Globalaffairs

Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Javier Guerra

The present article aims to be a brief introduction to the Chinese financial system, structure and the features of a system that has experienced substantial changes in the last years; being the most radical change the total opening of the banking market in December 2006 in accordance with the agreements of China with the WTO.

History of the Chinese Bank

The banking sector in China began in 1948 when the People’s Bank of China was created. In 1949 the Bank of China was created, born from the People’s Bank of China that acts such as Central Bank of China. The Chinese banking system was a copy of the system of the old Soviet Union, a system of planned central economy, where private property does not exist. Following this premise, the Chinese government was reconstructing for three years private banks and other institutions left by the previous government (non-communist) led by Jiang Kai-shek. During the first five-year plan (1955-1959), the People’s Bank of China was gradually taking the control of private banks and private participations therefore they were gradually vanishing until disappearing absolutely.

Before 1978 the banking system was isolated from the world, international and financial markets. In 1978 a series of important structural reforms in China began resulting in substantial changes in the structure of the Chinese banking system.

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Issue 2 /April-May 2007
Manuel Silva Martinez

China´s real GDP growth reached 10.5% in 2006. China grows, China accumulates foreign reserves, China is the trading partner supplying large department stores in developed countries while leading its commercial diplomacy with the developing world. All these remark fall within common sense in today’s economic debate – and are exactly what Beijing wants to show the world. But, a few kilometres away from the airports, the skyscrapers and the neon lights stands a countryside that is hardly leaving behind decades of collectivization, and that observes the rise of the Kingdom of the Middle from behind the window-shopping, without feeling concerned.

150 million Chinese live on less than a dollar a day; but most poor people concentrate in the countryside. Peasants, two thirds of the 1.3 billion Chinese population, have an average disposable income of around 360 euros per year, three times less than their fellow urban residents. As for qualitative aspects, rural areas also lack of sufficient health and education facilities.

No one can however say that the Chinese economic policy has not paid attention to the countryside. Mao Zedong found himself faced to a mainly rural country, and the very first regulations after the People’s Republic was founded in 1949 were focused on increasing agricultural output and nurturing an industrial network allowing for a better life quality and the fixation of the population in order to reduce rural exodus in a context of booming birth rates. His successors, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and now Hu Jintao, prolonged this reforming spirit. Between 1981 and 2000, these reforms helped around 400 million people nationwide come out of the state of poverty.

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Issue 2/April-May 2007
By Aurora M.Alcojor

From a forgotten continent to a desired one. The tourism growth in Africa could mean the definitive take-off of the battered African economy. But what is in exchange?

According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), in 2006 Africa had the highest world increase in tourism (8% ahead of the world average with 5,5%). According to UNWTO World Tourism Barometer Sub-Saharan Africa hosted 25,6 million visitors in 2006 – 23,4 million last year- and North Africa hosted 14,7 million against 13,9 million the last year.

Obviously this increase is due to its departure position: tourism levels were extremely lower than in other traditionally tourist places, even so data are unquestionable: the attractive of the black continent is clear and travellers ask for it as main holiday destination. Furthermore something else is changing: the average expense of tourists in Africa has increase more than in the rest of the world (2005 data).

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Juan Luis Dorado

How is the USA embargo on Cuba in 2007? Due to the Castro’s illness it is likely to be in the background. However, the embargo continues and the situation grows tenser. Despite appearances, the embargo is being reinforced and due to the current international situation divergent positions can not become closer.

Fidel’s illness has provoked a kind of state of emergency and decisions are being taken slowly and moderately. Fidel alive and until the Raul Castro’s death, the Havana will not negotiate with the USA the withdrawal of the embargo. Such situation will be seen by Cubans as a Castrism defeat more than a USA victory.

Nevertheless the situation is changing. On one hand, in the USA Democrats and some businessmen are against the embargo. On the other hand in the island the only agreement between the regime and dissidence is about the non-intervention of the USA in Cuban affairs.

At global level, there is a generalized condemnation of the embargo that is the opposite effect that the USA was aiming to obtain with the Helms-Burton law (1996). The law aimed to institutionalize Washington policy towards the Havana at world level.

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Raul Sanchez

The geostrategic policy of the European Union is becoming aware of the important role of the Black Sea, in a context of extension of the organization. Although the UE lacks a policy for this region, the accumulated experiences due to programs developed - such as the Euro-Med, Euro-Mediterranean cooperation, also known as ‘Barcelona Process’ of regional cooperation across the Mediterranean Sea - help to promote new formulas of dialogue in regard to the Black Sea.

The awareness of the Twenty-seven and local actors of its importance has raised the necessity for a dialogue framework. Thus, the Stability Pact of the EU for South Eastern Europe has been signed. Moreover, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC PERMIS) is born, in which 11 coastal countries of Black Sea and neighboring states participate, as well as the Black Sea Forum for Dialogue and Partnership. This last one is a Romanian initiative to offer a right framework of meetings and dialogue in order to launch a process for thinking about the future and regional identity. In fact, the first meeting of the Forum was hold in June of 2006, in Bucharest.

Romania, after joining in the EU, has been practicing a pro-American policy, being distanced from a communist Left that plunged the country into chaos and misery, therefore there is a high percentage of Eurosceptic and people resistant to reforms in the population

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Naiara Cáliz Fernández

No one would say that chemicals were going to cause so much hectic activity among world leaders. No one would say that uranium will become a far-reaching new and no one would say that they prefer a part of the population will continue getting into debt because they can not generate their own energy.

The conflict of enriched uranium keeps multilateral institutions on tenterhooks. The world against Iran.

On one hand, it is the right of the Iranian government to enrich uranium for social purposes, in other words, this process generates energy for electricity. On the other hand, institutions through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintain that Iran enriches uranium for military purposes because in this way it can make a nuclear bomb.

Since the most popular towers in the world - the 11th of September 2001- were destroyed by radical Islamists, specific countries became part of the called ‘axis of evil’; these countries became quickly the worst enemies of the USA. The Bush Administration pointed out Afghanistan and Iraq, both countries are suffering the consequences of the north-American rage, but the proofs of such accusations have not been verified.

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Eva Díez Ajenjo

The growing interest in policies focus on religions, identities, and cultures is evidenced by the large amount of criticisms to the Huntington’s thesis the clash of civilizations. According to Huntington the international system and the future conflict in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War will be determined and caused by cleavages between and among civilizations. The author identifies civilizations with religion, culture, language, values, history, and customs (Huntington 2002) however; the central defining characteristic of civilization is religion.

Huntington (2002) suggests that shifts in power among civilizations are taking place due to a revival and assertiveness of non-Western societies and rejection of Western culture. Furthermore an erosion of Western culture follows the reassertion of the identities of non-Western states which is boosted by the consequences of modernization throughout the world.

Huntington is especially concerned about the global revival of religion ‘la revanche de Dieu’ (2002: 95) in particular Islam. He (2002: 217) depicts Islam as a ‘source of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and, in Europe, unwanted migrants’ and he asserts that ‘European governments and public have largely supported and rarely criticized actions the US has taken against its Muslims opponents’. But in this point the theory of Huntington is flawed because as the last international events have showed it has been a massive opposition to Iraq war from nearly every European country. This opposition has been illustrated in huge demonstrations against the war in countries such as Spain and the UK.

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Roger Casas

A series of events have just commemorated in Taiwan the 60th anniversary of the so-called “February 28 (Feb-28) Incident”, a popular uprising against the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang-KMT) administration which took place on February 28, 1947, and was brutally repressed by government forces. A ceremony held at the Feb-28 Memorial Park in Taipei was attended by hundreds of victims´ relatives; Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian himself, as well as several other members of his government, took active part in several official events, which included the inauguration of a new Memorial Hall dedicated to the victims of the massacre. The President promised justice and compensations for those repressed by the KMT in the past: “without truth, there will be no reconciliation”, he said. But the demand for historical truth is only a part of the complex political game Feb-28 has become.

At the end of the Second World War, and after around 50 years of Japanese administration, Taiwan island was handled back to the Republic of China (ROC) of the KMT, at that time fighting (and losing) the war against Mao Ze Dong´s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the mainland. At the beginning of 1947, after almost two years of ROC governance, administrative corruption was so spread that tension among locals was high: 50 years of Japanese government had got Taiwanese used to authoritarian but efficient rule, and KMT government´s theft of private property, embezzlement of international aid, and mistreatment of local population (mostly descendants of Fujianese migrants, and often seen by KMT members as pro-Japanese and suspects of betraying the “Chinese nation”) were too much for them.

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Soraya Carvajal B.

“Since I am the chancellor I found a hostile attitude from Ecuador”, this statement of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Colombia Fernando Araujo unleashed the most recent diplomatic clash between Colombia and Ecuador. In the last years both governments have had tense relations with a large series of border strife.

The minister’s statement, which was rejected by the Ecuadorian Government and disavowed by the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, was evidence of the bad Colombian foreign policy that lacks of a clear strategy, is tactless, unpredictable and subject to ups and downs of the national policy and interests of third parties.

Traditionally Colombia and Ecuador have had friendly relations but in the last years the situation turned conflictive due to border problems provoked by glyphosate fumigations of coca crops carried out by Colombia, the FARC, drug trafficking, arms trafficking and the presence of Colombian refugees.

When in 2001 Colombia started spraying coca crops, the Ecuadorian Government stated its worries regarding the environmental consequences and problems for citizens living in the border. In 2003 a bi-national commission was created to analyse the problem but the situation went worse and in 2005 Ecuador urged Colombian Government to stop aerial spraying within 10 kilometres of the border until knowing the effects of glyphosate.

Colombia suspended temporally fumigations in January 2006 and started a program for the eradication of illegal crops by hand. However, in December 2006, some reports pointed an increase in coca cultivation in Narino region – bordering on Ecuador – thus, some days before the appointment of the new Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, the Colombian government decided to restart the glyphosate spraying. This was understood by Correa as an aggression and ‘unfriendly and hostile’ action.

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Roger Casas

As a new constitution is being drafted in Thailand, the question of whether Buddhism should be officially designated state religion has raised again and provoked a public debate in the country. Although the official position of the Constitution Drafting Committee so far has been one of caution and respect for previous governments´ decisions concerning this problem (and therefore of not explicitly placing Buddhism as the official religion of the kingdom), some Buddhist groups appear to have gained the support of the National Legislative Assembly (NLA), whose committee on religious, moral, artistic and cultural affairs confirmed at the end of March that it will propose the Drafting Committee to include a clause recognizing Buddhism as the national religion of Thailand in the new constitution. As the committee has put it, it is only a matter of admitting the importance of Buddhism for Thai identity and of ensuring official support for it. Nevertheless, the “national religion” question is a particularly complex and sensitive one in present day Thailand, and a wrong decision regarding this matter could have profound consequences for the ongoing ethnic conflict in the South of the country.

In truth, and although the 1997 Constitution (abrogated inmediately after the September 2006 coup) did not refer to Buddhism as state religion, the significance of Theravada Buddhism for “Thai identity” is generally acknowledged by Thais themselves as well as by outside observers. According to the 1997 charter, the Thai king must be a Buddhist, and Buddhism is one of the institutions which, together with the nation and the monarchy, form the “Three Pillars” (sathaaban lak) upon which the modern political and cultural identity of the kingdom has been constructed. Between 85 and 94 percent (depending on the sources) of a population of around 64 million people is considered to be Buddhist and, in spite of the ongoing process of secularization, Buddhist values still determine social and political action in the country to an important extent. The intrincate infiltration of Buddhism through all aspects of secular life in Thailand makes apparently impossible to detach this religious tradition from any contemporary definition of “Thainess”.

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