‘Malaysia Bans Foreigners’? Look again.
An inexplicably terse headline has been making its rounds in my news feeds for the last couple of days. It would be big news, if only it were true.
“Malaysia Bans Foreigners,” cries the headline of an AP story published at the International Herald Tribune.
Well, no. The article outlines how non-Malaysian vehicles are being banned from gassing up within 50 km of the borders with Thailand and Singapore, since Malaysia is subsidizing fuel and they don’t want foreign freeloaders coming over just to take advantage of the subsidy.
So if you were planning to stop by Kuala Lumpur, and you’re not a Malaysian citizen, fear not. Just this: If you’re driving in from Thailand or Singapore, stop for gas before you get to the border and eat the high prices. Some desk editor needs to read the whole article (or even the lede) before writing the headline.
Bank of America and China Construction Bank, or No-Fee USD Withdrawls in China
My personal favorite transpacific investment tie-up is one that made a frustrating and expensive process free, if not easy. Bank of America has an 8.2 percent stake in China Construction Bank (jiàn háng), a major institution that went public in 2005. I don’t claim to understand the implications of this investment between huge banks, but I know one thing: It lets me move USD into RMB with no ATM fees, no exchange rate adjuncts, and generally few headaches.
By way of news, The Financial Times reports that BoA is increasing its stake to more than 10 percent, but I thought it might be useful for readers coming from the United States to China to know about this trick.
Many international travelers are familiar with the pain of double-barrel ATM fees — one from the machine that gives you money, and one from a U.S. bank penalizing you for using someone else’s terminal. Worse yet is the percentage of the withdrawl charged as an “exchange rate adjunct.” Before I discovered the BoA-CCB deal I was losing almost 7 percent on my USD withdrawls in China.
Now, I withdraw money from a BoA checking account with the debit card I received in the United States with no fees whatsoever: It transfers at market rate from USD to RMB and gives me cash.
There was one hurdle, however. Money in my life this year is deposited in Colorado. People in the U.S. needing to pay me send a check to my family, who generously go to the bank to make the deposit. But there are no BoA branches in Colorado.
BoA has one more service that completes my money circuit. Once you associate a U.S. account with a BoA account, incoming transfers from the other bank can be done on a one- or three-day basis with no fees. So if you think I need to be richer in China, I’ll send you the address in Colorado, my family will make a deposit into a locally available bank, I’ll transfer it free to BoA, and CCB ATMs throughout China (and Hong Kong) will allow me to withdraw that money with no charges.
Demonstrations in Tokyo During Hu Visit: Could Be Worse
But even as Hu spoke, about 200 protesters waved signs outside the university gate saying “Free Tibet” and “No Pandas, No Poison Dumplings,” the latter referring to Hu’s offer to lend two pandas to a Tokyo zoo and a row over Chinese-made dumplings laced with pesticide that made several Japanese people ill.
When I was in Japan recently, the contaminated jiaozi/gyoza scandal was one of the first things most Japanese friends asked me about on learning I now live in Beijing. It seems like a bit of progress if anti-China demonstrators (who weren’t particularly numerous) are complaining about human rights and food safety rather than history-related issues. Anti-U.S. slogans were not as substantial when I happened upon a much larger demonstration on Sept. 11, 2004, at Tokyo’s Omotesando.
“I just want to say ‘Free Tibet’. I want to say ‘No’ to China‘s oppression of human rights,” said 29-year-old Atsushi Hanazawa, who carried a guitar along with a Tibetan flag.
Again, this makes Japanese protesters in a similar position as many around the world. No comment on who’s well informed.
Some Waseda students were more concerned about getting to class. “I can’t get through the gate. It’s a pain,” said 18-year-old Takuhiro Waki of the protest.
About two dozen right-wing activists yelled anti-Chinese slogans such as “Hu Jintao, Go Back to China.” Earlier, some right-wing Waseda alumni protested against Hu’s speech in a blog.
There’s the nationalism. But two dozen? Pretty weak from people who get crowds twice that size in front of sound trucks on anonymous Tuesdays near busy train stations and somewhat regularly clog the streets near the Chinese embassy.
Nearby around 50 Chinese students held their own rally, yelling “Go, China” in Chinese, “Sino-Japanese Friendship” in Japanese, and “Yes, We Can” in English.
“When I hear the anti-Chinese slogans, I feel that the Chinese people’s character has been maligned,” said 28-year-old Chinese graduate student Cao Shunrui.
There’s a little more nationalism, perhaps, from the other side. I’m not sure what to make of that, but the “Sino-Japanese friendship” message is considerably more helpful than some of the vitriol on both sides in U.S. campuses, from Grace Wang’s experience at Duke to a few dozen other reported rallies.
Hu later shed his suit jacket to play ping-pong at Waseda with popular players from both countries, but Fukuda, 71, declined to pick up a paddle.
“I’m glad I didn’t play ping-pong with him,” Fukuda told reporters. “He’s very strategic. I thought you can’t be too careful.”
I wouldn’t play him either. If he’s playing with popular players, he’d kick my ass. Unless Prime Minister Fukuda has been training, it’s probably wise to save the embarrassment and watch a friendly match.
How to ‘Pressure’ ‘the Chinese’ on Human Rights
At Foreign Policy, former Amnesty International Executive Director William F. Schultz considers how to “pressure Beijing.” Aside from taking a little too literally Chinese government statements about “the Chinese” and their supposed hurt feelings, Schultz, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (disclosure: my former employer), makes an interesting suggestion:
What is the appropriate tack to take? The most successful human rights engagement with China—such as that of John Kamm, a former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong who has intervened on behalf of hundreds of political prisoners—is characterized by what one might call respectful tenaciousness. Trying to crack Chinese Internet censorship or highlighting the cases of those mistreated for seeking to advance the rule of law or exercise free speech, for instance, is always appropriate. But so is applauding China’s attempts to control corruption or experiment with local elections.
Effective human rights work requires two things. First, it requires a tragic sense of history—a recognition that, no matter what we do, we will never be able to save everyone from misery or suffering. Sometimes, for example, despite its immense power and resources, the U. S. government’s own ability to influence human rights is limited, and its willingness to do so in a bold way is compromised by competing interests. We who care about human rights would do well to recognize that and shape our recommendations to the U.S. government accordingly. Otherwise, we risk even greater marginalization than we already experience.
But secondly, good human rights work requires persistence and a long view, the recognition that human rights have become the lingua franca for much of the world and a ticket of admission to widely honored membership in the international community. The United States with its plummeting approval ratings around the globe has learned that the hard way. China too will learn eventually that the best way to avert hurt feelings is to avoid prompting criticism in the first place.
The whole construct of “pressure” feels problematic, but I think what Schultz proposes is a significantly more sensitive tack for advocacy and diplomacy. It’s an open question, though, whether a government that stakes much of its domestic persona on a national sense of pride will really change behaviour for the sake of avoiding criticism.
Celebrating May Fourth With Slow Internet
The internet is unusually sluggish today. I wrote a bit about some possible reasons why at Sinobyte.
Blogspot has re-disappeared, MSN Messenger is inaccessible from an artsy Beijing cafe, searches for Carrefour are just back from going unanswered, and the spring sky is clear. It’s the 89th anniversary of China’s May Fourth Movement.
In 1919, student activism took a powerful and still-honored turn for the patriotic in China. On May 4, thousands of students gathered at Tiananmen to protest the Treaty of Versailles and its treatment of previously German-held territory in Shandong Province, which was given to Japan rather than back to China.
Today, students have been at the forefront of recent demonstrations of national pride in the face of demonstrations against the Olympic flame as it toured the world. After a French demonstrator went after a woman carrying the torch in a wheelchair, anti-French sentiment was converted to demonstrations and boycotts directed against the French megamart Carrefour.
Go read the full post here.
