Day: July 11, 2021

The head of a Thai-based volunteer aid group, speaking from inside Myanmar, has described increasing attacks by that country’s military in the ethnic areas along the country’s borders with China and Thailand.

Speaking to VOA by satellite phone Friday from northern Kayin state in Myanmar’s east, David Eubank, the head of the Free Burma Rangers, said since the February 1 coup,  Myanmar’s military has not only attacked urban protesters but is now carrying out increasing offensives on the country’s fringes.

The United Nations said last month that almost a quarter of a million people have been driven from their homes and villages by post-coup violence, and that millions risk hunger in coming months.  Most of them are spread across the border areas, where ethnic minorities with standing armies have been fighting the military for autonomy for decades.  Eubank’s Free Burma Rangers sends hundreds of volunteers into Myanmar’s conflict zones with medical services and supplies — from rice to schoolbooks — for remote rural areas.

‘The gloves came off’

“Once the coup happened,” Eubank said, “it was like the gloves came off the Burma military. Not only did they begin to crush the people in the streets, as you’ve seen; they began to unleash their power on the ethnics, and that’s when we saw this huge uptick of attacks and displacement.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.

When the military started attacking targets in northern Kayin after the coup, by air for the first time in decades, the area’s displaced population jumped tenfold from 4,000 to 40,000 by April, Eubank said.

He estimated the airstrikes have killed about 20 civilians in the area and wounded some 40 more. He said that is fewer than those killed by the military’s ground forces in northern Kayin, which he puts at about 40, “but the psychological impact of the airplanes is just huge up here.”

“Way past the killing that the airstrikes [caused] and damage they did has been the fear,” he said.

Myanmar government officials could not be reached for comment. In the past the military has said it has only uses proportionate force against threats to state security.

In the jungle

Eubank said most of the 40,000 have returned home in recent weeks as the airstrikes died down and most of the new troops the military moved in were pulled back, although skirmishes with forces of the Karen National Union, one of the country’s many armed ethnic groups, have kept up.

He said the most intense fighting since the coup is in the northernmost state of Kachin, where the military has been losing ground to the Kachin Independence Army, another ethnic armed group.

In the past few weeks, though, fighting has picked up most in the tiny eastern state of Kayah, also known as Karenni, where the military is up against smaller militias and new “people’s defense forces” of locals who have pooled their weapons to resist the junta. Fighting there has driven more than 100,000 people out of their homes, now the most in any state or region, Eubank, who has teams there, said.

Those teams, he said, report soldiers looting villagers’ homes and firing into the jungle with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, both to keep any rebels at bay and to clear tracts of land of anyone else.

“I’m looking at photos that my team sent right now. … I see wrecked houses. I’m looking at a destroyed church. I’m looking at a guy who was shot. I’m looking at pictures of IDPs [internally displaced persons] hiding in the jungle,” he told VOA.

Heavy rains have only made it worse for those pushed into the jungle, he added, with many reduced to catching frogs and hunting squirrels to supplement their rice.

Those who can, find caves, the rest make due under pitched tarps, or less, Eubank said.

“Very often they fled out of the house with just what they could carry and maybe had a sheet of plastic over their shoulders. So maybe they’ll cut bamboo and make a frame, like a lean-to frame, and then lay banana leaves and other leaves over it to make a little shelter and huddle under that,” he said.

“They live pretty rough. And then there’s no school, and they’ve got the clothes on their back. And if there’s hundreds of them on the same stream. then you have pollution problems and dysentery.”

A looming crisis

Eubank said the military was also setting up checkpoints and sending out patrols to keep aid shipments from flowing from the plains into the hills  and rebel-controlled areas, where many of the displaced are taking shelter, checking people for everything from extra food and medicine to batteries and children toys.

He said supplies were still getting in and that most of the newly displaced have enough rice right now and to last the next two to three months.

Even those who have felt safe enough to return home, though, as in Kayin, are a month or two behind on their farming and coming back to overgrown fields that need extra work, he added. That could mean much less rice at harvest time.

Some of those who have returned are also still under fire, he said.

Eubank said he came across a woman in Kayin a few weeks ago being shot at with automatic and sniper rifles from the surrounding hills while planting her rice field. Determined to get the job done, he said, she gathered up her neighbors and together they finished the planting that night in the dark.

The 100,000 still living rough in Kayah cannot even do that. Last month the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Thomas H. Andrews, warned of “mass death” among the displaced there from starvation, disease and exposure if the military continued to cut them off from critical supplies.

Eubank said that could come to pass if more aid does not get in and if they cannot move to where they can find what they need to survive.

“I think it’s a big risk if this goes on, especially for right now in Karenni,” he said. “We have these 100,000 people, and we’re moving literally tons of rice up there through a variety of means. But that’s not sure to meet all the needs. And if the Burma army continues the pressure against those 100,000, they’re going to have to move or they’re going to starve to death,” he said.

The junta claims it toppled the country’s civilian government because it had ignored reports of widespread irregularities in last year’s general elections, in which the military’s proxy party was soundly defeated, but has shown no evidence to back it up. State media now run by the junta has blamed the crisis that has followed the coup on “dishonesty of democracy” in the election.

 

Source: Voice of America

For Helen Cui’s daughter, a 10-year-old rising fifth grader facing the September start of classes, tutoring is a nonnegotiable part of a middle-class Beijing childhood.

Her mother, a white-collar worker in a foreign enterprise, has established a grueling weekly extracurricular schedule that includes three hours of English lessons, three hours of math lessons, three hours of Chinese lessons, one hour of swimming lessons, one hour of piano lessons, and 90 minutes of a small online English class taught by an American who tells a story and then leads the handful of kids through a discussion.

Cui estimates these additional lessons cost around $16,000 a year, an expenditure she believes is necessary to ensure her daughter’s chance at the good life, an opportunity that hinges on excellent grades, excellent test scores and admission to an excellent college or university.

But new regulations issued by China’s Ministry of Education are placing restrictions on private tutoring, or “cram schools.” Some see this as the government’s attempt to reduce the cost of raising a child as it calls for couples to have two, or even three, children  after its one-child policy left China with too few workers to support the many retirees.

New regulations

The ministry created a new department on June 15 to regulate off-campus tutoring schools, with the vaguely stated goal of reducing students’ academic burden. Parents understood the statement as the ministry reminding them that it was in charge, even though it offered no details.

According to the ministry’s website, the Off-Campus Education and Training Department will supervise enterprises providing training and tutoring both online and offline to kindergarten through 12th grade students. The new office would guide private educational enterprises in areas such as incorporation, fees, class content, scheduling and training qualifications.

On July 2, the Beijing Municipal Education Commission announced that each district’s education commission government would organize summer after-school programs for its elementary school students. Such programs had usually been organized by private-sector schools. Nationwide, at least six other major cities, including Shanghai and Wuhan, have launched similar programs.

Parents like Cui worry that privately operated after-school tutoring centers may close because of competition from the inexpensive city-sponsored programs, especially now that the Off-Campus Education and Training Department wants to lighten students’ study load.

Parents are also fretting about the consequences of a spring crackdown on questionable business practices at some cram schools, fearing some may close.

On Zhihu, a Chinese social website for questions and answers that is similar to Quora in the United States, almost all the comments from parents are against the government’s new regulation of cram schools.

“This is like America’s Prohibition Act. You can ban alcohol, sure, but does that mean that people don’t want alcohol anymore?” posted one commentator. “Same with banning cram schools. If you close them, does that mean parents don’t want to send their kids to these schools? The demand is still there. It’s just becoming more costly.”

Another posted, “Only half the students graduating from Grade 9 are allowed to go to high schools. The other half have to go to vocational schools. There’s a quota now. But what parents want their children to become blue-collar workers? They’ll do everything possible to make sure their kids score well enough to be the top half.”

 

Competition drives demand

Cui said the problem is that students are evaluated by their test scores and that won’t change by restricting or closing after-school tutoring programs. As long as the college-entrance exams remain highly competitive, students will need after-school tutoring.

“If we can’t go to those after-school programs and we don’t have the energy to teach our children ourselves, then we will have to find one-on-one tutoring,” said Cui. “It is three or five times more expensive than group classes. It makes us more anxious. We (would be) spending more money. And we don’t have a choice to not go.”

After-school tutoring took off in the late 1990s as China transformed itself from an economy based on agriculture and industry to one that included a growing information sector and a vast industrial presence. The result was even more intense competition in education and a greater emphasis on university degrees. Many parents turned to after-school cram schools fearing that the typical school curriculum didn’t do enough to help children maximize their potential.

The official People’s Daily in 2016 quoted the Chinese Society of Education as saying a conservative estimate valued the “out-of-school education and training industry” that employed thousands of people at approximately $123.5 billion.

According to a report released in July 2020 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Key Laboratory for Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management, K-12 online education alone will have a market size of $23 billion by 2022.

Chinese couples say the cost of having children is one reason they are having fewer babies. In May, census data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman in 2020, a new low. China had 12 million newborns in 2020, down by 18% from 2019. 2020 is the fourth consecutive year that Chinese births have declined.

Cost of tutoring adds up

For Chinese middle-class urban parents, extracurricular classes are a requirement, much like regular medical checkups. But the cost of extra classes adds up.

According to a 2019 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences report, raising a child from birth through junior high school costs an average family living in Shanghai’s upscale Jingan district $130,000, with $78,713.42 of that budgeted for education, as Reuters reported.  Low-income families in Shanghai, which have annual incomes of about $7,700, spend more than 70% of that on their only child, the report said.

Michael Ma, who works in the after-school education sector and asked VOA not to use his real name for fear of retaliation, suggested that since the cost of having children includes educating them, regulating pricey after-school programs is one way for the government to lower costs.

Cui said that she and her husband didn’t plan to have a second child.

“The older your children get, the more money you need to spend. We don’t have that much energy,” she said. “People I know in big cities don’t plan to have a third child, anyway. Having one is already tiring.”

On April 25, the Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Regulation issued $77,000 fines to four extracurricular enterprises for pricing violations and false advertising. One of them was New Oriental Online, the digital offering from New Oriental, the self-described largest provider of private educational services in China. On June 1, the government issued a total of $5.6 million in fines to 15 cram schools for the same violations.

Bingqi Xiong, president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a nongovernmental education think tank in Beijing, said the examination system should be reformed to reduce the need for extracurricular schooling.

“The college entrance examination system that evaluates students with a single score is why parents are very anxious,” he said. “Under this evaluation system, all parents want their children to get higher grades and higher rankings in order to get into better universities.”

Ma said the industry was growing too fast, spurred on by outside investors seeking a return on their money rather than just high scores for customers’ children, even though top marks are the measure of success for students, their parents, the cram schools and university admissions officers.

“In China and other countries, after capital influx, institutions put all their energy into attracting more users with low prices and then go on to raise more money,” Ma said. This logic is wrong, and the market is problematic.”

The government guidelines intend to regulate the after-school programs, not close them, he added.

“The government hopes that through this regulation and change, public schools with public teacher resources will play a major role,” Ma said. “And the market-oriented elements should play a supporting role for public schools.”

 

Source: Voice of America

​The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas updates the public that the applicable rediscount rate for the month of July 2021 on loans under the Peso Rediscount Facility (PRF) remains at 2.50 percent, regardless of maturity (i.e., 1 to 180 days). Meanwhile, rediscount rates on loans under the Exporters’ Dollar and Yen Rediscount Facility (EDYRF) are set at 2.14575 percent for United States Dollar (USD) and 1.92250 percent for Japanese Yen, regardless of maturity (i.e., 1 to 360 days).

 

​Under the Peso Rediscount1 Facility, the sole availment2 covering the period 01 January to 30 June 2021 amounted to ₽4 million which represents the rediscount by a bank, under Production Credits, of a loan that financed industrial processing. There are no availments under the EDYRF for the same period.3

 

Source: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP)

The Singapore Government dispatched emergency oxygen supplies and equipment including liquid oxygen, ISO tanks, oxygen cylinders and oxygen concentrators today, in response to Indonesia’s request. A Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) Landing Ship Tank (LST) departed Changi Naval Base for Tanjung Priok Port, Indonesia, this morning. This tranche of emergency oxygen supplies and equipment follows the initial tranche of assistance delivered to Indonesia by the Republic of Singapore Air Force on 9 July 2021.

 

As Indonesia’s close neighbour and partner, Singapore will continue to work in close cooperation with Indonesia to support their efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

 

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Singapore