Asia view

FOR a fast rising power, China remains unusually shy about military deployment beyond its shores. But its decision to dispatch four military transport aircraft to Libya and a guided-missile frigate to waters nearby suggests that it might be rethinking its posture. The Ilyushin-76 aircraft took off from the far western region of Xinjiang on February 28th bound for the Libyan city of Sabha. The ship, Xuzhou, which had been engaged in anti-piracy duties in the Gulf of Aden, set sail for the north African coast on February 24th. 

The assignments could prove little more than symbolic. Of the 30,000 Chinese estimated to have been in Libya when the unrest began there, some 29,000 are said to have already left the country. China’s defence ministry says Xuzhou will not arrive until March 2nd. It is not clear when the aircraft will reach their destination. Gabriel Collins and Andrew Erickson of China SignPost say they will have to stop for refuelling.  

The deployments are a sign that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which includes the air force and navy, is gaining a bit in confidence following its dispatch of a small flotilla in December 2008 to join international operations in the Gulf of Aden. That was a turning point in China’s military history: the PLA navy’s first active-duty deployment beyond East Asia. China had long been diffident about long-range engagements, fearing they might stir anxiety about China’s military ambitions while at the same time revealing frailties to its potential enemies (America being the biggest concern). 

Western powers have long been trying to cajole the PLA into playing a more dynamic role, both in UN peacekeeping (China is a big contributor of troops, but not of front-line ones) and disaster relief (the PLA did not send forces to help out after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004). The PLA’s decision to get involved this time, however, is likely far more to do with domestic considerations than a desire to show solidarity with the West. A perceived failure by the PLA to show concern for Chinese lives in Libya would not have gone down well with the country’s fiery online nationalists (to whom the country’s leaders appear to pay considerable attention). 

In 1998, when riots targeting ethnic Chinese broke out in Indonesia, nationalists in China accused the government of a limp-wristed response (see this analysis of the event by Christopher Hughes of the London School of Economics). The Communist Party does not want a repeat of that, especially at a time when it is already worried about possible contagion from the pro-democracy movements in North Africa and the Middle East. Nationalism and anti-government sentiment can be a powerful cocktail in China. 

China’s propaganda machinery has been playing up the significance of the deployments. What the state-run media call the biggest operation in China’s history – which includes the dispatch of civilian aircraft—to rescue Chinese overseas is being touted as a sign of the country’s emergence as a “responsible great power” (see this dispatch, in Chinese, on the website of Guangming Daily, a Beijing newspaper). The term echoes the appeal made in 2005 by Robert Zoellick, then America’s deputy secretary of state, for China to play its part as a “responsible stakeholder”. It is one aimed at pleasing nationalists at home while trying to show the outside world that China is merely doing what is expected of it. 

China’s vote on February 26th in favour of a UN resolution imposing sanctions on Muammar Qaddafi and calling for an international war-crimes investigation will certainly be looked at with favour by the West. It too appeared to mark a shift, China having usually avoided punishing countries for behaviour within their borders (sanctions imposed on North Korea for its testing of nuclear devices being a notable recent exception). Again, the reasons for China’s actions are likely to be domestic. Mr Qaddafi’s political control appears tenuous and Chinese lives are at risk. The Communist Party does not want to appear to be propping up the man endangering them. 

China has long condemned what it describes as “interfering in other countries’ internal affairs”. Since 1989 it has been particularly fearful of setting a precedent for international action against itself should it stage another bloody crackdown on dissent such as on the Tiananmen Square protests that year. But China sees the situation in Libya as very different from that in China after Tiananmen—when the Chinese leadership, despite its squabbles, maintained a firm grip on power and largely kept the armed forces on side. 

A blog entry published on February 27th on the website of Caijing, a Beijing magazine, (here, in Chinese), suggested that it was time to give up the non-interference policy in the case of Libya. The article, boldly titled “Support the dispatch of American troops to Libya”, argued that “human rights come before sovereignty”. Its author, a Chinese journalist, said that when “a tyrant enslaves his country and tyrannises and massacres his citizens” talk of non-interference is “dog farts”. That, very probably, is going further than the party would like.

“HUMAN error” has been blamed officially for the terrible accident that sank a boat in Ha Long bay and killed 12 people last week. Surely that can’t be wrong. But whose error exactly?

The boat’s 22-year-old captain—who did not go down with his ship—and one of his colleagues have been charged with negligence, according to reports published on February 21st. The valves that connected their junk’s engine-cooling pipes to the water had been left open overnight, swamping the hull. The Bien Mo sank suddenly, at around five o’clock in the morning. Eleven foreign tourists and a Vietnamese guide were drowned. Nine tourists survived.

In one respect, such accidents are not uncommon. In January 2009 a boat sank in central Vietnam and killed some 40 Vietnamese citizens. Though that disaster was blamed on similar conditions its story did not attract much in the way of international headlines.

The mere loss of human life may not be enough to attract the government’s attention. What happened in Ha Long bay last week has demanded special notice as the worst accident to afflict Vietnam’s tourist industry in the past 25 years. Safety standards have tended to be lax in Ha Long bay: that much was already known. But now other operators are expecting to feel a painful pinch.

Like several other of the fastest-developing parts of the world, Vietnam has done a remarkable job of drawing increasing numbers of foreign visitors in the past ten years. Its ongoing struggle has been to convince affluent tourists that their exotic holidays can be safe ones too.

People who work in Vietnam’s tourism business seem to be in agreement about what caused the disaster in Ha Long bay: cheapskate outfits sail clapped-out, “tired” old junks, piloted by “cowboys”. Tim Russell owns a travel company called Come and Go Vietnam and also blogs about the local industry. He tends to be quite critical of some of his competitors. A recent post of his, titled “Will anyone learn this time?”, summarises the frustrations felt by who work in his field.

Mr Russell makes one especially sharp point. “The Tripadvisor forums are full of Hanoi-based agents saying ‘Let’s not point the finger, these things happen etc etc,’ and, worst of all, claiming that if the people on board had booked more expensive tours, they wouldn’t have died, as if safety is something reserved for luxury travellers [sic].” The hope seems to be that the right sort of tourist can be lulled into ignoring the odd disaster—if only they can be reassured that their own boats will enjoy smooth sailing.

Luxury travel has taken off in Vietnam in recent years (if you don’t fancy taking a heavily congested, four-hour drive to the bay you can opt for a helicopter ride to your private boat) and it’s something that the local travel industry is keen to promote. The luxury sector is doing what it can to distance itself from the headline-grabbing accident. But a large segment of the market has ever been—and still is—strictly “budget”: banana-pancake-eating backpackers, price-sensitive Chinese packages and super-cheap deals for the domestic market.

The discount sector manages to eke out a profit by fudging many of the checks and balances applied by scrupulous international operators. In 2009 a busload of Russians travelling from beachside Mui Ne, a hotspot for Russian tourists, to the old hill station of Dalat went over the verge of a steep and winding road. More than ten people were killed. Local authorities promised quick action; the driver, who survived the crash, was charged days later. But making a villain of a driver here and a driver there does not address the root of the problem, nor, presumably, the perception of Vietnam as a safe place to visit.

That the Bien Mo was a somewhat ramshackle affair is obvious from this blog post. Though backpackers in Vietnam tend to be sniffy, their photos are eloquent. The most recent reports claim it was unlicensed. According to other reports the company at fault for the sinking of the Bien Mo was responsible for another accident, in 2009, which drowned four people in the same area.

A sustainable-tourism consultant who has worked in Ha Long bay (and asked not to be named) responds with horrified sarcasm. “Wow, so it happens again.” Many of the boaters allowed to ferry around tourists lack “even the most basic safety procedures or equipment.” If the still nascent industry is to flourish, responsible agencies are going to have to start concerning themselves with the industry as a whole.

(Photo credits: Northern Vietnam Travelogue and Wikimedia Commons)

ON TUESDAY morning, February 22nd, an earthquake rocked Christchurch, the second-largest city in New Zealand. By Thursday the official death toll had risen to 98, with more than 200 people yet missing. As efforts to find people buried alive in the rubble of the city centre intensified, hope began to give way; no one has been rescued since Wednesday. One of the most massive structures to have been destroyed was the Canterbury Television (CTV) building, which was home to an English-language school where an unknown number of foreign students have been living. Sixty to 120 people are thought to have been trapped inside.

AT 12:51pm local time an earthquake shattered Christchurch, killing at least 65 people in New Zealand’s second-largest city. With many more of its 380,000 residents reported to be trapped or missing, that toll is sure to rise. John Key, the prime minister, rushed to the city and soon judged that this might rank as his country’s “darkest day”.

As a rule, events in New Zealand tend not to trouble the international news pages. That has changed lately, with a run of horror stories from the country’s South Island. First came an earthquake that struck Christchurch last September. Despite extensive damage, no deaths resulted. There were no such miracles left in November, when an explosion at an underground coal mine across the Southern Alps from Christchurch killed 29 men. On February 22nd, Christchurch’s luck ran out.

Although the latest tremor was technically less severe than September’s (6.3 magnitude as opposed to 7.1 then) it was also shallower (5km rather than 10km), with an epicentre less than 10km away from the city centre—last time it had been 30km away. The timing also had a terrible effect: September’s quake occurred in the early morning on a weekend, but this time round the streets were bustling with lunchtime workers, shoppers, tourists and schoolchildren.

New Zealand is better equipped to cope with such a blow than is any poor country—Haiti, for instance. Even so this time the material damage, let alone the human cost, is massive. Older, colonial-era buildings in the most “English” of New Zealand’s cities had borne the brunt of September’s earthquake. With the city’s infrastructure weakened then, and during the run of aftershocks since, many of its newer buildings toppled this time—as did the spire of Christchurch’s iconic Anglican cathedral. The quake was felt far afield, including in the Southern Alps, where great chunks of a glacier fell. Damage at the port of Lyttleton was severe.

In Christchurch proper the mayor, Bob Parker, declared a state of emergency, and the airport has closed to all but relief flights. One-third of the city was reported to be without electricity, with widespread damage to roads, water, sewage and gas infrastructure. Emergency services, though quick to react, were swamped by the scale of the damage. A relief centre in the city’s Hagley Park was soon filled to capacity.

Overnight, as rain started falling, extra personnel, including military, were heading for Christchurch, while a team of search-and-rescue specialists were crossing the Tasman Sea from Australia. The city’s ability to cope with the Rugby World Cup, likely to be New Zealand’s largest-ever international event, in September and October, is now under question; hotels have been hard hit and the main stadium is being assessed for damage.

New Zealand’s dollar and stockmarket both slumped on the news, and in Wellington, the capital, an emergency cabinet meeting approved special measures to meet the cost of the aftermath. Mr Key’s conservative coalition government faces an election scheduled for November 26th. Last year the government and Mr Key in particular won praise for their handling of 2010’s disasters, and their poll rankings have remained strong. But the economic cost of this latest disaster, coming on top of last year’s bill—estimated to be NZ$3.5 billion by New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission—is sure to sting. New Zealanders are already coping with climbing cost-of-living and unemployment rates. The government’s political fortunes, already hit by the recession, might hinge on this disaster’s long-term effect on Kiwis’ finances.

Today’s earthquake has once again underlined New Zealand’s treacherous seismic conditions. Positioned at the southern end of the Pacific Ocean’s “ring of fire” and at the convergence of the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates, its islands are no strangers to the odd tectonic jolt. But its quakes, however frequent, are usually quite small. And the sparseness of the country’s human population, at just 4m, has meant that severe damage and loss of life are rare. Till now, no quake had killed many people since 1931. The severity of the September quake, along a fault line previously unknown to seismologists, had been a shock. Worse still could yet come to Christchurch, as aftershocks—one of them already measured 5.0—harass and terrify its survivors. 

DESPITE a concerted international effort since the start of the year to soothe heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula, the South Korean government is bracing for a different type of aggravation from Pyongyang: terrorism, perhaps. Nothing is certain, of course. But if these fears were to be justified, it would reopen one of the darkest chapters in the fratricidal north-south relationship since the 1950-53 Korean war.

Kim Tae-hyo, President Lee Myung-bak’s advisor for national security strategy, told The Economist on February 15th that Mr Lee’s determination to launch a disproportionately strong response in the event of another North Korean attack (like the one on Yeongpyeong island in November) was no empty threat. “This is the best way to keep the peace and avoid war,” he said.

“I believe North Korea has already caught South Korea’s message and because of this it will not choose to make any aggression in the daytime or in the open space that everyone knows the source of. South Korea is looking at many other possibilities, such as terrorism and other kinds of provocations, other than military means,” he said. Elsewhere in the government people speculate that such shadowy threats could include assassinations or the use of biological warfare. “We need a lot of imagination,” Mr Kim says darkly.

The tone in Seoul, when it comes discussing the dangers from North Korea, remains strikingly hawkish, not least because many fear that the succession between Kim Jong Il and his son and heir, Kim Jong Un, is not yet consolidated. The youngster may need to perform more acts of belligerence to shore up his credibility in the eyes of the trigger-happy army. What’s more, higher food prices may make the internal situation in the penniless North even more fragile, not least if China has to go easy on the handouts it provides to its allies in Pyongyang in order to preserve its own foodstocks. 

It was no comfort that North Korea pulled out of military-to-military talks with the south on February 9th , even though, as one official put it,  weeks before it had been engaged in “peace offensives” with all-and-sundry. The stumbling point was North Korea’s refusal to discuss the sinking last March of the Cheonan, which South Korea and many of its allies blame on the North. It is not surprising Pyongyang finds that a big hurdle, because it denies torpedoing the Cheonan. But it can hardly have expected South Korea, which lost 46 men as a result of its sinking, to shrug it off.

Some are hoping that the North will return to military-to-military talks after South Korea and the United States hold 11 days of joint military operations due to start on February 28th. But if not, South Korea will be on heightened alert. If it is terrorism they are worried about, North Korea has form. In 1987 a Korean Air flight from Baghdad to Seoul was bombed by two agents apparently acting on orders from “Dear Leader” Kim, with a resulting loss of 115 lives. In 1983 North Korean agents attempted to assassinate South Korea's then-president while he was visiting Myanmar. (They missed their mark, but killed 21 other people and lost the hermit kingdom its welcome in Myanmar.) Since those dark days the threat seemed to recede and in 2008 George Bush’s administration removed North Korea from Washington’s list of states reckoned to sponsor terrorism. These new rumblings from Seoul would seem to push in a different direction.

(Click here for an enlarged view of the map, courtesy Jan S. Krogh)

THOSE of us who keep an eye out for anomalies in the world’s maps have long held a fond regard for what might be called Greater Bengal. A crazed array of boundaries cuts Bangladesh out of the cloth of easternmost India, before slicing up the surrounding Himalayan area and India’s north-east into most of a dozen jagged mini-states. But the crème de la crème, for a student of bizarre geography, is to be found floating along the northern edge of Bangladesh’s border with India.

EVER since Bangladesh achieved its independence in 1971, struggles over territory and terrorism, rather than the exchange of goods and goodwill, have dominated its relations with its mega-neighbour. Forty years on, both countries appear to be nearing an agreement to solve the insoluble—by swapping territory.

The planned exchange of parcels of each other’s territory is concentrated around some 200 enclaves. These are like islands of Indian and Bangladeshi territory surrounded completely by the other country’s land, clustered on either side of Bangladesh’s border with the district of Cooch Behar, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Surreally, these include about two dozen counter-enclaves (enclaves within enclaves), as well as the world’s only counter-counter enclave—a patch of Bangladesh that is surrounded by Indian territory…itself surrounded by Bangladeshi territory.

Folklore has it that this quiltwork of enclaves is the result of a series of chess games between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the Faujdar of Rangpur. The noblemen wagered on their games, using villages as currency. Even in the more sober account, represented by Brendan R. Whyte, an academic, the enclaves are the “result of peace treaties in 1711 and 1713 between the kingdom of Cooch Behar and the Mughal empire, ending a long series of wars in which the Mughals wrested several districts from Cooch Behar.”

That was before the days of East India Company rule, before the British Raj and long before the independence of South Asia’s modern republics. These places have been left as they were found by both India and Bangladesh: in a nearly stateless state of abandonment. They are today pockets of abject poverty with little or nothing in the way of public services.

In a 2004 paper titled “An historical and documentary study of the Cooch Behar enclaves of India and Bangladesh”, Mr Whyte, in reference to the intractability of the boundary issues at partition, asks whether India is still “waiting for the Eskimo”.

When in 1947 Mr Feroz Khan Noon suggested that Sir Cyril Radcliffe should not visit Lahore for he was sure to be misunderstood either by the Muslims or the Sikhs, The Statesman wrote: “On this line of argument, he [Sir Cyril] would do better to remain in London, or better still, take up residence in Alaska. Perhaps however there would be no objection to his surveying the boundaries of the Punjab from the air if piloted by an Esqimo”.

Apparently the newspaper thought that anyone’s sorting this border dispute anytime soon was highly improbable. Sir Cyril’s success seemed as implausible—in those waning days of the British empire—as the notion of an Inuit flying an aeroplane. Most of a century later and a flying “Esqimo” seems like no big deal, while progress on the zany borders of Cooch Behar has made no progress at all.

There is now talk that a land swap might be sealed when India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh visits Bangladesh later this year. If it goes ahead, India stands to lose just over 4,000 hectares of its territory, or about 40 square kilometres. It has 111 enclaves of land within Bangladesh—nearly 70 square kilometres. Bangladesh has 51 enclaves of its own, comprising 28 square kilometres surrounded by India. The transfer proposed would simplify the messy boundary immeasurably—and entail something like a 10,000-acre net loss for India.

For India’s governing Congress party, making a gift of land to Bangladesh—in all an area equivalent to the size of 2,000 test-cricket stadiums—will not come easy. During a time of ideological waffle, it is an issue which India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can use to flaunt its nationalistic (oftentimes pro-Hindu, ie anti-Muslim) credentials and to attack Congress at a weak spot—its perceived softness towards illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, most of them Muslims. By many estimates, more than 15m illegal migrants have entered India from Bangladesh since 1971. The BJP has been trotting out the round figure of 20m for years.

Meanwhile, construction of a border fence, 2.5m high, on India’s 4,100km border with Bangladesh, the world’s fifth-longest (due to all its zigging and zagging), continues unabated. It is a bloody border, too. Indian soldiers enforce a shoot-to-kill order against Bangladeshi migrants caught making their mundane way from one side of the line to the other.

But what’s in it for India? Its broader desire to clarify its fuzzy borders with all its neighbours provides one attraction. The dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir has eluded resolution. China’s claim of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh remains an open sore. Drawing one steady borderline in the east looks comparatively easy.

India must also hope that its generous co-operation in the territorial dispute might help Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, secure popular Bangladeshi support for a rapprochement with India. Her Awami League (AL) government has proven itself a willing partner: working to deny Bangladeshi territory to the insurgent groups who challenge Indian sovereignty in its north-eastern states; and cracking down Bangladesh’s homegrown Islamic-extremist fringe. But as many of Sheikh Hasina’s fellow citizens see things, India has yet to reciprocate following their government’s consent last year to allow India to use Bangladesh’s ports and roads. The main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), whose leader likes to say that no foreign vehicles should be allowed to use Bangladesh’s territory, scents blood.

Indian diplomats know this. A diplomatic cable from the American embassy, leaked to the world by WikiLeaks, summarises discussions held in 2009 between India’s then High Commissioner to Bangladesh and the American ambassador. India, the Americans thought, would like to establish a bilateral agreement with Bangladesh on counterterrorism, but was impeded by its understanding “that Bangladesh might insist on a regional task force to provide Hasina political cover from allegations she was too close to India”.

Such international intriguing tends to ignore the people who actually in the enclaves—150,000 by some estimates—who are left waiting. Their chief grievance is a complete lack of public services: with no education, infrastructure for water, electricity etc, they may as well not be citizens of any country. NGOs are barred from working in the enclaves. The question of their citizenship is a major obstacle in resolving the problem: referendums are out of the question, as India does not want to create a precedent which could inspire Kashmiris or north-easterners fighting for independent statehood.

The people who actually live in enclaves (and counter-enclaves) in a certain sense “don't see” the borders. They speak the same language, eat the same food and live life without regard to the politicians in Dhaka, Kolkata and Delhi. Many of them cross the border regularly (the bribe is US$6 a trip from the Bangladeshi side).

A few years ago, away from Cooch Behar, on the eastern border with India, I met a man who lived smack on the border between Tripura state and Bangladesh. His living room was in Bangladesh, his toilet in India. He had been a local politician in India, and was now working as a farmer in Bangladesh. As is typical in such places, he sent his daughters to school in Bangladesh, and his sons to India, where schools, he thought, were much better. To his mind, the fence dividing the two countries was of little value. But, he conceded, “at least my cows don’t run away anymore.”

CHAIRMAN MAO used to rail against the evils of revisionism. But statisticians unlike ideologues like to review, update and tinker with their past pronouncements. So it is that China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) today published a revised set of inflation figures, dating back to the beginning of last year. The number that grabbed the most attention was the latest one, showing that consumer prices rose by 4.9% in the year to January. Most China-watchers were expecting a figure well over 5%.

Investors seem pleased that inflation was lower than feared. But some analysts took a more Maoist attitude to the revised figures. One broker told Bloomberg that the National Bureau's tinkering "suggests a fudging of the numbers". 

What has the NBS done, exactly? Like all inflation measures, its index reflects the cost of a basket of goods. The NBS must decide what to put in the basket and what weight to give each goodie. Their choices should change as consumer habits evolve. For the new series, the NBS has increased the weight of housing (by 4.22 percentage points) and cut the weight of food (by 2.2 points). It has also made a number of smaller tweaks: cigarettes and alcohol, for example, apparently now figure less prominently in the spending of abstemious Chinese. Although the NBS is happy to reveal how the weights are changing, it is not yet ready to say what the weights actually are. But HSBC's Qu Hongbin and Sun Junwei have hazarded a guess (see the table below). 

What difference do the new weights make? Not a lot, according to the NBS. They say that if they'd calculated January's inflation figure using the old weights, it would have come out even lower: at 4.918%, rather than 4.942% (see chart below). Nothing much for the anti-revisionists to denounce, then?

Maybe. But the weights weren't the only things the NBS changed. According to a comrade interviewed on the NBS's website, the bureau also updated the products themselves, dropping some anachronistic goods and including some more modern conveniences. Moreover, within any broad category such as "food", the relative weights of subcategories, such as grain and meat, may also have changed, according to Yu Song and Helen Qiao of Goldman Sachs.

Does that amount to "fudging the numbers"? Not necessarily. A reweighting of the index was due—China carries out a big one every five years. It is not as if the bureau picked this moment to reweight the index just because inflation was uncomfortably high. Moreover, I'm not sure anything is gained by understating the official figures. The broader public doesn't follow them closely enough to worry about the difference between an official figure of 4.9% and one over 5%. They only know that the price of vegetables in the market is rising too fast. 

Yu Song and Helen Qiao in particular are not saying the revisions produced a less accurate figure, only that they may have produced a lower one. But until the NBS tells us how it fills its basket, it's hard to say for sure. 

A SPY ring, perhaps answering to China, may have stolen confidential files on the business model of Nissan's new electric car, the Leaf. Or so says the carmaker's boss, Carlos Ghosn. But The Economist has been allowed a peek at the technology under the hood—literally. We recently visited the factory, an hour outside of central Tokyo, where the eco-friendly cars are being built.

The Oppama factory employs around 2,100 workers. The workers’ average age is 42 and each of them has worked there, on average, for 22 years. About two-thirds of the workers are classic, full-benefit company employees who have been trained carefully and now enjoy perks, while the rest are part-time or contract employees, mostly in non-manufacturing, support-staff roles. The carmaker’s practice of maintaining skilled employees—so unlike electronics manufacturers, who tend to hire temps—helps explain one of the Leaf's most interesting, behind-the-scene features: it is somehow bolted together on the same assembly line as three other Nissan models, cars with conventional, internal-combustion engines.

The right parts are delivered to each production stage with the co-ordination of sophisticated computer technology. Yet it is the skill of these seasoned workers that enabled Nissan to add the Leaf to the existing line. Electric vehicles (EVs) have far fewer parts, and many stages in the process of their assembly are entirely different. So the line workers need to work differently. Battery bays are spread along the chassis and beneath seats; the small motor is popped gently under the bonnet at the same time as seat-belts are attached.

That said, adding a very different type of vehicle to an existing assembly line may be one of the reasons for the slow ramp up of Leaf deliveries. Nissan plans to make 50,000 Leafs (“Leaves”?) in Japan this year, and to start production at other factories in Europe and America. More than 20,000 American customers are stuck on a waiting list: Nissan shipped barely 100 Leafs in December and January combined. This hasn't stopped it from posting ruddy results. This week Nissan reported that sales grew 19%, to ¥6.4 trillion ($74 billion), over the past nine months and that its operating profit almost doubled, to ¥448 billion.

The Leaf's core technology, the battery, is handled by Nissan alone. Sales in Japan have been fuelled by a generous government subsidy on green cars, which in effect lowers the price from ¥3.6m to ¥3m (around $35,000). When that buyer’s incentive expires later this year, the car may have a tougher time competing domestically.

The best part of such factory visits? Not the sights but the sounds. In the accompanying video, be sure to listen to the fantastic industrial cacophony of metal-bashing carmaking, accented by the high-pitched digital melody of the automatic trolleys that deliver parts to the line.

EVER since national elections in early November and then the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the pro-democracy opposition, from something close to 20 years' in detention, Myanmar-watchers have been waiting with bated breath to see which way she and her party would jump on the tricky issue of sanctions. At last, it seems, we have something of an answer.

Maintaining Western countries’ sanctions against Myanmar and its military regime were for many years a rallying cry for human-rights activists and opposition groups. Recently though there have been calls from within that community to reassess the policy in the light of what some see as progress towards greater freedom and democracy—such as the elections, the meeting of a first parliament in 20 years, to say nothing of the release of Ms Suu Kyi herself. The pressure has been mounting. The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has called several times for sanctions to be lifted. More pertinently perhaps, five of Myanmar’s “ethnic-based” opposition parties recently argued for the same.

On February 7th Miss Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), issued a statement to the effect that—after a lot of consultation and discussion—they have decided that sanctions should stay. At least for the moment. The length of time it took for the NLD to say this reflects the fact that the issue has become a subject of live debate within the party. Nonetheless, the NLD was quite clear about the fact that the progress that others have claimed to see is in fact a sham; the regime, they say, should not be rewarded for doing so very little.

The NLD rebutted the charge that the sanctions serve only to impoverish the ordinary people of Myanmar—the very people that the NLD professes to represent—rather than to penalise the regime. One NLD official, Tin Oo, was quoted as saying that after extensive research the party had found “that sanctions affect only the leaders of the regime and their close business associates, not the majority of the people.” So, that would appear to be that, then.

But not quite, I think. The NLD must be aware that it will have disappointed many policymakers and business interests in the West who have been hoping to return, if only to offer some counterweight to China and Thailand in their accelerating exploitation of Myanmar’s natural resources. Accordingly, the NLD has given itself some wiggle room. Spokesmen say that the party is keen to “listen” to the people who argue that sanctions ought be lifted, and to have more discussions. We haven’t seen the last of this matter.

IT CAN be hard to know what to make of Indonesia these days. On the one hand, it delivered the world’s third-best economic performance during the recent global financial meltdown, and hears itself mentioned in the same breath as China and India among global investors looking for a place to park their spare billions.

But this newfound international recognition—Indonesia recently joined the G20—and the ongoing economic boom seem to be doing nothing for the country’s ongoing democratisation and anti-corruption drives, both of which have stalled in their tracks.

And then there’s the matter of Indonesia’s old-fashioned moral compass, which is plainly coming unstuck. But there is fierce disagreement about which kind of morals need defending.

On January 31st a district court in Bandung, two hours’ drive from Jakarta, sentenced Nazril “Ariel” Inham, frontman for the pop group Peterpan, to three and a half years in prison for making a series of homemade sex tapes with his celebrity girlfriends. (Shades of Hong Kong’s Edison Chen!) Never mind that the recordings were only released after they were stolen from Ariel’s house near Bandung; they were posted online in June 2010. Under the law that resulted from the Bill on Pornography and Pornaksi, his “pornoaction” was liable for prosecution, regardless of whether or not he was involved in its dissemination. A national sensation ensued, bringing out screaming teenyboppers in support of the defendant and fire-breathing Islamist groups demanding that poor Ariel be lynched. The panel of judges who tried his case ruled that the pop star himself was guilty of “giving other people the opportunity to spread, make and provide pornography.”

The verdict made little sense from a legal perspective, but it makes perfect sense in today’s climate of moralistic iniquity. Attacking pornography has become the easiest way to attract populist sympathy. While Ariel himself didn’t post the (quite popular) sex tapes, the judges appear to have been cowed by radical protestors who vowed to burn down the courthouse if the young lothario was acquitted. It didn’t help that the president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), a no-nonsense retired general, took a personal interest in the case last year, ordering the national police to go after everyone involved. The sex-tapes ruling was only the latest black eye for the country’s judiciary, which in recent months has been caught arranging to acquit defendants charged with corruption in exchange for a share of the spoils. Meanwhile popular musicians, as well as journalists and poor people, are sent to prison. In August 2010 the Supreme Court inexplicably overturned the acquittal of the editor-in-chief of Playboy Indonesia and sentenced him to two years in prison. He was jailed on a charge of indecency, despite the fact that his now-defunct magazine had never published a single nude photo.

Not only is the ongoing morality crackdown at odds with the reformasi movement, which ousted a long-reigning dictator, Suharto, in 1998, but the state officials who are charged with enforcing it have themselves been implicated in profile corruption cases and—yes, even sex scandals. Top prize must go to the senior national police officials, state prosecutors, and judge who were implicated last year in fixing the trial of a rogue taxman, Gayus Tambunan, who bilked the government for $11m by helping big businesses avoid paying taxes. “SuperGayus”, who subsequently became a household name, was retried and sentenced to seven years in January. But not before bribing his way out of police detention on more than 60 separate occasions, taking holidays in Bali, Macau and Malaysia. Two members of SBY’s own cabinet were alleged to have had extramarital affairs, while another lawmaker from the president’s party was accused of rape. All three are still in their jobs.

SBY, who boasted of Indonesia’s democratic and economic gains during a speech before the World Economic Forum in Davos, must have been thanking his lucky stars that the verdict in the “Peterporn” trial came afterwards. Otherwise, he might have been asked to explain an awkward discrepancy to the world’s press. For on January 24th three soldiers from SBY’s beloved armed forces took jail sentences of less than one year each, after being convicted of brutally torturing two Indonesian civilians in the restive province of Papua last year. Their crimes too were caught on video, then leaked and posted online. But then Ariel received a sentence of more than four times that length, for the crime of making sex tapes in his own home. The irony raises a difficult question for the new Indonesia: is sex now considered to be a worse offence than torture?

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)