Banyan

A WEEK ago South Korea observed “Children’s Day”, an occasion when every school and office is closed, and the nation’s families march off in unison to chaebol-owned theme parks like Lotte World or Everland. Cynical expat residents are fond of asking “isn’t every day Children’s Day?” They mean it sarcastically but their sarcasm is itself ironic. In reality the other 364 days of the year are very tough for Korean youngsters.

Results of a survey released last week by the Institute for Social Development Studies at Seoul’s Yonsei University show that Korean teenagers are by far the unhappiest in the OECD. This is the result of society’s relentless focus on education—or rather, exam results. The average child attends not only regular school, but also a series of hagwons, private after-school “academies” that cram English, maths, and proficiency in the “respectable” musical instruments, ie piano and violin, into tired children’s heads. Almost 9% of children are forced to attend such places even later than 11pm, despite tuitions between 10pm and 5am being illegal.

Psychologists blame this culture for all manner of ills, from poor social skills to the nation’s unacceptably high rate of youth suicide, which is now the leading cause of death among those aged 15-24. Recently, a spate of suicides at KAIST, a technology-focused university, has drawn national attention. For most students the pinnacle of stress is reached somewhat earlier, in the third year of high school. This is the year in which the suneung (university entrance exam) is taken. Tragic reactions to the stress it creates are all too common.

Every suneung period is accompanied by national soul-searching and endless newspaper articles, but nothing ever seems to change. For hundreds of years civil service examinations were the only means by which social advancement was possible; testing became the means by which a person’s value in Korean society would be defined. In this ultra-competitive country, no parent wants their child to be seen as a B student.

Private education of course also costs a great deal of money, and is a major factor in South Korea’s low birth rate—it is a lucky couple these days who can afford to raise two or more children. South Korea is due to achieve the perilous status of being a “super-aged” country by 2026. Between those demographic consequences and the sheer misery it inflicts on its young, South Korea’s approach to education is starting to look like a matter of two steps forward, three steps back.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

AS HER government prepared to deliver its first budget on May 10th Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, launched her latest plan to stop asylum-seekers reaching the country by boat. Three days earlier, Ms Gillard announced Australia had struck a deal with Malaysia to swap refugees. After the arrangement comes into force, the next 800 boat people to land on Australia’s shores will be sent to join the thousands of asylum-seekers who are already waiting to have their claims processed in Malaysia. In return, Australia will admit 4,000 of the group stuck in Malaysia who have already been assessed as refugees, taking them in over a period of four years.

The timing of Ms Gillard’s announcement was hardly accidental. The refugee deal has triggered yet more controversy over an issue that has dogged her since she was elected as leader of a minority Labor government last August. She must be hoping this row can be buried quickly beneath the debate around the budget over the coming week. That is unlikely.

Among rich countries, Australia’s asylum-seeker numbers are not so great: it received 8,250 applications last year, putting it at 15th among 44 asylum-receiving industrialised countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Yet images of boat people arriving in northern Australian waters, after paying people-smugglers in Asia for passage, have played badly in suburban Australia. The asylum-seekers themselves, frustrated at the length of their detention, and in some cases by the rejection of their claims, rioted recently at Christmas Island, Australia’s main detention centre in the Indian Ocean. In March, another group of detainees set fire to a centre at Villawood, in Sydney. The riots and fire only fuelled accusations by the conservative Liberal-National opposition that the government had lost control of asylum policy.

Yet some of the government’s problems seem to be of its own making. When Labor came to power in 2007 under Kevin Rudd, Ms Gillard’s predecessor, it promised to ditch the so-called “Pacific Solution” instituted by John Howard, the former conservative prime minister. This had involved intercepting boats and sending asylum-seekers to languish for years in Australian-built camps on Nauru and Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, while their claims were assessed; many detainees in both places anyway ended up in Australia.

Although Labor promised a more humanitarian approach, much of what it has done since then, especially since Ms Gillard seized control of the government, has been bringing it ever closer to the policy it once condemned. Last year she floated the prospect of setting up a regional processing centre in Timor-Leste; that idea has since collapsed. Shortly before she announced the deal with Malaysia, it emerged that Australian officials—including Mr Rudd, now foreign minister—had approached Papua New Guinea about re-opening the Manus Island detention centre; that may yet go ahead.

The government has managed to drop other aspects of its once high-minded stand against the previous cabinet’s policy. At one point it had ruled out the opposition’s demands to reopen the Nauru detention centre. Nauru, it said, had not signed the UN refugee convention, which applies certain humanitarian conditions to the treatment of asylum-seekers. But neither has Malaysia. And while Labor once chastised the Howard government for labelling boat people as “queue-jumpers”, Ms Gillard herself has since adopted similar language. She says boat people who land in Australia will be sent straight to Malaysia, to “the back of a very long queue”.

The government defends its deal with Malaysia on two main grounds. It says it is about “burden-sharing” the responsibility of resettling refugees currently in Malaysia; and it is aimed at undermining the “business model” of criminal syndicates involved in people-smuggling.

In these respects, Canberra’s deal has support from the UNHCR. Richard Towle, its representative in Australia, says the Australia-Malaysia arrangement is a “first concrete step” that falls within proposals for regional co-operation against people-smuggling that were discussed at talks in Bali in March. He also differentiates the “Malaysia Solution” from the “Pacific Solution”. The latter, he says, was not about Australia sharing a regional burden with countries that faced similar problems; it was more about Australia passing its own responsibilities onto others.

For all that, the UNHCR opposes all mandatory detention of asylum-seekers, including Australia’s policy. Mr Towle says that many among the 6,800 people, including 1,000 children, now detained in places such as Christmas Island and Villawood “don’t need to be there.”  He adds: “Mandatory detention of asylum-seekers coming to Australia is causing significant psychological harm to people, including incidents of self-harm and suicide. We are deeply concerned about that.” 

(Picture credit: AFP)

SINGAPORE belongs to a small category of places where a parliamentary election resulting in a victory of 81-seats-to-six, in favour of the ruling party, can be taken as a breakthrough for the opposition. Within that small category, it is probably unique in that the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) dominance relies on neither electoral fraud nor physical intimidation. Yet its dominance has been nearly absolute since 1965, when Singapore separated from Malaysia and began life as an independent city-state.

After the election on May 7th the PAP still faces few obvious constraints in pursuing its policies. It has a huge parliamentary majority, well above the two-thirds it needs to change the constitution. But this was its worst result since 1965 both in terms of the number of successful opposition candidates (the previous best was only four, in 1991), and in the PAP's share of the overall vote.  At 60.1%, this compared poorly with the 66.6% it won in the previous election in 2006, which was itself disappointing after a 75.3% haul in 2001.

The opposition tapped a vein of resentment towards the PAP. Despite its success in making Singapore a rich, clean, law-abiding and pleasant city, the PAP has alienated many voters. A common perception is that it has lost touch with the concerns of the less well-off—about rising prices, especially of housing, and about the rapid influx of immigrants, notably from China. Of the population of just over 5m about a quarter are immigrants. 

Some also feel the PAP is arrogant and high-handed, in its discrimination against opposition-held constituencies in the allocation of funds for upgrading public housing, and in its bullying tactics towards opposition politicians. 

The emergence in this election of social-networking sites on the internet as a focus for opposition politicking changed the tone of the campaign. Even the docile mainstream media were forced to devote more coverage to the opposition, lest readers forsake them for the newer outlets.

So the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, has struck an unusually humble tone, both during the campaign, when he actually apologised for some PAP missteps, and in acknowledging the landslide victory, which prompted him to promise some PAP “soul-searching”.

This tacitly acknowledges that Singapore’s winner-take-all electoral system leaves the losers even less proportionally represented than do most first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems. Singapore has a sort of “FPTP-Plus”. In 1988 it introduced “Group Representation Constituencies” (GRCs), into which some single-member constituencies were merged. The enlarged areas that resulted are contested by slates of candidates. The justification is to ensure representation for ethnic minorities, from which the slates have to include candidates.

Another effect however is to make it hard for the opposition, which is fragmented into a number of tiny parties, to find the resources or candidates to contest these seats. It has also helped unknown PAP candidates enter parliament on the coat-tails of the ministers who typically “anchor” a PAP slate. In this election, all but 12 of the seats were subsumed by four-, five- or six-member GRCs. The opposition had never won one, and often failed to contest most seats.

This time the opposition co-ordinated and fielded candidates in all but one of the seats—that held by Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, father of Lee Hsien Loong—where, on nomination day, opposition candidates arrived 35 seconds too late to register.

Moreover, two veteran opposition MPs—Low Thia Khiang of the Workers’ Party, and Chiam See Tong of the Singapore People’s Party—abandoned their single-member seats to take on the PAP in GRCs.

For Mr Chiam, the gamble did not pay off. His GRC slate lost, as did his wife, Lina, by just over 100 votes, when she stood in his former constituency. She is now eligible for one of three parliamentary seats, with limited voting rights, available to the best-performing losing opposition candidates. Mr Low and the Workers’ Party, however, triumphed, both in his former seat, and in the opposition’s first-ever GRC victory, in the Aljunied constituency, where he succeeded in toppling Singapore’s foreign minister, George Yeo.

Mr Yeo and his colleagues aside, both opposition and government can claim some sort of satisfaction from the election result, as can voters. Singaporeans, who seem still to trust the PAP to do an efficient job, in the aggregate want not an alternative government but a stronger opposition. And they have got one.

The danger for the opposition, as Cherian George, author of an excellent book on the politics of Singapore in the 1990s, pointed out in an online column, is that having succeeded in teaching the PAP a lesson at the polls, it will now “have to face the daunting possibility that the government actually learns it.” 

TRUTH and reconciliation panels are all the rage these days. Most are created in the aftermath of cataclysmic political events. Sadly, few scale the lofty heights attained by the post-apartheid hearings in South Africa, which lent their name to the genre. It is all the harder to hold the perpetrators to account when they are still in positions of power. Witness Sri Lanka’s feeble stab at investigating its wartime conduct, while at the same time its government furiously denounces a UN report into alleged war crimes committed in the final months of the conflict.

Last May parts of Bangkok resembled a war zone, as combat troops faced off against “red-shirt” protesters, some of them armed. In the bloody aftermath, the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, promised a proper inquiry into the nation’s worst outbreak of political violence since 1992. A truth-and-reconciliation commission was appointed and legal investigators began to work through their caseloads of the dead and injured. A year on however not a single case has been prosecuted. The truth commission is similarly stalled. With elections coming soon, there seems little hope of a breakthrough in apportioning blame for the killing of the 92 people who died. 

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has stepped into the breach with a detailed, 154-page report on what happened last year. “Descent into Chaos” pieces together how the red shirts set up protest camps in Bangkok’s city centre and the subsequent actions of the government and its security forces. The report does an impressive job of marshalling the known facts, talking to those directly involved and describing the violence, including the use of military snipers in “live-fire” zones around the protest camp.

It is, by necessity, a partial account: HRW does not have access to official data, such as forensic tests on shooting victims. But it is not a partisan effort. While there is plenty of blame for trigger-happy soldiers, the red shirts are not spared. Armed “black shirts” allied to the reds appear to have instigated the first deadly clashes on April 10th and to have joined ensuing battles against the army. Grenades were fired into army bases and police posts. Armed men stormed a hospital where soldiers were reportedly billeted.

While red-shirt leaders claimed the mantle of peaceful, non-violent protest, they urged their own supporters to prepare for war. “Bangkok will be a sea of fire,” vowed one leader. This was not far off the mark: arson attacks spread across the city as the army closed in on the protest camp. Other leaders made similar blood-curdling speeches on stage.

The report cites evidence that troops fired repeatedly on unarmed protesters and on volunteer medics trying to assist the injured. At least four medics died, including a nurse at a temple on May 19th, the day that troops dispersed the protests. Red shirts were killed with single shots to the head, an indication that snipers were employed. Video footage obtained by HRW shows a military sniper in action, with a colleague acting as a spotter.

Bangkok may have resembled a war zone, but this was not an armed conflict, according to Brad Adams, HRW’s executive director for Asia. He told a press conference on May 3rd that Thailand was obliged to use only non-lethal force against civil disturbances. But it seems “the laws of war didn’t apply in Thailand last year,” he said.

Such legal niceties may be lost on Thais who argue that the troops were justified in using deadly force, given the presence of black-shirt gunmen in the crowd. Why did the red shirts encourage these rogue elements? On the other hand, most of the firepower was on one side, hence the high death toll among protesters, most of who carried nothing more dangerous than a stick or a rock, if that. Could they have been stopped by non-lethal methods? Did the army exert proper control over its rank-and-file?

The answers have spent the past year lost in the fog. This is precisely why truth-telling tends to be seen as a necessary start to healing the wounds. It might be too much to expect a single report to capture all the complexities of the chaos. HRW should be commended for trying. It is up to those in power in Thailand to push the process forward.

WOKEN by the deafening thump of rotor blades, Haji Bashir Khan crept onto his roof and watched, under a warm and moonless sky, as American special forces stormed his neighbour’s compound. “Yes, we were scared—we don’t have terrorism here,” says the restaurateur. He heard shooting and screams, then felt an explosion as a grounded helicopter was destroyed. The blast broke his bedroom window and strewed blackened bits of the chopper over a nearby wheat field.

Mr Khan and others in Abbottabad, a garrison town north of Islamabad, say the raid that killed Osama bin Laden lasted for 40 minutes and Pakistani soldiers turned up only after the Americans had departed. That delay, even though three army regiments are camped on a base just a few minutes’ stroll away, and the ease with which helicopters swooped in from Afghanistan, suggest some limited Pakistani co-operation. The government, braced for public anger or revenge attacks by jihadis, al-Qaeda or otherwise, says grimly that it was caught unawares by the raid (though it also claims, somewhat confusingly, to have given some intelligence help beforehand).

Much harder to swallow are its claims that Pakistan’s blundering spies had no idea that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living, probably for years, not in a remote cave on the Afghan frontier but cradled in the arms of retired and serving generals in the pleasant, hillside town. It prefers to plead incompetence, since it would be far more painful to admit the alternative: that Pakistan's secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), or rogue elements within it, had long harboured Mr bin Laden and that Pakistan’s leaders only acquiesced in his killing, if at all, moments before the Navy Seals did the job.

Pakistani complicity is the likelier explanation. Mr bin Laden might well have had the gall to risk hiding in plain sight by the military cantonment in Abbottabad, where residents say they regularly submit to identity checks and police visits at home. Yet his prolonged stay at a specially built, high-walled compound, with many of his family flocking in from Yemen, required a network of help. That he had relatively few guards on the spot also suggests he trusted others for security. So it is unsurprising that, to the growing fury of Pakistani spies, many informed observers conclude he must have had help from the ISI.

Either way Pakistan, and especially the ISI, now looks deeply humiliated. India’s hawks crow that their bitter rival can never be trusted; noisier American congressmen want to slash the $3 billion in military and civilian aid that America sends to Pakistan. President Asif Zardari and other civilian leaders have floundered in their response. Relations with America that were already cool, especially between spy agencies, have turned icy as criticism of the ISI grows.

Spooked, the Pakistanis are already warning the Americans not to consider any more such raids. But it is clearly a tempting prospect. An obvious next target would be Mullah Omar, the ageing Afghan Taliban leader, whom the ISI is also accused of protecting. American agents snooping in Pakistan’s cities in the past year may have turned up other useful leads but chosen not to act until Mr bin Laden had been dealt with. Some conspiracy theorists even fret that the Americans could go after Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Usually smooth-speaking ISI men have been giving garbled accounts of what Pakistan was up to. More telling is the gobsmacked silence of their boss, General Ashfaq Kayani, the powerful army chief who had long denied that Mr bin Laden was hidden in Pakistan. On April 23rd he had brushed away American grumbles that too little was being done to fight terrorists, saying blithely they would soon be beaten and “we in Pakistan's army are fully aware of the internal and external threat to our country”. All the more galling for him, he said these words at Abbottabad’s military academy, within waving distance of the al-Qaeda leader’s safe-house.

The general may take some more knocks. Several foreign allies, such as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, speaking on May 3rd, have called for support to Pakistan’s civilian leaders to continue, while saying that its military chiefs must answer tough questions about their spies. Yet any Western pressure will be calibrated with the civil war next door in Afghanistan in mind.

It is unclear how much will change there after the beheading of al-Qaeda. Optimists see glimmers, if for example the Americans at last push Pakistan to start a long-postponed campaign against the Haqqani network, which attacks Western forces in east Afghanistan from Pakistani bases. Al-Qaeda itself may be written off as irrelevant in Afghanistan, where intelligence folk say its fighters number fewer than 100. And if the more powerful Taliban accept that Mr bin Laden is dead, it may feel released from a Pashtunwali honour code about protecting guests and so disavow ties with al-Qaeda. A Western demand for them to do so has been the biggest block to planned peace talks. The Taliban may be spurred to act, fearing that whatever support it gets from inside Pakistan is in jeopardy.

But it is not clear that the Taliban will grow any more amenable just yet, and few observers think talks would get far given the many groups that would have to be involved. The Taliban's leaders will watch to see whether Mr bin Laden’s death softens Westerners’ already flagging will to fight on in Afghanistan, and whether plans to get many troops out in the next three years are hardened up—which would in turn weaken Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. The fallout from Mr bin Laden's death in South Asia is only just beginning.

SINGAPORE’S general elections rarely draw much attention from beyond the shores of this tiny island-state. After all, the result is hardly in doubt. The People’s Action Party (PAP), founded by Lee Kuan Yew and his fellow “men in white”, as they are known, has won every election since independence—and usually by a huge margin. Indeed, in the last parliament the opposition won just two contested seats, and that was considered a good-ish result for them.  So when the current general election officially kicked off on April 27th, anyone could be forgiven for struggling to stifle a yawn.

Yet now that we are into the short campaigning period, with polling day set for May 7th, the political atmosphere seems to be at least as intense and combative as in any British or American election. It’s almost as if the opposition parties think that they really can win a handful of seats! But surely not?

The big outdoor rallies, held between 7pm to 10pm in the evenings, are packed—one friend estimated that there were probably about 40,000 people at a Workers’ Party stadium rally that she attended. They are festive but well-ordered affairs. The thousands who go along listen carefully to the arguments put over from the podium; they really do want to hear about a viable alternative to the PAP. Indeed, some enthusiastically talk about this election being a “watershed”. Opposition politicians argue that now is the time for “change”—and many actually seem to believe in it.

Older and wiser heads however counsel me against taking too much of this too seriously. In a country where political debate is normally quite limited, the election campaign period serves as a safety valve, they say—people can blow off a bit of steam and then we can all return to a peaceful, stable, PAP way of life, just as before. The iron laws of Singaporean electoral arithmetic will prevail, as ever.

Maybe so, but there is undoubtedly something a bit different going on this time. Specifically, the opposition has altered its tactics, mounting an unusually concerted attack on the PAP. And there are real issues now that the opposition can exploit.

On tactics, the opposition is contesting more seats than ever before. In previous elections, such was the PAP’s lock on the Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), each of which returns up to six MPs as a single-party block, that the non-PAP parties rarely bothered to contest even half. Now, only Lee Kuan Yew’s GRC will be unopposed. The Workers’ Party, the biggest of the six main opposition parties, is concentrating its firepower in just one GRC, Aljunied. Its five candidates there include all its top leaders, most prominently Low Thia Khiang, Sylvia Lim and Pritam Singh. Judging from the campaign so far, they certainly have the best hope in a long time of taking down a prized GRC. If they do manage it, that would constitute something of a political tsunami by Singaporean standards—and they would also claim a very prominent PAP scalp, that of George Yeo, the foreign minister.

All this clearly has the PAP a bit rattled, if Lee Kuan Yew’s comments are anything to go by. Fighting his own 14th election, the 87-year-old “Minister Mentor” (MM), as he is officially known, has been warning voters of the dire “consequences” of voting against the PAP. “You must expect the PAP to look after PAP constituencies first”, he told reporters. Thus if the unfortunate voters of Aljunied really do have the temerity to vote out the PAP, they will have “five years to live and repent”, according to MM. Asked if this sort of provocative language could cause a backlash against the PAP among voters, MM himself remained wholly unrepentant: “I am 87. I am speaking the truth. I do not want to be hypocritical.” So there.

The rising cost of everyday goods and services in an already expensive city is the main worry for Singaporeans, and this has become the main campaign message for many opposition politicians. Immigration has become part of the mix too; opposition candidates argue that the steady stream of low-cost workers coming to Singapore depresses wages for Singaporeans, thus adding to their worries about rising prices. Some parties argue for reductions in taxation, or special help for the elderly and other groups. The PAP argues that Singapore should stick to its traditional free-market, low-welfare policies, arguing that the best way to combat rising prices is to help the already flourishing economy grow even further. Last year Singapore achieved the second-highest growth rate in the world, after Qatar.

The PAP should still win comfortably. But given their past electoral hegemony, if they lose even one GRC—or, at the very extreme realms of possibility, two—that would be a shock. At the very least, this time round the PAP will know that it has been in a fight.

THE communist government of Laos has big plans for the country's economy, which is yet the smallest in South-East Asia. By harnessing the power of the Mekong river, which runs the length of the country, the government hopes to quench the region’s perpetual thirst for electricity and to transform Laos into “the battery of South-East Asia”. Throughout April however representatives from most of the country's neighbours, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia—the nations that the Lao government has hoped would become its biggest customers—failed to endorse its plan to build a huge dam at Xayaburi, which was supposed to be the first of a series to cross the lower stretch of the Mekong.

The multinational Mekong River Commission (MRC) expressed concerns about the rigour of the environmental assessment carried out by the Lao government, and in particular the effects of the dam on the Mekong delta region in southern Vietnam. Given the importance of the Mekong ecosystem, which supports tens of millions of people, such concerns are hard to ignore. Ecologists have argued that the construction of the dam will push dozens of species of migratory fish into extinction, turn sections of the river into reservoirs and, by diminishing fish stocks, reduce the main supply of protein for riverside communities. It is estimated that about 2,000 villagers will also have to be resettled. Similar worries have plagued China's efforts to dam the source of the Mekong.

As it was unable to reach a consensus, the MRC agreed to take the proposal to ministerial level. The way forward is unclear, given the wide differences of opinion between the MRC's members. Vietnam, which, as the site of the delta arguably has the most reason to worry after the dam’s environmental impact, would like not only to scrap the dam, but impose a ten-year moratorium on all new hydropower projects on the lower Mekong. Cambodia and Thailand wish to see further research into the environmental effects. Thailand’s position is complicated though; a Thai company won the contract to build the $3.5 billion dam, and one of its state-owned enterprises has a 25% equity share in the project.

A further problem concerns the MRC's lack of clout. As a consultative body, it cannot prevent any of its members from acting unilaterally. After the meeting the Lao energy minister, Viraphonh Viravong, who is also head of the Lao delegation to the MRC, promised to "consider to accommodate all concerns", but warned that further environmental studies would take longer than Laos was willing to wait. Indeed the patience of the Lao authorities may already have run out. A report in the Bangkok Post includes photos that appear to show that construction at the site is already under way.

Construction of the dam at Xayaburi risks opening the proverbial floodgates. The Lao government has proposed a further 11 hydropower projects along the lower Mekong, which will be harder to oppose if the river has been dammed already. The potential exists for the dam to turn into another regional flashpoint. Lao rhetoric towards Vietnam, its closest ally, has been unusually bullish. Of course were Laos to disregard Vietnam’s completely the region’s brand-new battery might be left trying to bring power to a broken circuit.

THE publication of preliminary data from China’s census last year shows that an extraordinary demographic transition is under way. The population is still massive, and larger than any other country’s, at 1.34 billion. But the population is growing slower than when it was last counted, in 2000, and ageing faster. China is still likely to be the first country to grow old before it gets rich.

Three decades of the one-child policy have seen the population growth rate and the total fertility rate (the number of children an average woman can expect to have in her lifetime) fall steadily. The average annual population growth from 2001-10 was 0.57%, just over half the rate from 1991-2000. 

The total fertility rate is contentious. In both 2000 and 2010 it was estimated at about 1.8%, reflecting widespread breaches of the one-child policy. It has anyway never been a universal policy. Families in the countryside were allowed a second child if the first was a girl. Ethnic minorities were allowed more. More recently, couples who are both single children themselves have been allowed more than one child. 

If the rules were followed nationwide, the fertility rate would be about 1.5; some demographers believe that 1.8 is in fact an overestimate. Even if it is not, it implies that China’s work force will in a few years start declining, and the “dependency” ratio—the proportion of the population made up of the young and elderly—will start to climb. Already, the proportion of people aged over 60 has increased from 10.4% in 2000 to 13.3% now. Those under 16 now make up 16.6% of the total, down from 23% in 2000.

This shift has led some to call for an end to the one-child policy, or at least for further easing. The government, which credits the policy with having “averted” 400m births, insists it will stay. But a few days ago, Hu Jintao, the Communist Party leader, said China will “uphold and improve” the present policies. To some, that implied flexibility.

Even if the policy were to be relaxed, China would still be scrambling to cope with the changing shape of its population. The census highlights the urgency of efforts to restructure the economy, away from a dependence on growth led by investment and labour-intensive manufacturing for export. But the aim—an economy more reliant on domestic consumption—is made harder to achieve by an ageing population, worried about its health and security in its dotage.

It is not certain that population growth would shoot up if restrictions were eased. The six richest places in Asia (Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) have the lowest fertility rates in the world, despite concerted efforts by some of their governments to encourage bigger families. 

Nor will it be easy to correct the sex imbalance the one-child policy has exacerbated. The census estimates the number of boys born for every 100 girls at 118.6, up from 116.9 in 2000. This is the result of sex-selective abortion—female feticide on an extraordinary scale. In fact however the overall sex imbalance has moderated in the past decade. There are now 105.2 men for every 100 women, compared with 106.7 in 2000. The discrepancy may reflect inaccuracies, as well as women’s longer life expectancy.

Two other comparisons testify to the wrenching social change China is experiencing. Just under half the population now lives in cities, compared with 36.1% in 2000. And the number of migrant workers has increased from 121m to 221.4m. One in six of China’s population is working away from his or her registered home.

China’s leaders often seem obsessed with the threat of unrest, and the necessity of stability. Looking at the bare statistics revealed by this census is not going to help them sleep any easier.

JAPAN has been dreading a major energy shortage in the north-east, after a quarter of the region's power-generation capacity was damaged by the quake, tsunami and crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. But a summer of rolling blackouts may be avoided.

TEPCO, the Tokyo regional power company, has been able to bring online more power plants than it anticipated initially. Instead of an 8-gigawatt (8GW) shortfall, it now expects to suffer a shortage of only 3GW, as a story in this week's paper explains. Demand is estimated to peak at 55GW, which leaves room for basic energy-saving measures, like using less air-conditioning and lighting, to avert a power crunch with capacity to spare.

The accompanying chart, describing usage in TEPCO's service region, explains why. It is a forecast of energy use this summer in the greater Tokyo area over a 24-hour period, by Japan's Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies. It shows the enormous variability between “base load” and “peak load” among different energy users.

Industry, at the bottom, takes a steady draw of energy: about a quarter of all power used during peak hours. The increase from trough to peak is minor: only around 25%.

Next come households, who have fairly constant energy use until the evening spike that occurs between 5-10pm. Their usage is as much as three times higher at its peak than at its nadir. Here there is low-hanging fruit. Lowering the air-conditioners (that is, raising temperatures) would lower peak-load consumption tremendously. But there is opportunity for “time-shifting” too, such as running the washing machine before 10am or after 8pm—which otherwise is when power demand is greatest.

But the most promising site for new conservation is commercial users (such as office buildings and retailers). Their use is around ten times higher at its peak than at its trough. Lights and air-conditioners account for much if it. Many retailers, including Earth-loving brands like Body Shop, Birkenstock and The Gap, keep their doors wide open during the hot Japanese summer, letting cool air stream onto the sidewalk. The better to lure in sweltering window-shoppers? Regardless, ending this inane practice could save a lot of precious electricity.

Japan is rightly celebrated for having the most energy-efficient economy in the world. The energy consumption per unit of output in America and Europe is around twice that of Japan's, and China's is eight times as much. But the efficiency of Japanese industry hasn't been matched in other sectors of the economy. Although industry uses roughly the same amount of energy today as it did before the oil shocks in 1973—even while the economy grew to become two and half times larger—household usage has grown at a faster pace than the economy as a whole.

The residential and services sectors are where the waste is, and that is where the conservation ought be. Cutting back the power supply available to Japanese industry would be unnecessary and unwise. There are better places for conservationists to spend their energy.

AS MANY others enjoyed a quiet Easter break, the Thais and Cambodians were back to trading gunfire and diplomatic insults over disputed temples along their shared border.

Eleven soldiers were killed on the two sides of the border in the three days of artillery shelling, while scores were wounded. It was the second time in only a few months that the land along the border has become the scene of such bloodshed: in February a very similar flare-up left ten soldiers dead. Then the fighting focused on the disputed Preah Vihear temple: this time the two armies were skirmishing around two other disputed temples, Ta Moan and Ta Krabey, about 90 miles from Preah Vihear. Hundreds of civilians from nearby villages were forced to flee their homes.

The firing seemed to stop during the daylight hours of April 25th, only to flare up again in the evening. By the morning of Tuesday the 26th it was plainly back into full swing. Diplomatic attempts to resolve the conflict have been disappointing. Under the terms of a deal to stop the fighting in February, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), to which both Thailand and Cambodia belong, had arranged to send Indonesian observers to the border in order to monitor the situation—what was to have been a ceasefire. However the deal was never finalised. In a further setback for the credibility of ASEAN, Indonesia’s foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, had been due to fly in to chair talks between the two sides on April 25th, only for the trip to be cancelled at late notice. The Thais, apparently, were unhappy at his terms of reference for the talks. But the UN did little better. From New York the secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, appealed for a ceasefire on April 23rd, only to be ignored as well.

Probably the only thing that will stop the two ASEAN countries scrapping like this will be a change in the internal political dynamics of either or both countries. Some elements on the Thai side, in particular, have every interest in rallying nationalist sentiment with a good border dispute in an election year.

The conservative yellow-shirt movement has made a lot of political capital out of demanding a firm stand against Cambodian “aggression”; they hope to force the government of Abhisit Vejjajiva to sway in their direction. There is even speculation in Bangkok that the whole border fighting is being whipped up by the army in order to precipitate a sense of crisis in the country, in order to have the election cancelled altogether. What the army fears most is a victory at the polls for the red-shirted supporters of the deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

What is not in doubt is that this won’t be the last time that Thailand and Cambodia lob shells at each other over the border. They have been tussling over this land for many years, and politicians know better than to be reasonable and generous in a situation like this. 

RONALD REAGAN is supposed once to have said that the scariest words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But what if you are the government? In that case, perhaps, the scariest words are “I’m from the World Bank, and I’m here to help.”

That certainly seems to have been the experience of Timor-Leste, a much-put-upon country that spent more than 200 years under Portuguese rule, then 24 under Indonesia’s and a final two under the United Nations, before eventually winning independence in 2002. Nowadays the young republic finds a number of reasons for cheer. But if the World Bank’s own review is to be believed, it deserves little credit for Timor-Leste’s progress.

When Indonesia was at last forced to give in to overwhelming demands for the independence of its then-province of East Timor, the bank moved in quickly to offer assistance. It has been assisting every since. A report from the bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, to be published next month, details the success of that assistance. Or rather, its lack of success.

Of the outcomes of the bank’s 12 self-defined strategic and operational goals, five are rated “unsatisfactory”, four “moderately unsatisfactory”, two “moderately satisfactory” and only one “highly satisfactory”. That last was, admittedly, to bring transparency and probity to the management of oil and gas revenues—no mean feat for a poor country in that particular industry. But the failures were legion.

A few quotes:

Poverty and unemployment rose significantly through most of the evaluation period and declined only after 2007 when the Government, against Bank advice, increased its spending using petroleum resources including in the form of cash transfers.

Progress on school infrastructure and textbooks was held back by using Portuguese only, a language few knew, and by the lack of teacher training. As a consequence of these two issues, a full cohort of the population may be functionally illiterate.

...strict enforcement of World Bank Group rules delayed procurement of four new hospitals for a full year.

The New York Times has more. Overall the report suggests that after the first couple of years of its intervention, when it did help to bring order to a troubled situation, the bank’s programme “overemphasised long-term institutional objectives, placing too little emphasis on short-term interventions that would yield immediate benefits to the population.” In other words, being bureaucrats themselves, the bank’s officials in Timor-Leste tended to see more bureaucracy as the answer. Just the sort of thing that scared Reagan.

Full marks to the bank, then, for the candour of its self-criticism. Two out of ten, though, for actually achieving its goals.

AT LAST, some good news from one of the world’s bloodiest international borders. Last month, the number of Bangladeshi nationals killed by India’s trigger-happy Border Security Forces (BSF) along the India-Bangladesh border dropped, like a stone. Down to zero.

This is a first. For years, not a week had gone by without news of yet another killing. The death toll between these two democracies dwarfs the number killed attempting to cross the inner-German border during the cold war. According to Human Rights Watch, India’s border force has killed almost 1,000 Bangladeshis over the past ten years.

The recent ceasefire is not total. On April 10th, the BSF shot dead a Bangladeshi cattle trader at Naogaon on the eastern border.

Still, the change is striking. In March, the head of the BSF announced that “non-lethal weapons” would be issued to Indian border guards in sensitive areas on an “experimental basis”. If successful, this practice would be implemented along their meandering 4,095km border, the world’s fifth-longest.

The change to India’s shoot-to-kill policy comes only months after the BSF shot dead a 15-year-old girl named Felani at an illegal crossing point between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Soon afterwards the walls adjacent to the office of Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, were plastered with a picture of Felani, calling for the killings to stop.

Shootings along the border have been one of many obstacles that have hobbled Sheikh Hasina’s attempt at a rapprochement with India. Bangladesh’s giant neighbour to the west, midwife to its birth forty years ago, nowadays tends to be regarded in the public mind as a wicked, overbearing stepmother.

The sort of normalisation of economic relations that would reflect the two countries’ shared history and geography is still far off (Bangladesh’s biggest trading partner is China; India is not even among its top-ten foreign investors). India regards China’s growing influence in South Asia as a major headache.

The leaders of both India and Bangladesh hope to make progress on a number of knotty issues when India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visits Bangladesh later this year. The topics up for discussion ought to range from water rights along their common rivers to terrorism, trade and even to swapping parcels of territory.

Sheikh Hasina has already agreed in principle to allow India to use its ports and roads for transit. The biggest difficulty for her party, the Awami League, will be to explain its new policy of engaging India to voters, in a country with a strong anti-Indian sentiment. Khaleda Zia, the leader of the main opposition group, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, likes to remind the electorate that under her leadership “no foreign vehicles” would be allowed to cross Bangladesh’s territory. She declares that she will resist her rival’s “move to turn Bangladesh into a state of India”.

Mrs Zia’s rhetoric sounds like a voice from the past. The Dhaka-based Bangladesh Enterprise Institute estimates that full economic integration with India could raise Bangladesh’s average rate of economic growth from 6% to 8%. Full integration is a long way off. But a less bloody border seems a fine place to start.