Pearls and Irritations

In Asian media this week: India’s message of foreign policy independence. Plus Green-tech overcapacity claims ‘absurd’; How West could help the Rest fight climate change; Asia-Pacific NATO would add to flash points; Party dismisses disgraced leaders; Newspaper scores press freedom own goal.

A striking image from Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Russia was of the Indian Prime hugging Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to Al Jazeera, a bear hug is almost inevitable whenever Modi greets a male world leader.

But the US is miffed, especially after all the effort President Joe Biden has put into wooing Modi, including hosting a White House state dinner in June last year.

US officials criticised Modi’s visit, his first to Russian since that country invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Al Jazeera reported US National Security adviser Jake Sullivan said strong ties with Russia were a bad bet for India.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the US was concerned about India’s links with Russia. And the US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, said New Delhi should not take its ties with Washington for granted.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was furious, as Modi’s trip came the day after Russia’s devastating missile attack on his country’s biggest children’s hospital.

Modi, Al Jazeera said, was confident he could juggle multiple complex relations. And he was betting that Donald Trump might well return to power and ease tensions between the US and Russia.

The Hindu newspaper said the criticism of the visit from Washington and Kyiv was unprecedented.

But it said in an editorial India would have to assert its own interests and convince the West it is futile to force India to choose –  or to push a country known for its independent stance to become a camp follower in the Russia-Ukraine war.

The visit highlighted Modi’s adept management of relations with Russia and the US, The Statesman newspaper said.

The India-Russia alliance helped balance Russia’s relationship with China – a matter of concern for India and the US.

“New Delhi intends to maintain a balance between the West and Russia,” the paper said. “[But} the recent summit has sent a message to the West, confirming India’s commitment to safeguarding its national interests.”

Anti-China tariffs a historic blunder

Stephen Roach, the doyen of America’s China economists, has criticised as absurd Western attacks on China’s supposed overcapacity in green technologies at a time when the world suffers horrific climate change.

“Climate change itself is a visible sign that the world is deficient in the low-carbon capacity it needs to address a serious greenhouse emissions problem,” Roach says during a long interview with the South China Morning Post about the approaches Beijing should adopt to put China’s economy on the right course.

“There can be no excess capacity in low-carbon alternative energy products in a world afflicted with the existential climate change that we are experiencing.”

Roach, a former chairman of investment bank Morgan Stanley Asia and now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre, says the West attacks China for subsidising green technologies but the US does the same thing.

Examples are tax credits for EVs, the massive federal loan Elon Musk received for Tesla and support for US chip makers.

“We have rediscovered industrial policy with our own American characteristics,” he says. “There is a clear hypocrisy in this notion of going after excess capacity.”

Roach says recent US tariffs increases on Chinese green technology are a blunder of historic proportions. One reason is that the US is protecting local industries that have been slow to get started and that are not cost-efficient compared to their Chinese counterparts.

Another is that the US is taxing green technology when the world wants it to expand the supply of green technology.

A commentary in the Asia Times news site attacks the notion that China’s subsidised industries destroy value because they are not profitable. Value is not being destroyed, it says. Rather it is flowing to consumers in lower prices, higher quality and greater innovation.

The article compares the market value of Tesla and China’s BYD.

“To celebrate Tesla’s $US 788 billion market cap in comparison to BYD’s $93 billion is to confuse incentives with outcomes,” it says. “That Tesla is far more profitable than BYD while EVs have far less market penetration in the US is evidence of policy failure, not Elon Musk’s brilliance.

“Tesla pocketed the incentives while BYD (and competitors) delivered outcomes.”

As temperatures soar, the rich stay cool

When rich countries set new temperature records because of climate change, rich people can pay to stay cool. In poor countries, people die.

This is the essential unfairness of climate change.

Former central banker Andrew Sheng says central banks in China, the eurozone, the US and other developed countries expanded their balance sheets by $US 11 trillion between February 2020 and May 2021.

Writing in South China Morning Post he asks: “Why can’t they be a source of funding for climate change?”

But the banks stay on the sidelines as they see tackling climate change as the job of governments.

Sheng, distinguished fellow at Hong Kong University’s Asia Global Institute, says governments agreed to expand the IMF’s special drawing rights by $US 650 billion to reduce the effects of the COVID pandemic. But it would have been more effective if they had boosted the capital of development banks, such as the World Bank and the ADB.

This would have let them create funding for developing nations to achieve their goals in alleviating poverty and fighting climate change.

SCMP carries a related piece by commentator Biman Mukherji. He says improved economic conditions later this year might lead to interest rate cuts, helping middle class consumers struggling with high costs.

But developing countries and those in conflict zones might not experience any relief.

Mukherji says groups like BRICS should put pressure on the West to help but could also assist poorer nations more directly. Countries like China and India have strong green tech programmes and other countries, like Thailand and Vietnam are big food producers.

“In uncertain geopolitical times, regional neighbours must co-operate rather than waiting for wealthier nations to act,” he says.

European nations lack will to confront China

Closer security ties between NATO and Washington’s East Asian allies, including Australia, might not enhance security in the region.

Rather they might lead to the worsening of current flash points and the creation of new ones.

This is the view expressed in an opinion piece in The Diplomat Asian news and analysis site, written by James Park and Artin DerSimonian, two researchers with the Quincy Institute, an American foreign policy think tank.

The article says there are reasons to be concerned about the emerging authoritarian bloc – China, Russia and North Korea, which they call the “Axis of Upheaval”.

But introducing a greater NATO presence into the Asia-Pacific region would likely give Beijing more reason to strengthen ties with Moscow.

Further, many European alliance members lack the capability and political will to confront China.

The Diplomat is carrying a second article on NATO’s presence in Asia, focusing on Japan’s interest in closer ties with the alliance.

The article, written by Yukari Easton, a researcher at the University of Southern California, says Japan contemplates with dismay the prospect of a second Trump administration.

It says Japan has adopted an increasingly co-operative approach to NATO.

“Nothing can substitute Japan’s collective defence capability with the United States,” it says. “But working with a multilateral bloc such as NATO can only add deterrence into a potential adversary’s calculus.”

An opinion piece in The Jakarta Post, written by Endy Bayuni, a senior editor, says that given NATO’s recent record in Eastern Europe its expansion into the Indo-Pacific would likely add to, rather than reduce, tension in the region.

The article says: “NATO’s expansion is inviting trouble; the last thing the region needs today.”

Xi continues campaign against corruption

China’s Communist Party has formally removed the country’s former foreign and defence ministers – Qin Gang and Li Shangfu – from its Central Committee.

The two men were dismissed from their ministerial jobs last year. Their removal from the Central Committee was approved at the party’s long-delayed third plenum, held this week.

Singapore’s The Straits Times said the committee approved Qin’s resignation from that body and confirmed that Li had been expelled from the party, as had Li Yuchao, a former PLA Rocket Force commander.

The paper said President Xi Jinping had led a strong anti-corruption campaign since 2012. In the first six months of this year, the party’s main graft watchdog investigated 36 officials at the level of vice-minister or above.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said the plenum’s communique had referred to former foreign minister Qin as “comrade,” suggesting he was not under criminal investigation and was still a party member.

The Post said that in the communique the party pledged to deepen its anti-corruption drive, adhere to strict standards in governing the country and to promote “self-purification”.

China Daily, an official newspaper, reported the resignation and expulsions in the last paragraph of its story.

It said the third plenum adopted a resolution on further deepening reform comprehensively.

“By 2035, we will have finished building a high-standard social market economy in all respects,” the communique said.

The paper published the full text of the communique on its website.

US paper sacks Hong Kong union chief

A Western newspaper has scored a press freedom own goal in Hong Kong. The Wall Street Journal this week sacked one of its reporters there, a little over two weeks after she became chair of the city’s Journalist Association.

The Hong Kong Free Press website reported that Selina Cheng, who covered China’s automobile and energy sectors, had been told her role with the journalists’ union would be incompatible with her reporting job.

The website said Cheng had been told Journal employees should not advocate press freedom in “a place like Hong Kong”.

Cheng’s position was terminated on July 17, when an editor from the UK flew to Hong Kong to deliver the message in person. She was told her job was eliminated because of restructuring but Cheng said she had previously been told that Chinese EV stories were among the most important for the paper in Asia.

The newspaper announced in May that it planned to move its Asian HQ to Singapore, with some Hong Kong staff being laid off.

The South China Morning Post said the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club had expressed concern over Cheng’s dismissal.

SCMP said the club compared Cheng’s alleged treatment with that of Evan Gershkovich, a Journal reporter detained by Russian authorities since March last year.

“If the editors of the Journal advocate for reporters’ rights to do their jobs without fear and intimidation in Russia, they should do the same in Hong Kong,” a club spokesman said.