Why are we worried it may turn into another Japan?
Factors such as high debt-to-GDP ratio, the speed at which it built up, an enormous amount of government money spent on propping up the stock market ($200 billion), bad loans, financial frauds, and capital outflow are all engendering a concern for a financial crisis. There are many reasons why we may not be in for a crisis (explained here), but if not crisis, the real concern is that China’s economy may end up like that of Japan.
What happened in Japan? In the 1990s, banks in Japan liberally lent to real estate projects based on wildly speculative land values. At one point, a park in Tokyo was meant to have the same value as an entire state in the U.S. (or something like that). Then the bubble burst in 1991 with land and stock prices spiralling down. However, banks did not call in bad loans and kept them on the books as if nothing was wrong (on the orders of the banking regulator), and the central bank pumped Japanese banks with liquidity. That prevented the financial system from a comprehensive collapse. But there was nothing to do about the bad debts, which in turn limited banks’ ability to make new loans to worthy businesses. Corporations on their part spent all the little profit they made paying down debt rather than investing in new projects (that is usually how an economy grows). So the economy was literally stagnant.
How bad is China’s situation? So notwithstanding a financial crisis, we are concerned that China might indeed face a similar fate. But it’s worth noting that they narrowly avoided a lost decade in 1997 by transferring bad loans to asset management companies, and funnelling liquidity into banks from the Treasury. Then, unproductive SOEs were ruthlessly shut down (what the premier Zhu Rongji is known for, and the current premier Li Keqiang is being compared to) and people were allowed own and sell houses (this is when the People get the sweet taste of capitalism for the first time since 1945). The economy took off, and so corporations made enough to pay down all the debt.
Of course, the situation now is different: growth rates are expected to dither and fall below 6%. And although the quality of lending is better, it is huge in absolute terms: 260% by some estimates, which in itself is not that bad since i) US and Japan have a higher ratio ii)has enough income and assets to pay down. But still it’s concerning. The way to reduce debt-to-GDP ratio is obviously to reduce credit, but that comes at the expense of growth. For political reasons, the CCP cannot afford to slow growth and if you slow growth then people are not able to pay back their debt.
Much of the information here was taken from Arthur Kroeber’s China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know
The ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague was much stronger than expected. Almost all points under contention were ruled in favour of the Philippines. This surely will have some consequences not just for the way China conducts itself in the region but also for China’s soft power which, for all its money, has been and still will be a crucial part of the country’s efforts to forge more ties in the world.
Two key points of the ruling:
1. There is no legal basis for China’s historic claims within the Nine-dash line.
2. The Philippines reserves its traditional rights on the Scarborough Island, and any Chinese land reclamations and blocking of fishing and oil-exploration activities violate Philippino sovereignty.
The immediate response by China has been to reject the verdict, as expected, and indeed it is doubtful as to whether the ruling could fundamentally undermine what China has been doing or claiming within the so-called nine-dash line. Some have even argued China has followed a tradition of “Great Powers” ignoring international ruling on maritime disputes. But the South China Sea involves keen interest of multiple parties, including the U.S. and a third of global trade passes through this area. So now there are legitimate grounds on which to scrutinise any action that China takes in this body of water going forward.
What China will do next depends on whether hardliners or moderates in Zhongnanhai gain the upper hand. Hardliners would probably see in continued militarisation of the South China Sea an apposite response. Moderates, on the other hand, are concerned that would push regional neighbours further into America’s embrace.
Many analysts are turning towards the view that in denting China’s long-held ambition of becoming a maritime power, the Hague ruling would have emboldened the hawks. Indeed, it is hard to find any representation of moderate sentiments in the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and by now it can be said with confidence that Xi has monopolised power crystallised consensus around his China Dream platform.
Here are a few things that analysts here and there have predicted China might do in response should hard-liners come to dominate the agenda:
1. Declare Air Defense Identification Zone. China did that in the East China Sea and most countries simply ignored it by dispatching jets into the zone. But with landing strips and various other airforce facilities based in the South China Sea, its ability to enforce ADIZ in the South China Sea should be taken more seriously.
2. Withdraw from UNCLOS. (maybe even set up its own international tribunal?)
3. Continued industrial-scale land reclamation and continued deployment tolerance of the activities of the militia, the so-called Little Blue Men on Scarborough Shoal, around which the Philippines reserves traditional rights to undertake fishing activities, the ruling has declared.
Another immediate flashpoint is Mischief Reef, part of the Spratley’s island scatter, which the ruling had declared legally belongs to the Philippines. Yet, Chinese landing strips and air facilities the size of football fields are already in place there.
There is optimism that bilateral negotiations are still viable between China and the Philippines, which wisely chose not to crow about the ruling. The new Philippine president Duterte is expected to be different from President Aquino who has actively and publicly strengthened ties with the US. Duterte’s priorities are state-led infrastructure projects and economic reforms, and any foreign policy decision will be made in consideration of this (despite the fact that he claimed he will water-ski to Scarborough and plant a national flag). That means existing ties with U.S. will not likely shrivel. But given the ruling, the Philippines is in good position to extract economic concessions in some form of investments or trade deals.
With ASEAN and the EU too spineless to stand up against flagrant defiance of international law, what will affect how China acts in the long-run is U.S. policy, which so far has preferred to respond to China’s salami-slicing strategy of incremental gains. As many have pointed out, the onus is on the U.S. to prove its commitment to regional allies. But so far, pronouncements on Asia-Pacific by the more likely candidate hasn’t been so reassuring, though it isn’t a guarantee of things to come. Those in favour of action by US, has called for active naming-and-shaming, though that might backfire given America’s own track record of observing international rulings: Nicaragua); resumption of freedom-of-navigation operation, public condemnation of the militia. While governments figure out what they want to do, for now, the losers of this ruling are KFC and Apple in China.
Adolf Hitler’s father was called Alois. And he was known as Alois “Schicklgruber” for the first forty years of his life. That was the maiden name of his mother, since his father Johann Hiedler, a miller, never legitimized Alois as his own son. In fact he had abandoned him aged ten when his mother Maria Ann Schicklgruber passed away. Then thirty years later, Johann turned up aged eighty four to claim Alois. For some reason his name had modified slightly to “Hitler”. Historians speculate that Alois, out of guilt, wanted to help his son gain a share of an inheritance from an uncle.
In any case, the story continues thusly in William Shirer’s classic work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth. Had the eight-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after he death of his mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber.
There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous “Heils”? “Heil Schicklgruber!”? Not only “Heil Hitler” used as a Wagnerian, pagan-like chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies, but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced “Hello.”
Chinese censors must be one of the most efficient and effectively managed state institutions around the world. As soon as posts related to Panama papers began to be circulated, they were at work. According to Baidu, Panama Papers do not exist.
Among the Chinese high-level officials to be implicated in this 2.6TB leak from Mossack Fonseca were 2 members of the 7 Standing Committee of the Politburo, one of them being Liu Yunshan 刘云山, the propaganda chief himself, as well as president Xi Jinping. So the stakes were quite high and the range of censorship equally extensive (the word for “brother-in-law” was reported to be included in the “sensitive” list, or got “404ed” 被404了 since it was the name of Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui 邓家贵.)
Just as the Russian propaganda machine portrayed it as part of an “information war” against Putin, China’s Global Times called it “a new means for ideology-allied Western nations to strike a blow to non-Western political elites”. Besides the “Western plot” card, as the China Digital Times noted, the week that Panama Papers were released coincided with news of assault on a woman at a Beijing hotel and the non-intervention of the bystanders, which for the latter reason attracted a flurry of views and moralizing comments about the state of Chinese society etc. etc.–it was enough to distract. The confidence with which the spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly no-commented questions related to Panama was also notable.
However tempting it is to imagine the damage this may have on the legitimacy of Chinese leadership, I would argue it was limited, if not negligible. In 2012, when Bloomberg and NYT reported on the former Premier Wen Jiabao 温家宝’s wealth, there were no uprisings.
To many people in China, as this Economist article rightly points out, high-level corruption is neither news nor a compelling reason to lose faith in the leadership. The Chinese middle class which that widely-quoted study on the relationship between GDP per capita (threshold being USD 6,000) and democratization (and of course the end of history thesis) had hoped would become the next agents of change, were for the large part unmoved. Admittedly, that idea would have appeared more persuasive at the height of American power before 2008 when capitalism and democracy seemed to partner up well.
Of course, calling for an outright regime change or endorsing democratization in public have unequivocally become unpopular since Tiananmen. That is not to say the Chinese middle class has no political consciousness, which would be a grand generalization on a group of more than 100 million people. In fact, the quesiton of how to make China a better place is something almost everyone obsesses about. But, more and more are less convinced by the merits of democracy as an effective mode of governance (Trump). Additionally, some of my Chinese friends (who are mostly the children of the middle class) have lamented how many Chinese millennials are less concerned about such matters than by the latest trend in Korean hair style. Though it’s hard to say without a comprehensive survey, the argument has been made that much of the middle class, in part out of a sense of powerlessness to effect any meaningful change themselves, are more concerned about their daily lives.
There is an interesting comparison to be made with Russia, another authoritarian country whose leader has been a central cast to this episode through the proxy of a cellist called Sergei. Similar to China, not much shit was given in Russia (Andrey Kostin, head of a state bank that allegedly involved” called the idea of Putin’s involvement “bullshit”). “Corruption is seen as a fact of life, and the sense that there’s nothing we can do about it is pervasive,” editor of the journal Counterpoint Maria Lipman told the Economist.
Corruption in China, however, is not a fact of life. In fact, the campaign to rid its system of graft has been one of the most enduring and intense ones to take place since the communist takeover. If you talk to a cab driver in Beijing, my go-to source for the “average Chinese Joe”, many of them will tell you it’s all to settle political scores. Yet the same people also believe the anti-corruption campaign is genuinely having an impact, nevermind whether it will be rooted it out once and for all–the Xi administration remains one of the more popular governments in the world according to a survey. So, it is rather odd that there should be very little reaction to all of this, especially when Xi Jinping’s relative was on the client list of the same law firm that Gu Kailai, the wife of Bo Xilai, Xi’s arch enemy, and the poster child of the bad boys’ club in China.
In this instance, however, I was personally more curious as to how this news would be received at a time when discontent appears to be brewing within Chinese society and the political circle in regards to more oppression of the freedom of speech and media, and the increasing influence of Xi Jinping. But that idea itself, that the oppression of the freedom of speech or the increasing hold on power of Xi can impair Chinese society, has also not gained such wide currency either. Such developments are often taken with a positivist attitude; so people are less judgmental. It seems more apparent that authoritarian politics, not corruption, is taken as a fact of life in China. Due to such circumstances, along with other factors, contradictions of an authoritarian regime in relation to corruption come under less scrutiny, especially if the economy is doing relatively OK.
But we also mustn’t forget the achievements of China’s propaganda apparatus. When such episodes like Panama Papers strike, media blackouts and the forestallments of anything vaguely civil society-esque (remember the five feminists who were arrested for protesting about women’s rights) have obviously played a great role in pre-empting sentiments adverse to the incumbent government. The former gives the impression to the masses that it is not an important issue (or that it doesn’t exist). The latter prevents more active citizens from making it into one. Both have seen an uptick under Mr. Xi, and together with the recent memory of Tiananmen, these make for a powerful propaganda package that keeps potential dissent on the side of caution.
Such control of media and public opinion, I believe, was the main factor behind the extraordinary difference in reaction to the cruise ship sinking in China and South Korea. In both countries, a cruise ship sank, the leading crew members survived but hundreds died. In China, the official pronouncement that it was a natural disaster was taken at face value and discussions were wrapped up within the week. In Korea, it was a to begin a long period of intense political firestorm, and still continues to be one of the major reasons for the strikingly low ratings of the current Park administration.
Scams in China’s finance industry is a trend I think will continue for a long time. Quartz has done this great compilation of financial scandals in China:
E Zubao and other P2P financing platforms—at least $11 billion
Fanya Metal Exchange—about $6 billion
MMM social financial network—beyond calculation
Zhuoda Group—about $1.6 billion
GSM Financial Group—about %6.2 billion
And it also discusses why these schemes succeed, or why investors keep falling for them:
First off, opportunities in real estate and of course the stock market seem dubious, and new financial companies, especially peer-2-peer lending firms present an attractive alternative.
But of course, while rule of law has much to catch up on this new and upcoming industry, presenting a great opportunity for crooks with a bit of brains to come in and attract innocent investors looking for swift gains.
Indeed, many of these firms lie beyond the scope of supervision. P2P lending platforms often go beyond their normal role as sole information brokers and provide services and products that only licensed banks or lending companies offer. Many of them are not even registered with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce.
And investors will just go for these seemingly shady companies for really quite simple reasons: i)friends recommended it,
ii)just believed in their marketing campaign promising incredibly high returns (in some cases, people know it’s a ponzi scheme but still go for it confident they can get out with some gains before it all collapses),
iii)some famous investor spoke well of it (eg.,
iv) some local government has backed them like in the case of Fanya. People just expect the government will have their back once things go south. Nothing more than the trusting soul of man under authoritarianism.
v)And another unique feature on mainland:
Put these all together: it’s a lack of experience in investments. Mainland has arrived to capitalism late and so investing habits are also in its teenage years. So all of this will take time to develop, but it will also require reform on all fronts, law, regulation, supervision, general education, and availability of information etc. But most importantly, my view is that it is the enforcement of law, as always, they can make most difference in the short-term.
China has two currency rates. One is onshore, which trades within a narrow band dictated by a central bank daily rate (the yuan is allowed to rise and fall by 2% of this fixed rate). The other is offshore, where the yuan floats freely and serves as an indicator of what markets think about the Chinese economy.
Since last August, when the PBoC declared a change to how it fixes daily yuan rates, which they say reflects market value, the yuan was expectedly devalued. But it was depreciating at much quicker pace than people had anticipated.
Caixin’s details on the change: The new method, which officials said better reflects market value, links the daily rate to the currency’s closing price for the previous trading session. The fixing is a reference the central bank provides to interbank forex market traders based on the perceived value of the yuan. It is a mid-point from which daily spot trading prices for the yuan are allowed to deviate by 2 percent in either direction.
Dreading further depreciation of the yuan, those with offshore yuan holdings started selling. Then you had speculators who sought profit from the weakening yuan by short-selling their yuan holdings, and the gap between onshore and offshore yuan widened to a record. (Besides the fact that offshore is free floated and onshore isn’t, the fact that capital can’t come out freely from mainland once in, has contributed to the widening gap).
Details on short-selling CNH (offshore RMB in Hong Kong): Known as “carry trading,” it has become popular practice for speculators to swap borrowed offshore yuan for dollars, then rebuy RMB when it has depreciated, pay off the loan and keep the remainder. Only made possible since August when the RMB started depreciating.
All this had led offshore RMB to become significantly more devalued than onshore RMB, with the gap widening to over 1,300 basis points (in November it was about 300).
What the PBoC has done is to stop short-sellers by raising the interest rate at which they can borrow CNH. It has done so by selling its massive foreign exchange reserves and buying up offshore RMB through state-owned banks in Hong Kong. Hibor (Hong Kong Inter-bank Offered Rate) went to record highs of 66.8% on January 12.
The RMB has now stabilized at 6.58 against the dollar.
But the move has not been without costs. Countering short-selling in such a manner reduced FOREX reserves, which last year shrank for the first time by 500 billion USD to 3.3 trillion. At a time when, Chinese companies are still saddled with 1.53 trillion dollars in foreign debt, most of which are also short-term.
But as China’s economic transition continues (as well as the ups&downs of the stock market), the expectation is further depreciation, and that means more intervention of that nature is likely.
As discussed in the last post, central to solving China’s debt problem is the reform of a system that keeps state-owned zombie enterprises on life support, while new, innovative companies are denied the privilege.
Here’s a nice idea by Michael Schuman, a Bloomberg view columnist, and one that I always thought of writing, but he did it better than I previously conceived in my mind.
Look at what Korea did with its Chaebols, copy/adopt it. I say this, not just because, or maybe partially because I’m from South Korea.
1. Break the tripartite relationship between Government-Corporations-Banks
South Korea has followed state capitalism model for development, starting from rule of the military dictator Park Jung-hee (father of the current president) whereby policymakers directed credit to strategic industries, and ordered major business leaders to focus on them. The result was dramatic growth.
But by the ‘90s, these chaebols, so central to the growth miracle, had become just like what China’s SOEs look like: bloated, inefficient, hoarding resources that can go to those with better business plans.
Notably though, it did take a crisis for this status-quo system to unravel. The ’97 Asian Financial Crisis. Massive restructuring took place.
Banks were freed from state reins, became well more efficient and held to more stringent standards. Everything from the way window customer services were conducted to loan decisions were revamped to distribute resources more efficiently and as quick as possible.
And chaebol affiliates won’t be able to make loans to each other to survive. Off the dole they were, as Schuman puts, and once on their own, they began to, well, behave more like corporations in a normal capitalist economy. For them, it meant “streamlining their business by cutting staff and selling assets”. This happened to a lot of other firms too, if they weren’t forced to go bankrupt or go through mergers. There were many suicides.
Can we call it necessary evil?
Now, Samsung is just second to Apple in smartphone productions, although not the most well-known, Hyundai cars are being sold the world over, etc. It’s a miracle to see corporations from a nation of 50 million that has risen from the ashes of war just 50 odd years ago to be shouldering with the world’s top corporations. Did I say I was South Korean?
As a caveat, I have to mention that it took a financial crisis to urge Korean corporations transform themselves into what they are now. Debates are still ongoing as to possibilities of a hard-landing, but China has a stunningly solid macroeconomic environment, as the World Economic Forum report has pointed out, making a crisis very unlikely. Lest, the government deliberately lets one happen. But that’s highly unlikely, for the ruling Communist party will surely lose all credibility.
Where has China got too? As Schuman points out, China is nowhere near doing this.
About 80% of all loan so to state-owned companies whose returns are only a third of private firms. Beijing has shown balls of steel in radically restructuring state-owned firms back in 1990s. But as of now, I’m not sure what’s holding them back, but local governments for sure are continuing to funnel subsidies to these state-owned zombies. Why? They used to be biggest tax contributors. Their local growth may depend on these firms, which often are the biggest employers especially in heavy industry regions like the Northeastern provinces, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia. And also they fear social unrest if mass layoffs happen all too quickly. According to China Labour Bulletin’s monitor, number of labour related protests have perceptibly gone up since 2013.
But Caixin has argued that there is a new economy up and coming to absorb the pain from scalping away the old. Just need to give more gas to the younglings? However, I do think that especially in areas like Manchuria where there is little sign of the new economy, things are looking quite bleak. More on that later.
Here is what’s wrong with debt in China: too huge, built-up too fast, and hard to count. Huge compared to produced goods:
Although economy has grown at 6.9% in Q3 y-o-y, yet bank loans increased by 15.4% in Q3 compared with the same period in 2014. China’s overall debt-to-GDP ratio is continuing its steady upward march.
Growth in credit did slow down. Measured by total social financing (TSF) growth (bank loans + corporate bonds + shadow lending) soared to 35% in 2009, but rose by 13% this quarter from a year earlier. But what is important is to see how much debt is rising vis-à-vis GDP, to truly measure indebtedness.
Fast Buildup:
In 2007, debt was 160% of GDP. Now the ratio stands at more than 240%, 161 trillion yuan ($25 trilliion). That’s almost double the buildup in debt in the US and UK in the run-up-to the financial crisis.
Here is the graph that Bloomberg produced based on McKinsey numbers:
Hard to count:
The sheer pace of new lending, regulatory loopholes, shadow banking practices, and a murky system of implicit guarantees (not clear whether debt is backed by the government or who would be allowed to go bust)
A crisis?
Since most of the debtors are state-owned companies and creditors, state-owned banks, the Chinese government can still control the situation. It has done so by simply rolling over non-performing loans when they are due, or extend the deadline.
SOE and finance reform central to reducing debt:
However, that only spares the economy of an eventual reckoning in the short-run. And in addition, when there is a need for loans to be distributed to soft-land growth, a lot of it is still being funneled to zombie corporations rather than the enterprising private sectors.
This situation has got worse. 6 years before the crisis, one yuan of credit brough 5 yuan of national output. Now that ratio has come down to 1/3.
Indeed, central to reducing debt is restructuring old and unproductive SOEs as well as overhauling a financial system which continues to favour these at the cost of new, full-of-potential companies that will precisely be the new drivers of growth.
What has the government done so far?
The government should bravely have pulled the plug on these old SOEs continuing to extend loans and not letting them go bust (the power equipment maker Baoding Tianwei, and Kaisa Group which has failed to pay overseas bonds) apart from but it hasn’t done so because it fears of social unrest and the toll it might take on.
It has so far tried to get a clearer picture of liabilities:
– require local government to compile and display better data on debt.
– force banks to bring more of their shadow loans onto balance sheets (they have made more official loans to substitute shadow loans)
It has also used monetary easing and low cost bonds (longer payback periods)-swap program (2 trillion yuan worth of high-interest debt) for local governments to reduce cost serving debt.
One problem is the last solution. People think this is just brushing the problem else where. Net bond issuance in first nine months of 2015 was 8.7 trillion yuan, up 67% y-o-y. More on bonds later.
Optimism and Pessimism:
Optimists say companies and local governments will simply grow their way out of the problem with an expanding economy. As China continues to grow (still at 6 something %, it will need additional projects; one road one belt, though by itself will not be enough). And the Chinese government has plenty of money to cover bad debt.
They also pluck on specific types of debt. The ratio of debt to equity for listed companies, for instance has peaked at 159 % in the middle of 2012, aand has started to edge down. It’s some distance away from the 234% in the US just before the Lehman collapse. Additionally, while those in the old economy do indeed have excess credit, with close-to zero return on assets, those in the new economy like e-commerce Alibaba are more innovative, cater to consumers, post much less debt to equity ratios and more impressive return on assets. The private sector is outpacing state sector in output, profits, and employment. Service sector’s contribution to GDP has been bigger than manufacturing since 2013.
But pessimists say risks are mounting as China’s economy cools and slower inflation threatens to make debts harder to repay. The Chinese government does have an unusually strong fiscal firepower and can bailout everyone. But high debt can drag on growth, like it did on Japan and Europe. IMF puts the drag-on-growth threshold at 96% of GDP.
밑 사진을 보면, 대표 보수신의 1면은 온통 빠리태러 사건/ 별개 기사로 도배 되있고, 대표 좌파신문1면엔 광화문 시위/ 박근혜 정부 비판하는 기사로 도배 되있다.
물론 ISIS가 선동한 파리 및 다른 중동국가 시민들에 대한 테러는 모든 인류가 주의하고 애도 해야 할 사건이다. 그렇지만 나라가 왈칵 뒤집힌 상태에 동 나라 신문사가 1면을 해외 사건으로 도배 했다는건 분명 고의적인 편집상 결정이다. 이에 따라 문제 제기를 하고 싶다:
기본적으로 우리나라 보수언론은 보수권력 앞에선 기어다닐 줄 밖에 모른다. 단순하게 폄하 하려는게 아니다. 소위 우리나라 지식분자/엘리트들이라는 조중동 기자들을 비판해야하는지, 아니면 그 소유주들을 비판해야될지. 아마 권력에 대한 충성심이 보수언론DNA에 바킨건 후자의 책임이 더 클 것이라 생각된다. 이 중 조선일보 그리고 조선TV (한국에 나올 때 가끔 보면서 느낀 건 tv조선은 미국 대표 막장걸래언론 FOX뉴스의 영업모델 및 철학…멘토로 모신 것 같다)가 제일 악질 적이라고 생각한다. 이런 친권력 언론의 편집부는 한국에서 일자리를 못 찾으면 중국국가 선전부 (propaganda department) 소속이나 다름 없는 국영매체 인민일보나 CCTV같은 곳에서 대환영을 받을 것이다. 다들 뻔히 아는 사실이지만, 이럴 때 다시 한번 강조 하고 싶다: 언론은 태생부터 권력자들이(기업이건 정부건) 일반 무력한 시민들을 착취하지 못 하게 하려고 설립된 단체로서 民主주의가 제대로 돌아가게 해주는 중대한 역할을 맡는다. 피와 같은 진실된 정보와 투명성을 대중에게 멈춤 없이 공급 해줘야되는 언론이 제대로 기능을 못 하면 民主주의는 막말로 하자면 심장마비걸린 사람 처럼 뒤진다.
The ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague was much stronger than expected. Almost all points under contention were ruled in favour of the Philippines. This surely will have some consequences not just for the way China conducts itself in the region but also for China’s soft power which, for all its money, has been and still will be a crucial part of the country’s efforts to forge more ties in the world.
double happiness courtyard 