Abe diverting attention from financial woes

The Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has announced that there is no room for negotiation on the issue of the sovereignty of the Diaoyu Islands.

Are the bare islands in the middle of nowhere really so important for Abe to antagonise Japan’s most important trading partner worth US$340 billion a year, or does he have an ulterior motive?

Abe’s real objective is to revive the ailing Japanese economy, which has been struggling between stagnation and recession for over two lost decades. His shock therapy is to print money and to step up government spending.

Whether such an unconventional policy will work, in a peaked-out economy with a shrinking population, is questionable. So the veteran prime minister needs to divert his electorate’s attention to China, Japan’s arch rival for centuries, so that they do not complain about the economic pain when his economic policy fails.

Meanwhile, by stoking nationalistic sentiment, Abe was able to win back his position as prime minister. Remember why Argentina waged war with Britain on the Falklands.

Abe’s smokescreen strategy fits well into US President Barack Obama’s Pacific strategy. After defeating the Soviet Union in the cold war, the US has no equal, except perhaps China. The 2008 Olympic gold medal count sent an alarming signal. Americans are concerned that what happened in sports may also happen in economic and other areas.

At the present growth rate, it looks likely that the Chinese economy will surpass the US before 2020. That is, unless Chinese high-speed growth, which is still driven by exports to the West, is derailed by a war with Japan, a Western ally.

But Deng Xiaoping , the architect of modern China, has already prescribed the solution: keep the head down and build strength.

Guy Lam, honorary chairman, the Association of Experts for Modernisation

That the Selection Committee will prevent honest candidates standing in 2017 has been obvious for a decade or two. But, admittedly without much for us to go on at this stage, won’t Peking be a little bit more subtle about it? Somehow maintain the pretence that all compatriots of the correct skin colour are eligible, while erecting invisible barriers to all but a hundred or two names?

https://www.google.com.hk/search?q=china+at+night+from+space&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari#biv=i|0;d|MzNXmm4W9s79cM:

Very useful indeed , because my company is currently studying this whole industry

(yes I do have an actual job….)

PS : @ Bela – check out Youtube “Gagnam Eton style” if you need any persuasion to continue thinking HK is after all preferable to England.

On the other hand, the line: “(I think his deadline was approaching.)” did make me laugh …

This is exactly what they proposing which, is why they allowed a CY Leung / Hank Tang dogfight (however I think they were unaware of the latter’s spectacular blow out). So it’s CY and (pick one from three) Jat, Bernard or Carrie. CY will lose. I think we can rule out Vagina, Jasper and Rita as they will be getting a little long in the tooth by 2017.

However as the Pro-Dems have their veto and will use it. Meaning same same. CY wins.

The Legislative council “elections” for 2022 will be far more interesting however I probably will have taken myself off the South East Asian beach by then.