Day: March 5, 2024

North Korean authorities are going door-to-door to ensure that all homes have a working speaker hardwired to receive the government’s propaganda broadcasts, residents told Radio Free Asia.

Three times a day, for an hour or two each time, the speakers broadcast directives from the party and bad news about South Korea and the United States – allowing a way for the government to reach into people’s homes with propaganda, although residents say they are often static-filled and hard to hear.

The broadcasts can include local news, mobilization instructions and even name and shame individuals who have been arrested for crimes, according to interviews with escapees conducted by the Washington-based Stimson Center’s 38 North project.

The so-called “Third Network” system is based on the Soviet “radiotochka” network that hardwired a speaker in every home to a central broadcast location so that messages can be transmitted without sending them over the air.

If during inspections, the home is found to have a faulty speaker, or none at all, residents must pay for repairs or a new speaker – but many resent the whole system because the broadcasts are not relevant to their daily lives, the residents said.

“These days, county authorities are inspecting broadcast cables and forcing any households without speakers to purchase and install them,” a resident of Puryong county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

“An inspector from the post office alongside the head of the neighborhood watch unit went to each home to verify that there was a speaker installed and that it was in working order,” he/she said.

Wires sold for scrap

The closed nature of the Third Network, colloquially called “wired broadcasting,” means that the state can control who is receiving the broadcasts, as they cannot be picked up in neighboring countries or by invading armies over the air. 

The state can also limit the access to information within the same country, broadcasting different information to different regions.

According to a report by 38 North, the Third Network was started in the 1950s and was said to have been “completed” in 1982. 

But North Korea’s economy collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and from 1994-1998 the country was plunged into a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people, or as many as 2.2 million by some estimates.

It was during this time that many of the speakers and wires were stripped from homes and sold as scrap as people did anything they could to survive.

North Korea appears to be trying to rebuild the network by forcing residents to pay for new speakers if theirs did not survive to the present day.

“A few days after the inspection, the head of the neighborhood watch unit collected 7,000 won (82 US cents) from households that were identified as being unable to listen to wired broadcasting due to missing or broken speakers,” the resident said. “But these days, most families are having difficulty earning a living.”

Static and interference

He said that they are resentful that the authorities are going around collecting money for speakers just so they can hear “slanderous propaganda” about the United States and South Korea.

“The sound quality is poor and there is a lot of static and interference,” he said. “So it’s often difficult to understand the broadcast content properly.”

A possible reason for poor sound quality is that the Central Broadcasting Committee in each city and county does not use the same wires connected to each home. The network was built over time and never updated, so some wires are as old as the 1950s and the ones in newer homes were installed recently. 

Also wires were made mostly of different materials in each era, with some made of iron and others made of aluminum. The cables are also overtapped in some areas and a broken cable in one area could affect an entire part of the city.

Another North Hamgyong resident told RFA that the authorities are telling people that they should listen to the “Third Broadcast” as part of their daily routine. 

“The party specifically assigned a task to a munitions factory to produce speakers,” he said. “They especially emphasized that families without speakers must install them as soon as possible.”

The party warned that not having a working speaker could be potentially disastrous, the second resident said.

“Authorities say that you will not be able to receive important messages or instructions from the Central Committee regarding emergency situations without wired broadcasting,” he said. “If one does not know the party’s intentions, one could unknowingly commit an error or fall behind the times.”

Access to reliable electricity has been a constant problem in North Korea these days, with some rural areas going completely without power for long stretches, and others only getting a few hours each day.  This means that even if the homes have working speakers they might not receive the broadcasts anyway. But they still have to pay to make sure they work.

“Broadcasts are rarely delivered properly due to frequent power outages,” the second resident said. “Even if the broadcasts are good, no one will listen to a Third Broadcast because it is not helpful for making a living.”

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

In 2021, China overtook the United States to become the European Union’s largest trading partner. In 2022, China was not only the EU’s largest importer, but also the EU’s third-largest exporter, behind the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

The EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, once hailed as a historic investment agreement, came to fruition after seven years of negotiations. However, in May 2021, the European Parliament withheld ratification due to China’s counter-sanctions on its members as well as other European scholars and think tanks. Previously, the EU imposed sanctions on Chinese officials who were accused of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. 

Gunnar Wiegand, former managing director for Asia and the Pacific at the European External Action Service, is currently a visiting distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. From 2016 to 2023, Wiegand was a key contributor to the EU’s policy on relations with China, India and other Indo-Pacific partners. 

In a recent interview with RFA Mandarin, Wiegand discussed the EU-China relationship, challenges to trade relations and the effect of China’s “pro-Russian neutrality” on bilateral ties in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: What factors are currently beneficial to the China-EU relations? 

Wiegand: The relationship between the European Union and China is first and foremost strong in the context of our economic relations. … We are very important partners for each other, and there is, therefore, economic interdependence. And that requires a lot of responsible decision making on both sides.

I will now enter into the specifics of the difficulties, which, of course, exist in such a vast economic relationship. These are linked to significant state subsidization of production in China, violations of intellectual property rights and forced technology transfer, or to the fact that there are certain sectors of the Chinese economy which remain closed to foreign investors.

I also want to emphasize that there is a common conviction that we need to cooperate closely, and we do so on everything related to climate change, the greening of our economies, and also to biodiversity, to name a few. Other international challenges are linked to the debt management of so many countries which are overly indebted, or to global health questions where we hope to have a global pandemic treaty at some point. These are examples which I would say are rather on the side where Europe and China are used to working together as partners. 

Sometimes, of course, when it comes to technologies for certain industries, we are also strong competitors.

RFA: What is the anti-subsidies probe into electric vehicles (EVs) manufactured in China that the EU introduced last year about?

Wiegand: For example, there are about 140 car-producing companies in China, active with a massive overproduction of cars. When you have highly subsidized products which you cannot sell on your own market, you have to look after markets in other countries. The effect is then similar as with a dumped product when you have a highly subsidized product.

I cannot comment on the state of this investigation. There will be a proposal once the investigation is finalized, whether, and if so, at which level, specific import duties would be applied so as to balance out the price differences. I only wanted to say that the rules for imposing anti-dumping duties or anti-subsidies duties are encoded in the trade defense instruments, remedies agreed under the World Trade Organization.

RFA: Will the EU’s goals to reach a zero-emissions target for new passenger cars registered in Europe by 2035, and to accelerate the production and sale of low-emission vehicles to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 conflict with the probe or the competition with China’s EVs industry? 

Wiegand: China has, of course, built up over the last few years a formidable production capacity for the greening of its own industry. This includes solar panels, wind power, batteries, EVs and many more items. China has seen the need for industrial output, which facilitates this green transition. And this is, of course, important also for us. … However, it is not possible for Europe to deal with the products put on the European market for this green transition, which are produced in a way … that they are highly subsidized and result in overproduction. We are together with China to meet our goals of decarbonizing, moving out of greenhouse gas emissions, but it must be done in a way that our wide-open market will not become the dumping ground.

RFA: What about factors that might be harmful to the EU-China relations?

Wiegand: Among the problematic areas, we should first and foremost mention the impact of the war of Russia against Ukraine. China has certainly underestimated the Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of its impact on relations between Europe and China. 

Because in the beginning, there has been, let’s say, hope and certainly the encouragement expressed by all our leaders when engaging with China … and [Chinese] President Xi Jinping was encouraged to reach out not only to [Russian] President Vladimir Putin but also to [Ukrainian] President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

China has opted for something which we call pro-Russia neutrality. China does keep contact with both sides, but it keeps much more contact with Russia because they have a limitless friendship. China has never condemned Russia for raging war against its neighbor and taking part of its territories. While China is officially supporting the territorial integrity of all states, including Ukraine, it has never indeed officially recognized the annexation of Crimea or Donetsk and Luhansk, southern parts of Ukraine. China has not done anything vis-à-vis Russia to reverse this and to restore Ukrainian territory. 

While the need for negotiations and the principles of territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of states were emphasized, “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis” did not include the necessity for Russia troops to withdraw. 

Russia uses China’s very reasoning that certain states and alliances are seeking to obtain military advantages to the detriment of the security of others, the so-called indivisible security. This interpretation of that principle negates the right of each state to decide how to secure itself and whether or not to belong to an alliance, which is equally enshrined in the security architecture of Europe in the 1990 Paris and the 999 Istanbul Charters under the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

RFA: There have been multiple media and U.S. intelligence reports on civilian and military dual-use equipment flowing to Russia. What is the EU’s understanding of this issue?

Wiegand: When it comes to the question of delivery of arms or ammunition, which has been clearly put forward as a red line by our leaders, China has emphasized at the last EU-China summit in Beijing that it does respect this red line. That no lethal aid is provided for the Russian war effort.

There’s a lot of discussion whether dual-use goods, which have components that could be used for arms production, are indirectly coming into Russia. … And the expectation for Chinese involvement and engagement in this direction has not been sufficiently met with actions. That  is certainly an issue in our bilateral relationship.

The latest round of sanctions has included the interdiction for European companies to deal with a number of companies in countries, where one has seen a significant increase of trade volumes with goods that can be used for military purposes. … It’s quite a number of different countries, and this is also for the first time directly affecting a few companies from China, which are also in Chinese ownership.

Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Joshua Lipes.

Authorities in democratic Taiwan are scrambling to test food products containing chili powder from China for the banned food coloring Sudan Red, after recalling and sealing more than 20,000 kilograms of foodstuffs, including those sold in the popular Haidilao chain of hotpot stores, officials said.

Authorities in Taoyuan city discovered the potentially carcinogenic substance in chili that was subsequently used to make hotpot flavoring and spicy rice noodles by Haidilao, a popular hotpot chain with outlets around the world, officials told the island’s lawmakers on Monday.

But fresh reports of contaminated products continued to roll in on Tuesday, with restaurant chain Bafang Dumpling and instant noodle maker Wei Lih Foods both saying they had bought chili powder tainted with Sudan Red, which is banned in many countries as a likely carcinogen. 

Bombarded by questions in the Legislative Yuan on Monday, Taiwanese Health and Welfare Minister Hsueh Jui-yuan said the government is reinspecting foods containing China-sourced chili, after tainted chili powder was found in several food products across the island.

The ministry has stalled inspections of fresh imports from 21 Chinese exporters and manufacturers and stepped up batch inspections, with Sudan Red found in nine batches out of the 59 officials had inspected by Monday, Hsueh said in comments reported by the United Daily News.

Sudan Red has been banned by various food regulatory bodies worldwide , while European member states carry out mandatory testing for the substance in all products containing powdered chili pepper. It is considered “very likely” to cause cancer by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Health officials will continue to carry out checks and ensure that any other products containing tainted chili powder are recalled, Hsueh said.

Tracing the source

The scandal emerged on Sunday, when health officials in Taoyuan city said they had found chili powder tainted with Sudan III at six different businesses, including Haidilao, which used the tainted powder in products sold at 16 branches across Taiwan. Some 900 kilograms (1,985 pounds) of Haidilao products have now been recalled, the Taiwan News reported.

Officials traced the source of the tainted powder to Chinese suppliers Jinzhan International and Jiaguang International, but blamed Taiwanese food importer Bao Hsin Enterprises for distributing the chili powder to companies despite being aware that it was substandard. Police detained Bao Hsin staff members and its chief executive Liu Ching-shih, and fined the company for violating food sanitation regulations, the China Times newspaper reported.

National Taiwan University professor Wu Kun-yu said Taiwan’s health regulations list 796 permitted food additives. Anything not on the list is banned.

“Additives that aren’t listed can’t be used, and illegal additives will be recalled,” Wu said, blaming “administrative laziness” for the failure to detect the substance sooner.

Haidilao has said it has removed all affected products from sale, and denied any direct business dealings with the suppliers.

The company said it will conduct its own investigations into its supply chain, and actively cooperate with health officials in their investigations.

Public health scandals

Chinese companies have been embroiled in a string of public health scandals affecting foodstuffs in recent years, including other incidents involving Sudan Red in foods, melamine-tainted infant formula milk, used “gutter” cooking oil and cadmium-tainted rice.

A businessman from the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, who gave only the surname Ji for fear of reprisals, said Sudan Red and other banned food additives were detected in salted duck eggs in China between 2000 and 2008.

“There is a huge problem with food safety in China,” Ji said. “[They think] as long as you don’t drop dead after eating it, then it’s fine.”

Jiangsu-based current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping said Chinese officials are less likely to be exposed to toxic foodstuffs, because they have a special food supply chain that has been subjected to stringent safety checks, known as the “tegong” system.

“People at the top of the pyramid enjoy access to the special food supply, so they’re not exposed to these hazards,” Zhang said. “So officials aren’t that concerned about tainted food, and don’t pay much attention to food additives.”

“This is a systemic problem that will only get resolved if they cancel the special food supply for officials,” he said.

Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin

Junta forces dropped an explosive on a passenger bus, killing an elderly woman, locals told Radio Free Asia Tuesday. 

Regime troops dropped the bomb from a Soviet-produced Mi-2 helicopter on Monday while battles raged nearby. Five passengers on board were injured, residents said, adding that the bus was enroute to Dawei, the capital of Myanmar’s southernmost Tanintharyi region. 

Fighting in Dawei has already left thousands homeless. On Sunday alone, 1,000 residents fled five villages in the township after a local defense force attempted to capture a junta camp, villagers told RFA Burmese 

On Feb. 17, a junta offensive on Dawei city’s eastern side near the Thai border initiated a 10-day battle with local resistance groups. The fighting left 7,000 Tanintharyi residents stranded and in need of food and medicine. 

Troops dropped the latest explosive on top of a bus parked on Myeik-Dawei No. 8 Road in Thayetchaung township around 4 p.m. The victim was a 60-year-old woman passengers could only identify by the partial name of Aung, according to an official from the No. 2 Battalion of Dawei district’s People’s Defense Force.

“An elderly woman who was traveling with Mandalar Minn Express bus died. She was hit on her back, underarm and face,” he said, declining to be named for security reasons. “Her body was cremated on Monday. Her belongings are being kept by the No. 2 Battalion until they can be given to her family.”

The defense force has not been able to reach Aung’s relatives, and no further identifying information could be confirmed at this time.

Intense fighting near the Win Wa Police Station in Thayetchaung township, 28 kilometers (17 miles) south of Dawei city, caused the bus to park on the road, the official added.

Dawei defense force’s Oak Awe column spokesperson Yaung Ni told RFA the junta army bombed other villages in Thayetchaung township and a strategic hill nearby.

Battles continued into Tuesday when a junta artillery unit based in Dawei township’s Za Har village fired heavy artillery. The blast exploded in Maung Mei Shaung village’s Shin Dat We Pagoda compound, injuring two civilians.

RFA contacted Tanintharyi spokesperson Thet Naing to confirm these claims, but he did not respond.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

The chairwoman of property company Van Thinh Phat went on trial in Ho Chi Minh City Tuesday, accused of misappropriating more than US$12 billion in Vietnam’s biggest fraud case.

Truong My Lan, 68, is accused of bribery, embezzlement and violating bank regulations in connection with a VND304 trillion loan from Saigon Commercial Bank, or SCB.

Hundreds of police officers were called out to provide security at the trial, Vietnamese media reported.

Lan’s Hong Kong billionaire husband Eric Chu is accused of helping her secure the illegal loan from SCB – more than 90% owned by Lan – causing the bank to lose the equivalent of US$369 million.

Police and security guards guarded the court entrances from possible protests by angry investors as nearly 80 defendants arrived early Tuesday morning. 

The accused include 45 SCB executives, 15 State Bank of Vietnam officials, three government inspectors and a former official at the State Audit Office, according to media reports. Eight defendants are on the run, with international arrest warrants out for them.

Thousands of witnesses have been called to testify in a trial expected to last two months.

The case has claimed the cash of an estimated 42,000 victims, SCB bondholders who haven’t seen a return on their investments since Lan’s arrest in Oct. 2022, leading to rare protests in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Elaine Chan.

China has set a GDP target of 5% for this year, as it vowed to advance growth in stability while tackling “challenges” from the global economy and regional tensions that impede recovery. 

Chinese Premier Li Qiang revealed moderate measures to rejuvenate the economy as he delivered his first government work report to nearly 3,000 of the country’s political elite at the opening of the National People’s Congress on Tuesday.

“We must persist in seeking progress while maintaining stability, promoting stability through advancement, and in construction before destruction,” said Li, China’s No. 2 official after President Xi Jinping.

This year’s targeted growth of “around 5%” is a slight dip from the 5.2% expansion recorded for 2023, potentially extending the record slow pace of economic expansion since 1990. China’s projection is a tad optimistic from the market consensus of 4%-4.6%. The International Monetary Fund predicts GDP to increase 4.6%

Based on historical performance, Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis, said the 5% is justifiable by a relatively higher average regional growth target at the provincial level. With the average provincial growth rate of 5.9% last year, China’s GDP achieved 5.2%.

“So this means that with this year’s 5.6% [regional growth target] – it’s come down – but there’s still room for them to target 5%. This doesn’t mean that it will be easy to get to 5%, but the point is that based on provincial data, this sounds reasonable.”

A budget deficit of 40.6 trillion yuan (US$5.64 trillion), or 3% of GDP, is predicted, representing an increase of 180 billion yuan. The gap narrowed from the 3.8% for 2023. The government said it will also issue special long-term bonds for the next few years to fund “major strategic implementation and construction of major national security capabilities,” without specification. This year’s issuance will total 1 trillion yuan ($139 billion).

Structural reforms at medium-term costs?

The economic policy direction set out in Li’s work report matches market expectations that Beijing would resist pressure for stronger fiscal stimuli and instead focus on the longer-term to transform the world’s second-largest economy into a manufacturing and technological superpower.

“Currently, it is necessary to increase fiscal investment in many aspects. We must vigorously optimize the expenditure structure, strengthen the financial guarantee for major national strategic tasks and basic people’s livelihood, and strictly control general expenditures,” Li said. 

He also urged provincial authorities to protect basic people’s livelihoods, wages and operations, as local governments are drowned in debt.

Urban unemployment is expected at around 5.5% with some 12 million urban jobs to be created this year. Youth unemployment is a pronounced problem underlining the fix policy makers face from demographic changes caused by a shrinking and aging population while productivity and overall growth are sputtering. With an increasing number of university graduates entering the job market and China cracking down on real estate, education and technology industries that draw the youth, young people are finding it hard to find employment.

A spiraling real estate crisis, deflation amid overcapacity, and stock market volatility are caused by real structural problems, fundamentals which analysts at Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center and Rhodium Group’s China Pathfinder project pointed out Beijing must address with “structural reforms.” Not to mention that decades of reliance on exports and government investment models has made it difficult to fuel growth driven by domestic consumption, particularly at a time when investor confidence is waning. Falling housing and stock prices are evidence of that eroding confidence.

Li alluded to improving real estate policy and providing funding to deserving developers as part of accelerating a new development model for the industry without giving details. Real estate is one of the economy’s biggest growth drivers and troubles after a decades-long housing bubble burst a few years ago bringing ramifications to other sectors.

“Through the end of the year and start of 2024 Beijing continued to claim performance above the 2023 target of 5% GDP growth, despite a running battle to roll out extraordinary support measures including lifelines for property developers, mid-year expansion of the fiscal deficit ceiling, monetary policy easing and other steps, and unexplained distortions in the national accounts data,” wrote analysts Daniel Rosen and Rachel Lietzow in China Pathfinder’s February report. 

“Long-term stability will still require urgent market reforms, and the present danger will be that recovery makes the pain associated with real reform harder to justify.” 

To what length Chinese policymakers will go to root out the structural issues at the expense of shorter and medium-term gains remains to be seen.

Amid the deflationary climate, Li said consumer prices are this year targeted to rise 3%.

“We have argued that Beijing’s focus on industrial policy and a supply side transformation, if successful, will only go so far and won’t be enough to place the economy on a sustainable growth path.”

Diana Choyleva, founder and chief economist at Enodo Economics, said the Chinese leadership seems incapable of instituting the structural changes that would help it fuel a consumer-led recovery. 

“As a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, Xi’s approach to the economy leans heavily on the supply side, focusing more on production and distribution than on consumer demand.

“We have argued that Beijing’s focus on industrial policy and a supply side transformation, if successful, will only go so far and won’t be enough to place the economy on a sustainable growth path.”

The Xi element

Li took more than 50 minutes to deliver his first work report, peppered with mentions of guidance from the ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ now added to the constitution. The ideology underpins Xi’s plan to build a ‘moderately prosperous society’ by rebalancing the economy and easing inequalities, and to carry out deep reforms of institutions. That is coupled with the ambitious development strategy of the Belt and Road Initiative introduced in 2013 that connects China with Asia and Europe through infrastructure investments and trade to realize the Chinese dream where China becomes a central global power.

A decade on, the costs of many of the projects have burdened governments where they are located, evoking opposition and worries of the unsettling extension of Chinese power.

Some said the current Chinese economic malaise is the result of political decisions and policy mistakes weighing on structural problems. Indeed, Xi’s “high-grade growth” model is rooted in his priorities of national security and upgrading technology to fuel buy-side consumption. He has called for a new wave of large-scale upgrades among Chinese firms, and also consumers who are being encouraged to trade-in old equipment such as cars and home appliances to boost domestic demand and raise the overall development threshold.

Li’s work report on Tuesday gave air time to advancing modernizing manufacturing transformation to boost the development of “new productive forces” that will eventually create more “Made in China” brands with international influence amid intensifying trade tensions.

The premier also highlighted a focus on tech sectors such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence where China’s competition with the United States is head on.

Defense spending for this year will total 1.67 trillion yuan, representing a similar 7.2% increase from the previous year。

On the issue of Taiwan, China adopted tougher language omitting mention of “peaceful reunification” to simply an “unswerving push to promote the great cause of reunification with the motherland.”

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.