dChan
Anonymous ID: 372acd March 5, 2020, 8:29 a.m. No.8324602   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>8324534

Disbelief over Zelensky’s moves in Ukraine

 

I think there is disbelief with this cabinet reshuffle. The general line I have heard is what is President Volodymyr Zelensky doing? Just to reiterate what I said upon Zelensky taking office last year: This guy has the best opportunity to enact transformational reform of any Ukrainian leader over the past 30 years. He had:

 

  • Political capital, having won a landslide election in the presidential poll and then also winning a landslide majority for his Servant of the People Party in the parliamentary election;

 

  • The population wanted reform/change;

 

  • Ukraine was still backed by the West, and the International Monetary Fund had a new loan program teed up to be signed off by the IMF board;

 

  • The macroeconomic setting in Ukraine was the best I have seen in 30 years covering the country – low single-digit inflation, a stable currency, rising foreign-exchange reserves at the National Bank of Ukraine, falling interest rates, suggestive that investment was about to take off, a public debt ratio falling from over 90% to 50% and fiscal and current account deficits reduced to 2% of gross domestic product each;

 

  • And markets had rewarded his team and Ukraine with a collapse in borrowing costs, on hard currency debt from 10% to less than 6%, and in hryvnia from 20% to 10%. Conditions were well set for recovery.

 

In the midst of all that he has decided to almost completely change the team, ousting the reformers, and going back in time to a team that would not look out of place in a Viktor Yanukovych cabinet, circa 2011.

 

He seems to have decided that the conditionality attached by the IMF to the new loan program – of going after oligarchs to recover losses from the 2015-17 banking crisis was just too difficult. Assuming no IMF support he seems to have been sold some snake oil by the old guard oligarchic industrial lobby that there is some other “quick fix” scenario where the budget and a weaker currency are used to pump prime growth, and that Ukraine does not need the IMF.

 

Now going back to Yanukovych circa 2011, that worked for a few years, and back then global monetary conditions were also favorable as they are now – so Ukraine grew rapidly in those years, but at a price of rising twin deficits and rising indebtedness and that all eventually ran out of steam in 2014.

 

But Zelensky had the winning lottery ticket on this one and seems set to set to see it fly away in the wind being blown towards him by oligarchic vested interests.

 

It’s interesting that the fate of the former Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk was sealed when his conversation with his economy team, and the National Bank of Ukraine, was recorded, and then published in the Ukrainian media (presumably by one of these same oligarchic vested interests) whereupon he was heard describing the fact that Zelensky had no grasp of economics. I think events this week have just proven that to be the case.

 

https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/timothy-ash-disbelief-over-zelenskys-moves-in-ukraine.html

Anonymous ID: 372acd March 5, 2020, 8:45 a.m. No.8324715   🗄️.is 🔗kun

'China is not an immigrant country': draft law sparks online racism

 

A new draft law that could make it easier for foreigners to gain permanent residency in China has stirred up a torrent of xenophobia online. The proposal, released by the justice ministry last week, has been gathering billions of views and a flood of angry posts on social media, targeting Africans in particular. "China's forty years of family planning policy does not make it a place for foreign trash to soar," wrote one user on the Twitter-like platform Weibo, referring to the one-child birth limit China imposed between 1980 and 2016. The person went on to use racist language against black people, saying: "Our common Chinese ancestry will not be tainted by Africans." Some Weibo-users posted videos of black people apparently committing crimes in China, while a campaign to encourage Chinese women to date Chinese men, under the hashtag "China girl", had 240 million views as of Thursday afternoon. Another widely-shared post on Weibo read: "China is not an immigrant country." A hashtag related to the law has gained more than 4.8 billion views. The law – open to suggestions from the public until March 27 – proposes allowing foreigners' dependants to apply simultaneously for permanent residency, as well as relaxing education and salary requirements. State media said less than one percent of foreigners in China have permanent residency.

 

The draft bill comes at a time when China is seeking to expand its global influence and attract foreign exchange and investment. Its massive Belt and Road infrastructure investment project has funded thousands of lucrative scholarships for students from developing countries. But there have been points of tension, including a crackdown on illegal immigrants in commercial hub Guangzhou's "Little Africa" which left many complaining of hard treatment from authorities. There are also long-standing anxieties about perceived preferential treatment for foreigners in China, especially international students. "For a long time, some foreigners in China have secretly received 'superior treatment' as citizens," wrote Hu Xijin, editor of the nationalistic Global Times. Last July, Shandong University apologised after a backlash over a policy that introduced foreign students to local students of the opposite sex. Heather Li, a China-Africa business consultant, said she was "really shocked" by the extent of the online racism. She used to tell her African friends that many Chinese people were friendly and curious about their culture, despite their occasional encounters with prejudice. "But after seeing it on Weibo, I realised there was so much more to it, because people were using very strong language and really disrespecting people from other races," she said.

 

https://www.france24.com/en/20200305-china-is-not-an-immigrant-country-draft-law-sparks-online-racism