China faces a health emergency from “hidden epidemics’’ of diseases such as cancer, heart trouble and diabetes that could have far-reaching social, economic and demographic consequences for the world’s most populous nation, experts have warned. Although China imposed the world’s strictest lockdowns to protect its people from Covid-19, the deadly impact from non-communicable diseases is much less well understood and threatens to kill tens of millions of Chinese in the coming decades without tougher public health policies. China has been transformed in recent decades by an economic miracle that has…
Month: September 2022
‘I should eat more vegetables’: living with diabetes in rural China
Li, a retired farmer who lives in Henan province in central China, has type 2 diabetes. The condition is manageable but comes with large out-of-pocket expenses, a common feature for people in China, especially those who, like Li, live in rural areas and don’t have the best insurance policies. Li doesn’t like to complain too much, though, and says his children help him with the bills. “Now a lot of old people have diabetes,” he says. “So it’s not necessarily a severe disease, you just have to pay more attention…
Cambodia scams: Lured and trapped into slavery in South East Asia
“Many are quite sophisticated with separate departments for IT, finance, money laundering for example. The bigger ones can be corporate-like, with training provided for scamming, progress reports, quotas and sales targets,” said Gaso spokesman Jan Santiago. BBC
China Quarantine Bus Crash Prompts Outcry Over ‘Zero COVID’
Advertisement A nighttime bus crash that killed 27 people in southwest China this week has set off a storm of anger online over the harshness of the country’s strict COVID-19 policies. The initial police report did not say who the passengers were and where they were going, but it later emerged they were headed to a quarantine location outside their city of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province. The bus with 47 people on board crashed about 2:40 a.m. Sunday. City officials announced many hours later that the passengers were…
Ukraine war to take centre stage at UN as west and Russia vie for support
The UN general assembly summit this week will be dominated by a struggle – between the US and its allies on one side and Russia on the other – for global support over the fate of Ukraine, as the global south fights to stop the conflict from overshadowing the existential threats of famine and the climate crisis. With a return to fully in-person general debate, presidents and prime ministers will be converging on New York, many of them direct from London, where the diplomacy got under way on the sidelines…
Powering China’s Nuclear Ambitions
Advertisement China’s President Xi Jinping arrived in Kazakhstan on a state visit on September 14, ahead of his attendance at the 22nd summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in the Uzbek city of Samarkand. Although much of the media focus was on the SCO summit, and Xi’s bilateral meetings with other presidents, attention should also be paid to his state visits, particularly to Kazakhstan, and their relevance to China’s domestic policies. In a letter published in Kazakhstan’s Kazakhstanskaya Pravda newspaper before his visit, Xi noted that China and Kazakhstan “are good…
Chinese VP Wang Qishan attends Queen Elizabeth’s funeral
Zheng was barred from attending Parliament in September last year over Beijing’s sanctions on British lawmakers who had been outspoken about alleged human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region. Hoyle and Speaker of the House of Lords John McFall had agreed that Zheng could not enter until the sanctions were lifted. Some British parliamentarians had written to Hoyle and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly last week, asking them to rescind the invitation to China to attend the queen’s funeral. Advertisement That invitation was extended by the British government despite rising tensions…
Bus Taking People to Quarantine Crashes in China, Killing 27
BEIJING — A bus that was carrying dozens of people to a quarantine facility crashed over the weekend in southwestern China, killing at least 27 of them and setting off a renewed, anguished debate about the country’s zero-tolerance Covid policies. The bus was transporting 47 people from the city of Guiyang when it rolled over around 2:40 a.m. on Sunday, about 100 miles southeast of the city, according to the local authorities. In addition to the 27 people killed, the 20 other passengers onboard were injured. Much of Guiyang, the…
Indian government accused of ceding land in Himalayas to China
Indian people living near the country’s disputed Himalayan border with China have accused their government of giving away swathes of land after both sides agreed to withdraw troops from some contested areas and create buffer zones. Earlier this month, Indian and Chinese troops, who have been locked in a tense border dispute since June 2020, began to draw back from the contested area of Gogra-Hot Springs after an agreement was reached to disengage. The Indian government said the agreement restored the territory on both sides of the contested border, known…
West weighs calling for China Uyghur abuses inquiry at UN
Western powers are weighing the risk of a potential defeat if they table a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council calling for an independent commission to investigate alleged human rights abuses by China in Xinjiang. The issue is a litmus case for Chinese influence at the UN, as well as the willingness of the UN to endorse a worldview that protects individual rights from authoritarian states. The outgoing UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, issued a report on her last day in office – 31 August – claiming there…