Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

After US President George W. Bush shooks hands with Taiwanese representative Joseph Wu during a commemoration for victims of Communism in Washington DC, “Chinese government leaders threatened to plan new war games and heighten military readiness in anticipation of any attempt by the U.S. to defend Taiwan should a Chinese invasion occur, or simply if Taiwan declares its independence” (src).

The current state of political affairs between the two contentious “Chinese governments” is an uneasy truce across the straits. The PRC and KMT both assert legitmate control over China, Taiwan, Mongolia, and Myanmar, and are expected to use no force against each other. However, if peaceful reunification fails, there will definitely be an international disaster.

Today the Shanghai markets crashed, falling 9% due to psychological effects after yesterday’s high close and technical difficulties executing high-volumes of sell orders, leading to inefficient pricing. Here is the chart for the SSE composite index:

This led to a 400 point loss on the Dow here in the United States. Yahoo Finance has an article which gets at the root cause:

A 9 percent slide in Chinese stocks, which came a day after investors sent Shanghai’s benchmark index to a record high close, set the tone for U.S. trading. The Dow began the day falling sharply, and the decline accelerated throughout the course of the session before stocks took a huge plunge in late afternoon as computer-driven sell programs kicked in, and also as a computer glitch caused a delay in the recording of a large number of trades.

You can see the glitch yourself as a 90,000,000 spike in trading volume around 1 PM on the Yahoo chart.  There are two funny things about this:

• Investor disbelief at record gains led to a crash
• Technical problems led to market inefficiencies

In a perfect market neither of these things would happen.  Interestingly, the effect was felt in markets around the world, which really points at China’s new role in the global space and the increase of globalization.  One thing America needs to learn is that it’s now a part of a bigger global community, not a single superpower by itself.  We’re going to see an event in Asia crash the world markets again, more strongly than this, and vice versa.  We’re all connected now!

If you’ve ever felt the US is still racist and hypocritical about allowing non-Americans into the country, and then mistreating them when they get here, you definitely want to read Peter Bagge’s latest strip:

“Starting 500 years ago, waves of Western European immigrants began arriving in North America without Visas or Green Cards, killing, infecting, and stealing from the native population.”

According to the Register, the Chinese military has build an enormous model of the China-India border in Huangyangtan, a remote village:

The model measures 900×700 meters, and models an area of 450×350 kilometers.  So, the big question is why would China build a 250,000:1 scale model of a mountainous border?

The Republic of Singapore is forbidding political podcasts during their elections. What kind of elections are those?

To quote the primary source:

As a measure against the use of new Internet technologies during hustings in Singapore, Channel NewsAsia reported from a Parliamentary hearing on Monday that “Podcasting is not allowed during elections.”

Not allowing any kind of expression is contrary to the ideals of Democracy. It’s also strange that a government is in touch enough with cutting edge web 2.0 technology like blogging and podcasting to ban it, rather than encourage and foster its growth a medium for political discussion.