Bộ Ngoại giao Philippines (PDFA) ngày 7/12 thông báo Hội nghị bốn nước tuyên bố chủ quyền trên Biển Đông do Philippines đề xuất tổ chức trong tháng này tại thủ đô Manila đã bị hoãn lại.
Phát biểu tại cuộc họp báo cùng ngày, người phát ngôn PDFA Raul Hernandez cho hay hội nghị trên sẽ không diễn ra vào ngày 12/12, song các bên vẫn đang phấn đấu tiến tới hội nghị này. Khi được hỏi về lý do trì hoãn, người phát ngôn Hernandez nói: "Thách thức thực sự là do lịch trình của các bên tham gia."Trước đó hồi tháng 11, phát biểu với giới truyền thông, Philippines cho biết nước này, Malaysia, Brunei và Việt Nam sẽ nhóm họp tại Manila vào ngày 12/12 để thảo luận về tranh chấp lãnh thổ trên Biển Đông./.- Hoãn tổ chức Hội nghị 4 nước ASEAN về Biển Đông (TTXVN).
Philippines puts off South China Sea talks due to scheduling problems
December 07, 2012 6:00 PM
“Our Institutional DNA”: The U.S. Marine Corps Surges to the Asia-Pacific
theDiplomat.com - Thái Lan “nguy hiểm” nhất Đông Nam Á (PLTP).
- TỔ QUỐC BÊN NHÀ GIÀN DK1 (Bùi Văn Bồng).
- Hơn 4.500 lượt tàu thuyền nước ngoài vi phạm chủ quyền (VOV). – Viện trưởng Viện Nghiên cứu Quản lý biển và hải đảo Vũ Thanh Ca: Ngư dân Việt Nam không đơn độc (ĐĐK). – 9 ngư dân hoảng loạn sau khi thoát chết vụ chìm tàu (DT).
- Lại tuồn bản đồ lưỡi bò, sách xuyên tạc vào VN (Khampha).
- Trung Quốc ngày càng hiếu chiến (TT). – Trung Quốc và chiến lược “mềm nắn, rắn buông” ở Biển Đông (DT). – Trung Quốc: Sức mạnh càng tăng đi kèm với trách nhiệm càng lớn (NCBĐ).
- Cù Huy Hà Bảo: Biểu tình em ơi chẳng sợ gì (DLB). . – Cố lên các bạn ơi! (DLB).
- Luật biểu tình sẽ có nội dung như thế nào? (Nguyễn Tường Thụy).
Đảng 'nên đặt Tổ quốc lên trên hết'
Cắt cáp để gây áp lực
The “Long Pole in the Tent”: China’s Military Jet Engines
theDiplomat.com Clinton vows to thwart new Soviet Union
(Financial Times)-
Secretary of state says moves towards regional hegemony are accompanied by new campaigns of repression from pro-Moscow regimes throughout former bloc
- ‘Liên kết lực lượng đảm bảo cho ngư dân bám biển’ (VNE).
- Hình ảnh tàu Bình Minh 02 cập cảng Tiên Sa sau sự cố đứt cáp (Petrotimes). – Mưu đồ xua tàu cá độc chiếm biển Đông của Trung Quốc (VNE). – TQ tố ngược Việt Nam, xoa dịu vụ hộ chiếu lưỡi bò (PN Today). – Hộ chiếu lưỡi bò: Philippines quyết liệt, Trung Quốc hạ giọng (VnMedia).
- Giữa căng thẳng, không quân TQ tập trận quy mô (VNN).
- Tàu Trung Quốc đi vào vùng biển tranh chấp với Nhật (PN).
Philippines bổ nhiệm một nhà ngoại giao cứng rắn làm đại sứ tại Trung Quốc.
American Airpower = Soft Power?
theDiplomat.com
Hoa Kỳ cho hay đang tìm kiếm giải thích về quy định mới mà Trung Quốc đưa ra, cho phép dừng để khám xét tàu bè trên Biển Đông.
ASEAN - Trung Quốc: Avoid breaking down Asean-China relations (Nation (Thái) 3-12-12) -- Có nhiều thông tin mới về hậu trường ASEAN
Mỹ -- Trung Quốc: China and the Awkward Embrace [National Interest 3-12-12) -- Dan Blumenthal (phái diều hâu Mỹ) đồng tác giả
Hiện tượng "bố nhí" của quan chức Trung Quốc: The Mistress-Industrial Complex (FP 3-12-12)
Nga không khơi mào chiến tranh
TPO - Nga không tiến hành chiến tranh với bất cứ ai và ngân sách quân sự của Nga ít hơn so với ngân sách dành cho giáo dục và y tế. Thủ tướng Nga Dmitry Medvedev đã tuyên bố như vậy khi trả lời phỏng vấn các đài truyền hình Nga vào hôm nay, 7-12.
Medvedev không loại trừ khả năng trở lại chức vụ tổng thốngTiếng nói nước Nga
Nga - Trung thúc đẩy quan hệ thương mại song phươngĐài Truyền Hình Việt Nam
Nga-Trung ký nhiều văn kiện hợp tác song phươngVietnam Plus
Tập Cân Bình hô hào quốc gia chủ nghĩa! China's new boss Xi hits nationalist note with talk of "revival" (Reuters 6-12-12)
- Ông Tập đến Thâm Quyến đầu tiên sau nhậm chức (TTXVN). – TQ thêm một “dâm quan”: GĐ sở Công an “bao” 2 chị em ruột (GDVN).
- Đầu bếp Nhật hé lộ bí mật về lãnh đạo Triều Tiên Kim Jong-un (DT). – Triều Tiên chi 40 triệu USD để tôn vinh lãnh tụ (TP). – Ảnh: Cuộc sống bình dị thường nhật ở Triều Tiên (VTC).
- HĐBA cân nhắc trừng phạt Triều Tiên phóng tên lửa (TTXVN).
- Nhật triển khai khu trục hạm đối phó Triều Tiên (TT).
Project Syndicate -For some time now, a certain strategic vision has been gaining traction: the US is becoming energy-independent, paving the way for its political retreat from the Middle East and justifying its strategic “pivot” toward Asia. This view seems intuitively correct, but is it?
Mười huyền thoại về Trung Quốc: Top Ten Myths About China in 2012 (New Yorker 3-12-12) For China, 2012 was a humbling year. When the history of China’s reform era is written, this moment may prove to be a pivot point, a time when the myths that China and the world had adopted about the politics and economics of the People’s Republic began to wash away, leaving blunt facts about what China’s idiosyncratic national system has and has not achieved. Here are some of the myths that collapsed this year:
1. China’s political system has the efficiency and consensus to produce far-sighted decisions that Washington can only envy. Faced with our own gridlock and polarization, Americans are understandably eager to find a rhetorical cudgel, and we entered 2012 repeating the line that Chinese leaders had become all that ours were not: ambitious, visionary, willing to pull for a larger purpose. In last year’s State of the Union, President Obama invoked China as the “home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer. “So, yes,” Obama said, “the world has changed.” And he was not wrong. But this year added some sobering facts about the haste, waste, and corruption associated with China’s Great Leap. When a bridge collapsed in August, killing three people and injuring five, it was the sixth bridge collapse in a little over a year. The authorities blamed overloaded trucks, but it turned out that the concrete had been adulterated with sticks and plastic bags, the kind of corner-cutting that Chinese regulators have found in the nation’s enormous railway construction project. For this and other reasons that follow, the myth of China’s political efficiency can be retired.
2. China is destined for a hard landing. Take your pick—manufacturing, retail sales, investment—all signs suggest China has postponed another opportunity to go over an economic cliff. “Economic activity is back, and growth has bottomed out,” the economists Xianfang Ren and Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight wrote this week. But, while a recovery is welcome, there is little sign that Beijing has made the hardest decision of all: to upend powerful state-owned enterprises and unlock the dynamic private sector. Until then, China’s economy will still look an awful lot like an overloaded eighteen-wheeler on a mountain road.
3. There is good corruption and bad corruption, and China’s corruption hasn’t slowed things down. Economists see signs that so much money has gone to waste and corruption or simply to poor uses that China now needs to spend two or three dollars in financing to generate a dollar of growth in the G.D.P—a ratio that is up from one to one just six years ago.
4. The U.S.-China relationship is too broad and pragmatic to be shaken by human rights. In May, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng escaped house arrest and, after a car chase, ended up in the care of the American embassy in Beijing at the very moment that the United States and China were supposed to be talking about strategy and economics. After what seemed to be an elegant solution to get him out of the embassy, he upended the deal by phoning a Capitol Hill hearing from his hospital bed to advocate on his own behalf: “I want to come to the U.S. to rest. I have not had a rest in ten years,” he said. He prevailed, and he is now a fellow at N.Y.U. Most recently, after Chen’s nephew was sentenced to three years in jail, Chen released a video to urging his countrymen to follow his lead: “Don’t expect some good emperor to bestow the right upon us, or some upright officials to defend our rights. God helps those who help themselves. Our fate is actually in our own hands.”
5. In the fast-changing relations between men and women in China, the losers are the “leftover women.” For all the inches of text devoted to the subject, “leftover women”—a pool of educated thirtyish women who can not find a partner in China—is a concept invented and sustained largely by men. Take a look at the numbers, and you find real demographic challenge: leftover men.
6. Finally, China has a political leader who thinks like us. Xi Jinping, who took the helm of the Chinese Communist Party this month, has the bearing and style of a man from this planet. Where Hu Jintao, his predecessor, exuded a kind of bloodless pallor, Xi moves with the bodily vocabulary that pleases American politicians: he watches sports; he kicks a ball when it is presented to him. But behind the Brylcreem, Xi has the makings of a more complicated figure for a more complicated time, a nationalist with strategic and historical motivations to assert a more muscular Chinese position on the world stage. As the economy slows, Xi may face more pressure to seek refuge in the flag, and that may come to shape his image more than his facility on the rope line. One of the first actions on his watch—raising the stakes in the South China Sea—has not reassured the United States.
7. Compared to Americans, the Chinese are cautious, risk averse. We think of ourselves as the rugged individualists, but, as I discovered in Macau, China’s boom runs on risk. In a set of experiments, the behavioral scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee looked at Chinese and American attitudes toward financial risk and found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. (The Americans agreed.) But when they tested the groups, the cliché proved to be false, and the Chinese took substantially larger risks than Americans of similar means. What does it mean? More to learn, but it’s a good place to start.
8. The Party has succeeded in blunting the transformative effect of the Internet. With the departure of Google, and the expanding censorship apparatus, it was beginning to look as if China’s digital strategy of allowing the Internet to exist within the confines of Party control was working. That verdict was premature. The Arab Spring demonstrated that a motivated, angry minority can have a disproportionate effect on political stability, and in China that means that the Internet doesn’t need to be unrestricted to have outsized impact. Middle-class environmental protests in Ningbo; repeated exposures of official corruption; and many other cases coördinated and amplified by the Web demonstrate a new form of leverage on the regime that will only grow. More important, a generation is growing up to believe that official information is inherently suspect.
9. The Party itself will be transformed by the Internet. Precisely because the Party realizes the potential power of the Web, it has moved effectively to erect the world’s most formidable obstacles to connectivity. Censors, slowdowns, arrests—it has a powerful effect. Whether political activism will change China will hinge on how many people take their actions offline—and how the Party responds when they do.
10. Local bureaucrats might be corrupt, but decision-makers at the top are carefully selected and have deep public approval. “If we speak candidly,” wrote Deng Yuwen, a deputy editor of the Party-run newspaper called Study Times, “this decade has seeded or created massive problems, and the problems are even more numerous than the achievements.” The Bo Xilai debacle exposed a gangland element to Party politics that reaches to the top, and the revelations about Wen Jiabao’s family wealth leaves no doubt about the extent of self-dealing. Inside and outside the Party, reformists are calling not only for economic liberalization but also for credible efforts to end the two-tiered society, to resume political reform, and to narrow the widening wealth gap. China faces more urgent threats to growth and social stability than any time since the uprising at Tiananmen Square, in 1989. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of strikes and riots and what Chinese officials call “mass incidents,” doubled to a hundred eighty thousand a year—and that will continue to grow until the political culture improves.
Illustration: A. J. Frackattack; Photograph: AFP/Getty.
Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream
Three weeks in, the new administration of Xi Jinping has already begun work on a major project that represents a sharp break from the Hu administration: spin.
Xi's speeches and appearances of the past month have drawn a sharp contrast with his predecessor’s studied lack of personality. His public speeches as leader of the Party have been brief and given in plain Chinese – a sharp contrast to Hu Jintao, who often seemed to have no existence outside state ceremonies and to speak no language other than the Party's socialist theory jargon.
This was dramatically illustrated last Tuesday as Xi spoke to the press after touring the National Museum's “Road to Revival” exhibit – speaking in a casual setting, surrounded by his Standing Committee colleagues in windbreakers.
This new tone is not a matter of personal style – the entire Party is being strongly encouraged to follow suit in “waging war against formalism and bureaucracy,” as an editorial from the official Xinhua news agency noted The People's Daily likewise devoted days of coverage to an alleged outpouring of popular enthusiasm for a phrase from Xi's gallery speech, “the Chinese dream.”
According to these stories, the idea of the Chinese dream has taken ahold of Weibo users, inspiring them to share their dreams of a resurgent and powerful nation – in this telling, it is a collectivist counterpoint to the American dream. The most dramatic of the People's Daily stories’ claims has Xi's words inspiring overseas Chinese, emigrant families, and, oddly, exchange students to reclaim their national pride and dream of a strong China. There seems to be little truth to these stories, but that's not the point – the People's Daily is much less a propaganda mouthpiece than it is the in-house journal of the Party, a sort of forum for sharing best practices for administering an authoritarian state. It is, to be sure, not a gospel source for politically correct ideas.
But in this case they seem to have interpreted Xi's goals correctly: to construct a more open and charismatic Communism that makes people excited to be Chinese. Lest officials miss the point, the Politburo followed its gallery outing with a set of guidelines for being a modest bureaucrat – passing, on Tuesday, rules against officialscovering themselves in the trappings of high office: when officials go traveling, they are to have “no welcome banner, no red carpet, no floral arrangement or grand receptions.”
How much of a departure is this from recent history? In personal style, the gap is pretty big. But there is nothing especially new about the fear that the arrogance of petty officials may undermine the legitimacy of the party.
The remarkable thing here is that Xi seems to be trying to sell himself, and encouraging lower-level officials to pursue personal popularity just a few months after the purge of Bo Xilai, a charismatic politician whose chief sinswere flagrant self-promotion and individualism. His downfall seemed like a resounding victory for Hu Jintao's style of dodging attention and issuing all decisions from consensus. This style was one of Hu's strongest selling points to the leaders who chose him — a guarantee against a return to the strongman politics of the Mao era.
But it seems that Xi may have been studying Bo even as he condemned him. If Xi continues to develop his own brand, it suggests that he has made a real change of focus, from Hu's efforts to repair the party's legitimacy by internal reform to direct appeals to the people. It might also mean — and this would also be a major contrast to Hu — that he has enough support from the Standing Committee to act in a way that could strengthen him at their expense.
