 children under the age of six who were officially classified as “migrants”.
They are fated to grow up on a separate path from children of Shanghainese parents. Migrant children are eligible to attend local primary and middle schools, but barred from Shanghai’s high schools…
For years reformers have called for changes in the hukou system. Children with a rural hukou want to lead a better life than their parents did…
This is unlikely to change soon. First, China’s factories still need large numbers of migrants, and the system now in place ensures that many of them will seek work there. Second, Chinese cities have welcomed migrants without a coherent plan to educate them. Shanghai had 170,000 students enrolled in high school in 2010, but there were 570,000 migrant children aged 15 to 19 living in the city who were unable to attend those schools…
One educational option that is left to the brightest young migrants is vocational school, where students are taught a trade. At a suburban campus of the Shanghai Vocational School of Technology and Business, half the students are migrants and half are local Shanghainese…
Iran's parliament has re-elected a conservative critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as speaker.
Ali Larijani will serve for another year after beating Gholam Ali Haddad Adel by 177 votes to 89 in the Majlis.
Both are close to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Mr Haddad Adel wanted a less confrontational approach with the president…
Iran's parliament lacks executive power but plays a part in choosing next year's presidential contenders. Term limits mean that Mr Ahmadinejad must step down in 2013…
Chinese President Hu Jintao Wednesday urged the armed forces to constantly reinforce their loyalty and obedience to the Party…
Efforts should be made to improve the capacity of systematic operations based on the information system, raise combat ability and emergency response and prepare the armed forces for defense and non-war military actions, said Hu, also chairman of the Central Military Commission…
Hu said the Beijing Military Area Command is of strategic importance, and has a good record of implementing orders from the CPC Central Committee and fulfilling important tasks…
With Russia in a state of political ferment for the first time in more than a decade, a new poll has found sharply expressed and seemingly contradictory opinions holding sway…
Russians, as they have for years, still express strong approval of President Vladimir Putin. But a majority also approve of the political protests that have taken place since December.
It is a sign of the flux and uncertainty that prevail here. The Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Research Center — which has been polling in Russia, among other countries, for a decade — did 1,000 face-to-face interviews between March 19 and April 4, in the weeks following the presidential election. It found disquiet over the economy, pride in Russia as a nation and belief in a strong leader, as well as a widening gap between ideals and realities.
For instance, 71 percent of those polled said a fair judiciary is very important — and just 17 percent said Russia has one…
Pew calls this the “democracy gap,” between what should be and what is, and the average for all six categories has grown from a 21-percentage-point difference in 2009 to 34 points in 2012.
That’s a sign of the sharply higher expectations that Russians have of their society today — along with deeper disappointments…
Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center in Moscow, said this week that Pew’s findings roughly correspond to those of the polls his organization takes. “Democracy,” he said, earned a bad name in the 1990s, when attempts at reform unleashed rapacious oligarchs and dysfunctional politics. But now, gradually, Russians are coming to understand that there are democratic norms and that their country doesn’t have them…
[T]he Pew poll found that sharply higher numbers of Russians said voting is important. In 2009, 54 percent dismissed that idea; this year, 56 percent agreed with it, and the largest gains were among older voters, especially those over 50.
Yet support for Putin remains high, in part because of the perceived weaknesses of his competitors.
Outside the big cities, most Russians still get their news from state-controlled television, which helps to explain Putin’s high standing…
Drug traffickers took the unusual step of using an airplane to drop thousands of leaflets on the northern city of Culiacan accusing the governor of Sinaloa state of taking orders from drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, authorities said Wednesday.
Drug cartels in Mexico have long posted videos and hung banners from bridges to get their messages out, and they have recently taken to dumping truckloads of bodies on roadways to intimidate rivals or publicize threatening messages.
But the incident in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan on Tuesday is the first time in recent memory that traffickers have resorted to aerial leafleting. It may mark a further escalation in what has become a nationwide, military-scale battle between the Sinaloa cartel and the hyper-violent Zetas gang…
The single-page, computer-printed leaflets were unsigned, but expressed anger at the in-custody killing of a suspect who was recently arrested and sent to a prison allegedly dominated by the Sinaloa cartel…
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