CiCM 15th November 2023

NEWS IN CHINA

Marriage demographics, positive growth after a 9-year streak : China could end a streak of nine years of declining marriage registration. The trend statistics of the first nine months of 2023 recorded 5.96 million marriages marking an increase from the same period of last year. In this year alone, 2.14 million registrations were recorded in the first three months, with 1.7 million in each subsequent quarter setting a record to push the total over 7 million. Peng Peng, executive chairman of the Guangdong Society of Reform stated that this rise could be due to underlying reasons for marriages being suppressed during the pandemic years with signs of rebound in the trend emerging. Besides this, she also mentioned trends in society regarding the rise of the average age of marriage from 24.89 in 2010 to 28.67 in 2020 as well as the increase of the average age of women having their first child from 26.4 to 27.4 over the same period. The government also allowed residents of 21 provinces to register marriages across provincial boundaries, since June, leading to a cross-provincial marriage registration of 197000 by the end of September.
Entrepreneurs to promote cross-Strait cooperation: The 10th anniversary of the cross strait entrepreneurship summit opened on Tuesday, in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. As per the organisers, the summit intends to encourage entrepreneurs to safeguard the overall interest of the Chinese nation, and to realise the Chinese reunification, and rejuvenation. The summit acts as a crucial platform for cooperation and communication between enterprises and business people from both sides of the strait and plays an important role in fostering economic cooperation and deepening integrated development across the strait. Xi Jinping, in his congratulatory letter, stressed the need for compatriots across straits to realise the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and assured that more efforts would be made to improve systems and policies that contribute to the well-being of Taiwan compatriots and help them integrate into new development pattern, and achieve high-quality development.
Ministry urges BRI to coordinate on Disaster Management : China’s Ministry of Emergency Management, that countries involved in BRI should coordinate more and share experience and expertise in tackling challenges related to natural disaster. This comes after the Disaster Assessment Report, for BRI countries, which said that countries under the BRI are among the most severely affected by natural disaster and highly sensitive to climate change. It also announced that establishment of Belt and Road International Cooperation Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and Emergency Management at a ministerial-level forum. This framework would aim to enable BRI Countries, enhance their resilience and tackling capabilities, posed by natural disaster. It further predicts increasing trends of extreme precipitation in Southern and Southeast Asia, increase in intensity of flood in the Bangladesh, India, Myanmar (South Asian Region), and Eastern China. Floods would cover 3.4 million square kilometre, affecting 1.7 billion people. The Ministry also highlighted its contribution and aid to Pakistan and Nepal, and providing of Earthquake Monitoring Infrastructure provided by China to Laos, Myanmar, and Indonesia.
China releases paper to work on heart disease and brain disease: The National Health Commission, and National development and reform commission along with 13 departments released the “Healthy China Action - Cancer Prevention Action Implementation Plan (2023 - 2030). It emphasises on the monitoring of cardio cerebrovascular diseases especially among the age of 35 and above. It also necessitated the improvement of medical institutions are the primary level, with their capacity to monitor level of blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood fat. It plans for a comprehensive prevention and an early treatment system. Primarily it focuses on controlling the risk factor, through awareness, strengthening environmental and ecological protection, drinking water and improve air quality. Secondly it focuses on improving the cancer prevention system by focusing on existing resources, and promote the construction of National Regional Medical Centre focusing on Oncology Specialist. It further focuses on early diagnosis and early treatment by localising to organise guidelines to various kinds of cancer with high incidence, and screening methods and technical solution and further build step by step means to standardised prevention and treatment of cancer.
Malaysia and China’s Palm Oil Collaboration : In the high level round table meeting of major stakeholders in the Palm Oil industry held in Shanghai attended by Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Plantation and Commodities, Fadillah Yusof, emphasised on deepening business and trade ties in palm oil between the two countries. Export of palm oil to China reached an impressive $3.72 billion, in the year of 2022, which represents 11.4% of Malaysia’s total worldwide export of palm derivatives. China is already the largest trading partner for Malaysia, while Malaysia, a part of ASEAN, the grouping accounts to China’s largest trading partner. Fadillah also mentioned the rise of further exports to China particularly with the growing Oleochemical and animal feed sector. Datuk Mohamed Helmy, chairman of the Malaysia Palm Oil Board (MPOB), drew focus to the growing sophistication of the Chinese market becoming more food and health conscious, and hilighted the strength of Malaysian palm oil industry.

SOCIAL MEDIA CHATTER IN CHINA

Bounty on bullies stirs debate on Chinese social media: In a viral video that is circulating Chinese social media platforms, Sun Heli from Henan Province can be seen explaining the reason for placing a bounty on three attackers. His 14 years old daughter was attacked by three unidentified girls at the basement of a shopping mall. Sun’s daughter was walking alone in a mall, when three girls approached her, one grabbed her by the neck, and then they began to beat her causing injuries to ear, lips, cheeks, eyes.Initially his daughter hesitated to tell the truth, but later opened up after Sun’s encouragement. She did not know the girls but the girls had learnt her name, and tracked her down. After the police failed to tack down the attackers, the father placed a bounty of 10000 yuan ($1400) on the three girls. One person on the social media said “I support this father. The daughter did not deserve this” while the other wrote “Yes, those bullies should pay the price for their violent acts”. Such cases have always generated debates in China especially among parents.

INDIA WATCH

India imports nearly 65% of its cooking oil needs of 14 million tons, spending a staggering Rs 1.7 trillion as of 2021-2022, and rose by 29% at the in the year 2022-23. Most imports of about 8 metric ton come from Indonesia and Malaysia. To reduce this import expenditure, the Indian government introduced the National Mission on Oil Palm with an aim to produce 2.8 metric tons of palm oil by 2030, with a budget of Rs 11040 crore. Unlike Malaysia where the business owns both the cultivation and processing of palm, in India, the cultivation is done by the farmers, while the processing is done by the business owners. Between 1990-and 1994 India became self-sufficient in cooking oil, due to a technology mission promoting indigenous oil, and ensuring remunerative prices to farmers. This led to the brand of Dhara, an Indian household name, promoted by the National Dairy Development Board India. This did not last long due to reduced import duties in 1994. Comparatively, China is the second largest importer of Palm Oil with an annual requirement of 8 million tons at a cost of $4 billion. To reduce this expenditure, China’s first attempt came during the 1950’s - 1960’s, with the state spending 100 million yuan on importing oil palm, and by 1965, 43300 hectares had been planted. The palms used back then were low-yielding variety. Palm Oil is a very versatile and a high yielding oil seed, but requires a huge infrastructure, climate suitability, sound decision planning, and economies of scale, and therefore overtaking Indonesia and Malaysia in their field of expertise, would be a challenge for both China and India, in order to overcome the external dependencies.

Prepared By

Subhayan Acharya Majumdar

Subhayan is an Intern at the Organisation for Research on China and Asia . He is a postgraduate in International Relations with Political Science from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His area of interest includes subaltern security studies with a focus on labour (formal and informal) studies especially in the developing countries with context to Asia and Africa. He could be reached on his email subhayanmajumdar@protonmail.com