The Economist May 25, 2024

[5月 24, 2024]
The world this week

Leaders
Letters
By Invitation
Briefing
United States
The Americas
Asia
China
Middle East & Africa
Europe
Britain
International
Business
Finance & economics
Science & technology
Culture
Economic & financial indicators
The Economist explains
Obituary
| Next section | Main menu |
The world this week

Politics
Business
KAL’s cartoon
This week’s covers
The Economist :: How we saw the world
| Next section | Main menu |

| Next | Section menu | Main menu |
The world this week
Politics
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, and its foreign minister, Hossein

Amirabdollahian, were killed in a helicopter crash. The country’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, named a caretaker president ahead of
elections on June 28th. Mr Raisi was a leading contender to succeed Mr
Khamenei as supreme leader. His death makes it more likely that Mr
Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, will replace his father.
The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor announced that he was

seeking arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu,
and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as well as three leaders of Hamas. Joe
Biden, the American president, called the Israeli warrants “outrageous”; his
government may work with Congress to impose sanctions on the ICC. Mr
Netanyahu’s opponents, who have threatened to leave his government if he
does not change course in Gaza, rallied round him too.
Ireland, Norway and Spain said that they would formally recognise a
Palestinian state. Israel responded by recalling its ambassadors to the three
countries and described the announcement as “a reward for terrorism”.
South Africa’s Constitutional Court barred Jacob Zuma, a former

president, from standing for office in the general election on May 29th
because of a criminal conviction. This may benefit the ruling African
National Congress, which had been losing support to Mr Zuma’s new party,
known as MK, currently polling at 11%.
Rwanda is to deploy another 2,500 soldiers to Mozambique, bolstering its

force fighting against Islamic State jihadists. The insurgents have been
gaining ground in recent weeks as South Africa has withdrawn troops sent
there as part of a mission by SADC, the regional bloc.
America is to withdraw all its forces from Niger by September 15th, after
its negotiators failed to secure an agreement to continue counter-terrorism
operations there. Relations between the two countries have soured since a
coup overthrew Niger’s elected government last year.
https://t.me/+w49ZOrm3c4I1NmRh
Congo said it had thwarted an amateurish putsch attempt by about 50

armed men, including three Americans. The president, Felix Tshisekedi,
was not harmed in the attack on the presidential palace, which was live-
streamed by the alleged leader of the plot. The rebel was subsequently
killed by the security forces.
A Tory wet
In pouring rain outside 10 Downing Street, Rishi Sunak, the British prime
minister, called a general election for July 4th. The Conservative Party has
been in power since 2010 but a series of mishaps have left it far behind the
opposition Labour Party in the polls. Mr Sunak, the fourth Tory to hold the
job of prime minister within five years, is gambling that he can pull off an
improbable comeback.
The Infected Blood Inquiry, an investigation into Britain’s “worst treatment

disaster in the history” of the National Health Service, presented its final
report. The inquiry looked into the administration of contaminated blood
products to patients in the 1970s and 1980s. More than 30,000 people
contracted hepatitis C and HIV, and over 3,000 have died to date. Evidence
of infections had been destroyed; repeated government assurances about the
safety of treatment were wrong. Sir Brian Langstaff, who headed the
inquiry, said the “disaster was no accident”.
Police in Britain investigated the unexplained death of a man who had

recently been charged with spying for Hong Kong’s intelligence services.
Matthew Trickett, a former Royal Marine, was one of three men to be
indicted and was on bail. He was found dead in a park. The Chinese
embassy in London has accused Britain of a “malicious fabrication and
unwarranted accusation” against Hong Kong.
Georgia’s governing party lashed out at America, claiming it was
disrespecting the will of the Georgian people by opposing a new law that
requires NGOs and media groups that receive at least 20% of their funding
from abroad to register as foreign agents. The American Congress is
considering imposing sanctions for stifling democracy on the politicians
behind the bill.
Nine people were arrested in Poland for allegedly helping Russian

intelligence services to plot acts of sabotage. A Polish judge recently
defected to Belarus. Donald Tusk, the prime minister, has created a
commission to investigate Russian and Belarusian activities in Poland.
Moldova signed a defence and security pact with the European Union. The
country hopes to join the EU by 2030. Bordering Ukraine, it has been a
strong supporter of its neighbour’s fight against Russia and has complained
about Russian interference in its domestic politics. There is increasing
speculation that the EU will begin accession talks with Ukraine and
Moldova before the end of June.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Rally, announced that her
party was making a “clean break” from the far-right Alternative for
Germany (AfD) in the European Parliament and would no longer sit with
the party. This follows recent comments from Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s
lead candidate for the European elections, that the Nazi SS “were not all
criminals”.
Emmanuel Macron visited New Caledonia amid an outbreak of violence

over a new law that expands voting rights for French citizens who live in
the Pacific-island territory. Six people have died in the rioting. A state of
emergency has been declared and hundreds of extra French security
personnel deployed to tackle the unrest.
Lai Ching-te was sworn in as the new president of Taiwan, the fifth
democratically elected person to hold the job. In his inauguration speech Mr
Lai called on China to “stop intimidating Taiwan politically and militarily”.
China’s government said Mr Lai’s remarks had sent “dangerous signals”.
Thousands of people protested outside Taiwan’s parliament against a
contentious series of proposals from opposition parties to curb the
president’s powers. Mr Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party lost its majority
in parliament in January’s election to the opposition Kuomintang (KMT)
and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).
To Lam became the new president of Vietnam. Mr Lam, until recently a

minister for public security, is associated with a crackdown on corruption.
He faced criticism when a video of him being fed gold-leaf-garnished steak
in London in 2021 went viral while Vietnam was under lockdown.
Nine people were killed at a political rally in northern Mexico when the
stage collapsed. Meanwhile the presidential candidates held their final
debate before the election on June 2nd. Claudia Sheinbaum, the leftist
ruling party’s candidate, is the front-runner.
Luis Abinader easily won another term in the Dominican Republic’s

presidential election. Mr Abinader enjoys approval ratings of 70%, in part
by taking a tough position against migrants crossing the border from
neighbouring Haiti.
In Haiti the new governing council said the national police force would
lead a security mission that will try to restore order after months of violence
involving gangs, who in effect control the country. Kenya is supposed to
contribute 1,000 troops to the mission. Its president, William Ruto, held
talks with Joe Biden in Washington, where they discussed Haiti.
And don’t come back
Javier Milei’s visit to Spain upset the Socialist government. The Argentine
president spoke at a national-conservative rally, where he described the wife
of Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, as “corrupt” (there are claims of
corruption against Begoña Gómez, but Madrid’s public prosecutor has said
there is no evidence). Mr Milei also refused to meet the king. Spain
withdrew its ambassador from Buenos Aires—permanently, it said.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-
this-week/2024/05/23/politics
| Section menu | Main menu |
| Next | Section menu | Main menu | Previous |
The world this week
Business
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
The demand for chips to power artificial-intelligence services from the likes
of Meta and Microsoft helped boost Nvidia’s revenues to $26bn in the
latest quarter, a 262% increase, year on year. Net profit soared by 628% to
$14.9bn. The company promises more to come. It will soon start to ship its
new Blackwell chips, which cost more than $30,000 each.
Non-performance pay
Around a third of Boeing’s shareholders voted against the pay package

awarded to Dave Calhoun, who is stepping down as chief executive at the
end of the year amid a litany of safety concerns about the company’s
aircraft. Mr Calhoun’s total remuneration has increased by 45%, provoking
anger among some investors. Boeing’s share price is down by more than
25% since the start of this year.
A 73-year-old man died and dozens of passengers were injured on a

Singapore Airlines flight that encountered extreme turbulence. Deaths
from turbulence are very rare (the deceased man reportedly had a heart
condition) and big aircraft are unlikely to be brought down by severe
weather.
A court in St Petersburg froze assets belonging to Commerzbank, Deutsche

Bank and UniCredit, three European lenders, in a lawsuit brought by a
subsidiary of Gazprom, Russia’s state gas company. The assets totalled
nearly €800m ($866m), more than half of which are owned by UniCredit.
Europe’s banks have been slow to leave Russia, even though it is subject to
heavy sanctions. The European Central Bank has urged them to speed up
their departure because of the risks involved.
Shareholders in Shell overwhelmingly backed the company’s new climate

strategy, which lowers its target for reducing carbon emissions by 2030 and
abandons a goal for 2045, but still aims for net-zero emissions by 2050.
Some 22% of investors voted against the policy, around the same
proportion as similar green rebellions in 2022 and 2023. A resolution put
forward by Follow This, an NGO which co-ordinates shareholder pressure
on environmental issues, was also defeated.
America’s Justice Department readied its long-expected antitrust lawsuit

against Live Nation. The department, in effect, wants to revoke the merger
in 2010 between Live Nation and Ticketmaster, claiming it has created a
monopoly in tickets for large entertainment events.
Britain’s annual inflation rate fell sharply in April, to 2.3% from 3.2% in
March, and is now at its lowest level in three years. But the drop was less
than analysts had forecast, which dampened expectations that the Bank of
England might cut interest rates in June.
This isn’t just any strategy
Marks and Spencer reported a quarterly profit that exceeded forecasts and
announced its first shareholder dividend since 2019. For years the British
retailer struggled with falling sales and market scepticism about its
prospects, but in 2022 it unveiled a turnaround strategy, closing failing
stores and investing more in its popular food supermarkets.
Walmart’s share price continued to climb after it reported bumper quarterly

earnings and raised its annual sales and profit forecast. The retailer’s market
value rose above $500bn for the first time.
Janet Yellen, America’s treasury secretary, defended Joe Biden’s new tariffs
on a range of Chinese imports, including duties of 100% on electric cars, as
“strategic and targeted steps”. Speaking in Frankfurt, Ms Yellen called on
the European Union to join America in curbing cheap Chinese exports in
green-tech, which she said undermine Western innovation and jobs. She
also denied that America’s huge subsidies for its green manufacturers
amounted to protectionism. The EU has so far taken a softer approach to
China, but it is expected soon to slap duties on Chinese EVs, the makers of
which receive state handouts.
Klaus Schwab is to retire as head of the World Economic Forum, which

he founded in 1971. His replacement as chairman of the WEF, which
organises the annual Davos summit, is expected to be Borge Brende, the
WEF’s president.
Ivan Boesky died, aged 87. As one of Wall Street’s leading investors in the
1980s Mr Boesky helped fuel a takeover boom, until it all came crashing
down. He pleaded guilty to insider trading and was eventually sent to prison
in 1987. The character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s film “Wall Street”
was inspired in part by him, giving audiences the immortal strapline that
“greed is good.” Mr Boesky’s actual words, from a speech to business-
school students, were reportedly “I think greed is healthy. You can be
greedy and still feel good about yourself”. By all accounts, he was loudly
applauded.
this-week/2024/05/23/business

The world this week
KAL’s cartoon
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

Rishi Sunak’s election call makes no sense, but is good news
The Economist’s prediction for the next Parliament
The Conservatives’ world has disappeared. Don’t tell Rishi Sunak
KAL’s cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last week’s
here.

this-week/2024/05/23/kals-cartoon
The Economist
This week’s covers

How we saw the world
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
WE HAVE two covers this week. In most of the world we consider why
baby-boosting policies won’t work. As birth rates plunge in rich countries,
many politicians are keen to pour money into policies that might lead
women to have more children. Yet all these attempts are likely to fail,
because they are built on a misapprehension. The bulk of the decline in the
fertility rate in such countries is among younger, poorer women who are
delaying when they start to have children, and who therefore have fewer
overall. Focusing on these women as a group would be bad for them and for
society. Teenage pregnancies are linked to poverty and ill health for both
mother and child. Targeted incentives would roll back decades of efforts to
curb unwanted teenage pregnancy and encourage women into study and
work. Most economies will therefore have to adapt to social change, and it
falls to governments to smooth the way.
Leaders: Why baby-boosting policies won’t work
Finance and economics: Can the rich world escape its baby crisis?
In the Middle East and Africa we concentrate on South Africa. The more or
less peaceful transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy in 1994
demonstrated what can happen when political enemies show courage and
imagination. Now, though, the question is whether the country can reverse
its decline after almost a decade of grotesque graft. In elections on May
29th voters are unlikely to throw out the African National Congress, a party
still associated by many with liberation itself. So the next five years will
test whether South Africa’s young institutions can withstand yet another
assault from predatory politicians, and whether its opposition can reinvent
itself. Despite all the difficulties, the country still has a fighting chance.
Leaders: How to save South Africa
Briefing: Next week’s election is South Africa’s most important since 1994
this-week/2024/05/23/this-weeks-covers

| Next section | Main menu | Previous section |
Leaders
Why paying women to have more babies won’t work
Cash for kids :: Economies must adapt to baby busts instead
Rishi Sunak’s election call makes no sense, but is good

news
July 4th celebration :: Whether an act of political genius or lunacy, Britons should welcome it
The war-crimes case against the leaders of Israel and

Hamas is flawed
Lawfare v warfare :: Politics and diplomacy, not courts, are the key to ending violence and
starting two-state talks
Hacking phones is too easy. Time to make it harder

Security alert :: Regulators have avoided the problem for too long
How to save South Africa

30 years after apartheid :: The rainbow nation needs an alternative to decline under the ANC
What India’s clout in white-collar work means for the

world
The new brains trust :: In time its tech firms could be as formidable as China’s manufacturers

Cash for kids
Why paying women to have more

babies won’t work
Economies must adapt to baby busts instead
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
AS BIRTH RATES plunge, many politicians want to pour money into
policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has
vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France,
where the state already spends 3.5-4% of GDP on family policies each year,
Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South
Korea is contemplating handouts worth a staggering $70,000 for each baby.
Yet all these attempts are likely to fail, because they are built on a
misapprehension.
Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly

everywhere and the rich world faces a severe shortage of babies. At
prevailing birth rates, the average woman in a high-income country today
will have just 1.6 children over her lifetime. Every rich country except
Israel has a fertility rate beneath the replacement level of 2.1, at which a
population is stable without immigration. The decline over the past decade
has been faster than demographers expected.
Doomsayers such as Elon Musk warn that these shifts threaten civilisation
itself. That is ridiculous, but they will bring profound social and economic
changes. A fertility rate of 1.6 means that, without immigration, each
generation will be a quarter smaller than the one before it. In 2000 rich
countries had 26 over-65-year-olds for every 100 people aged 25-64. By
2050 that is likely to have doubled. The worst-affected places will see even
more dramatic change. In South Korea, where the fertility rate is 0.7, the
population is projected to fall by 60% by the end of the century.
The decision to have children is a personal one and should stay that way.
But governments need to pay heed to rapid demographic shifts. Ageing and
shrinking societies will probably lose dynamism and military might. They
will certainly face a budgetary nightmare, as taxpayers struggle to finance
the pensions and health care of legions of oldies.
Many pro-natalist policies come with effects that are valuable in

themselves. Handouts for poor parents reduce child poverty, for instance,
and mothers who can afford child care are more likely to work. However,
governments are wrong to think it is within their power to boost fertility
rates. For one thing, such policies are founded on a false diagnosis of what
has so far caused demographic decline. For another, they could cost more
than the problems they are designed to solve.
One common assumption is that falling fertility rates stem from

professional women putting off having children. The notion that they run
out of time to have as many babies as they wish before their childbearing
years draw to a close explains why policies tend to focus on offering tax
breaks and subsidised child care. That way, it is argued, women do not have
to choose between their family and their career.
That is not the main story. University-educated women are indeed having
children later in life, but only a little. In America their average age at the
birth of their first child has risen from 28 in 2000 to 30 now. These women
are having roughly the same number of children as their peers did a
generation ago. This is a little below what they say is their ideal family size,
but the gap is no different from what it used to be.
Instead, the bulk of the decline in the fertility rate in rich countries is among
younger, poorer women who are delaying when they start to have children,
and who therefore have fewer overall. More than half the drop in America’s
total fertility rate since 1990 is caused by a collapse in births among women
under 19. That is partly because more of them are going to college. But
even those who leave education after high school are having children later.
In 1994 the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree
was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s are
yet to have their first child.
Some politicians may seize on this to aim baby-boosting policies at very

young women. They may be tempted, too, by evidence that poorer women
respond more to financial incentives. But focusing on young and poor
women as a group would be bad for them and for society. Teenage
pregnancies are linked to poverty and ill health for both mother and child.
Targeted incentives would roll back decades of efforts to curb unwanted
teenage pregnancy and encourage women into study and work. Those
efforts, along with programmes to enhance gender equality, rank among the
greatest public-policy triumphs of the postwar era.
Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia, may

choose to ignore this progress. Yet they face a practical problem, because
government incentives do not seem to bring lots of extra babies even as
spending mounts. Sweden offers an extraordinarily generous child-care
programme, but its total fertility rate is still only 1.7. Vast amounts of
money are needed to encourage each extra baby. And handouts tend to go to
all babies, including those who would have been born anyway. As a result,
schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth. Only a tiny
number of citizens are productive enough to generate fiscal benefits to
offset that kind of money. Due to low social mobility only 8% of American
children born to parents without bachelor’s degrees end up getting such a
degree themselves.
Older, but wiser
What, then, can governments do? High-skilled immigration can plug fiscal
gaps, but not indefinitely, given that fertility is falling globally. Most
economies will therefore have to adapt to social change, and it falls to
governments to smooth the way. Welfare states will need rethinking: older
people will have to work later in life, for instance, to cut the burden on the
public purse. The invention and adoption of new technologies will need to
be encouraged. These could make the demographic transition easier by
unleashing economy-wide productivity growth or helping care for the old.
New household technologies may help parents, rather as dishwashers and
washing machines did in the mid-20th century. Baby-boosting policies, by
comparison, are a costly and socially retrograde mistake. ■
For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to
our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/why-paying-women-to-have-more-babies-
wont-work

July 4th celebration
Rishi Sunak’s election call makes

no sense, but is good news
Whether an act of political genius or lunacy, Britons should welcome it
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
AN OLD AXIOM of British politics is that the Conservative Party is

ruthless in its pursuit of power. Lately it has seemed relentlessly focused on
losing it. It has purged talented MPs who did not toe the ideological line on
Brexit, a cause that a majority of voters now think was wrong. In Boris
Johnson, it picked a leader manifestly unsuited for high office. In Liz Truss,
it installed the shortest-lived prime minister in British history and the
person who shredded the party’s reputation for economic competence. Now,
after taking a long, hard look into the electoral abyss, it has gone ahead and
jumped.
On May 22nd Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister, announced that the
next general election will be held on July 4th. Mr Sunak could have waited
until the end of the year to call a vote. Given the enormous poll lead
enjoyed by the Labour Party, the hope that things might somehow improve
seemed to most observers like the Conservatives’ only reasonable strategy.
Our prediction model currently gives them a chance of less than 1% of
winning the election. Instead, Mr Sunak has opted to try his luck.
Whether this decision is an act of political genius or lunacy—and The

Economist’s money is on lunacy—Britons should welcome it. The approach
of the election has distracted the government and distorted politics for
months. The prospect of a transfer of power to Labour has excited endless
speculation about who might lead the Tories after Mr Sunak, and
encouraged would-be contenders in a future party-leadership campaign to
hawk ever-more-outlandish ideas. Mr Sunak himself has repeatedly
chopped and changed in advance of the election, positioning himself first as
an improbable candidate of change and more recently as a figure of
continuity.
Electoral considerations have warped the government’s priorities. Mr

Sunak’s greatest energies have gone into an ill-conceived scheme to deport
asylum-seekers to Rwanda, a plan that is now unlikely to materialise.
Sounding tough on small boats crossing the English Channel might help
him ward off the threat on his right flank from Reform UK, an insurgent
party that dislikes mass immigration, but it is not the main priority for the
country or the electorate. To be fair to Mr Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the
chancellor of the exchequer, they have restored much of the economic
credibility lost by Ms Truss and avoided the temptation to dangle egregious
sweeteners in front of voters. Even so, an early election does helpfully
remove any possibility of a final irresponsible tax-cutting splurge.
It also brings forward the prospect of a period of political stability. The

Labour Party is not guaranteed to win the election: the campaign to come
will subject its leaders to closer scrutiny than any they have received to date
. Big question-marks hover over Labour’s interventionist instincts and how
it might handle the difficult trade-offs that actual power would bring, most
obviously over tax and spending. But Britain’s deep-rooted problems—
ailing public services, insufficient housing, stagnant productivity and more
—cannot be solved by a Conservative government that is consumed by
factionalism, incapable of building things and dogmatic about issues that
might help the economy grow faster, including a closer relationship with the
European Union. The Tories could have waited another six months to face
the voters. Six weeks is better for Britain. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/22/rishi-sunaks-election-call-makes-no-
sense-but-is-good-news

Lawfare v warfare
The war-crimes case against the

leaders of Israel and Hamas is
flawed
Politics and diplomacy, not courts, are the key to ending violence and
starting two-state talks
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
THE GAZA WAR is a diplomatic disaster for Israel, a military quagmire

and a human tragedy. In has stepped Karim Khan, prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court (ICC), who has accused Israeli and Hamas
leaders of war crimes. He believes he is creating moral clarity, asserting the
primacy of international law and thereby delivering justice. On all three
counts he is likely to be disappointed.
On May 20th Mr Khan asked ICC judges to issue five arrest warrants. Two
target the brains behind Hamas’s atrocities: Muhammad Deif and Yahya
Sinwar, holed up in Gaza; a third is for Ismail Haniyeh, its political chief,
who is in Qatar. Mr Khan also asked for warrants for Binyamin Netanyahu,
Israel’s prime minister, and the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, whom he
accuses of inflicting starvation, murder and extermination.
The gravity of the claims and the fact that some countries dispute the
legitimacy of the ICC make it essential that its prosecutor should
meticulously calibrate his accusations and follow due process. Instead Mr
Khan has pursued maximal claims against the two Israelis and short-
circuited procedure.
The Economist believes Israel has very probably breached the laws of war
by failing to meet its obligations under the Geneva Convention of 1949, to
provide food and medicine to civilians under its occupation “to the fullest
extent of the means available to it”. After October 7th several ministers also
threatened retribution and collective punishment. However, it is a leap to go
from this to asserting there is an intentional, systematic criminal scheme to
starve civilians. That is the jump Mr Khan’s allegations make, and as a
result they are both more serious and contestable.
Mr Khan has stretched procedure by requesting charges against the two

men. He is right that the ICC has jurisdiction because, although Israel is not
a party to the ICC statute, the Palestinian territories are. However, the ICC
should prosecute only when states are “unwilling or unable to do so
genuinely”. Israel is a democracy with an independent judiciary. Its
Supreme Court is hearing a petition on aid to Gaza. Were the government to
fall, as is likely, its successor would probably appoint a judge-led
commission of inquiry into the war. These mechanisms may ultimately fail,
and have sometimes failed in the past, but Mr Khan cannot simply bypass
them. Israel must have a chance to prove that this time they will work.
The charges against the Hamas bosses and the Israelis are formally separate,
but Mr Khan has chosen to wrap them up in a single package. His request
for warrants against Hamas could have come soon after October 7th, but he
delayed for nearly eight months. He argues that his actions show how all
five men are equal before the law. But bundling them together also signals
that democratically elected leaders whose state has been attacked belong in
the company of terrorists.
The best explanation for Mr Khan’s approach is that he believes that, for
international law to be seen as more than a tool of the West, he had to be
seen to intervene and be willing to prosecute both sides. But even if the
judges issue warrants, they are unlikely to try the cases, because all five
men are beyond the reach of ICC signatories.
At some level, the ICC works by consensus, which means it must navigate
international politics. Support for it around the world is already fragile.
America, China and India are not parties; Russia withdrew in 2016 and
wants to discredit it, because President Vladimir Putin has been indicted.
Now America has said it has no confidence in this latest, flawed, request for
warrants. President Joe Biden called it “outrageous” and Antony Blinken,
secretary of state, said he will consider imposing sanctions on the court.
There are silver linings. Mr Sinwar and Mr Haniyeh may be excluded from
a future Palestinian state’s government, which would probably be a
signatory to the ICC. Although a divided Israel has united around Mr
Netanyahu, which does not help peace today, the episode may eventually
weaken him, because it shows his disastrous strategy has unnecessarily
exposed the country to ignominy and legal risk. A change of Israel’s
government is essential to reset the war and open a path to peace. It is
politics and diplomacy, not courts, that are the key to curbing violence and
reviving two-state talks. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/the-war-crimes-case-against-the-
leaders-of-israel-and-hamas-is-flawed

Security alert
Hacking phones is too easy. Time to

make it harder
Regulators have avoided the problem for too long
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IN THE MID-1960S enterprising hackers realised that if they blew a

particular toy whistle down the phone, they could trick the network into
routing their call anywhere, free. When phone networks got wind of this,
they changed how the system worked by splitting the channel carrying the
voice signal from the one managing the call. One result was the Signalling
System 7, which became a global standard in 1980. SS7 stopped “phone
phreaks”, as they were known. But the system, built when there were only a
handful of state-controlled telecoms companies, has become woefully
inadequate for the mobile age, leaving dangerous vulnerabilities at the heart
of international phone networks. It is time to fix them.
For more than 15 years experts have known that SS7 (or, occasionally, a
later system called Diameter) could be abused to locate a phone user,
intercept their text or voice data, or send texts or spyware to a device.
Russia has exploited SS7 to track dissidents abroad. In 2018 the United
Arab Emirates is thought to have used it to find and then abduct a fugitive
princess. Earlier this year an American cyber-security official told the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a regulator, that similar
attacks had taken place in America.
Much like the internet, SS7 was built on the basis of trust, not security. That
was reasonable when the protocol was introduced and only a few telecoms
companies could access it. Today, many thousands of such firms can do so,
the vast majority of them private. The complexity of the networks has also
increased. Handsets roam from the jurisdiction of one provider to another,
requiring a handover. Text messages are routinely used for vital
transactions: think of the SMS authentication codes in global banking. And
providers in one country can use SS7 to connect to others—the Emirati
attack in 2018 appears to have involved the Channel Islands, lightly
regulated British territories, as well as America, Cameroon, Israel and Laos.
Short of using burner phones and donning a tinfoil hat, ordinary people
cannot completely escape the dangers of SS7. One sensible step would be to
routinely use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like iMessage, Signal or
WhatsApp for texts and calls. Companies could ensure that codes for two-
factor authentication come via an app, rather than SMS text messages,
which can be easily intercepted. However, because phones still have to
connect to mobile-network towers, these precautions cannot conceal where
a caller is.
In March the FCC announced that it was at last exploring

“countermeasures” to location-tracking via SS7 and Diameter. Most big
American mobile operators have retired SS7. But much of the world still
uses it. And Diameter is still vulnerable. These systems can be secured by
using filters that detect and block suspicious traffic. Many telecoms firms
have resisted this, however. One reason is that filtering is technically
complicated and can easily go wrong if important commands are blocked.
Another is that firms have balked at the expense. Few want to make it
harder or costlier for data to flow from their network into others.
Underlying all this is a collective-action problem. If only a handful of firms

deal with SS7 but others ignore it, the system will remain insecure. That is
why national regulators need to step in. They have avoided action for too
long. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/hacking-phones-is-too-easy-time-to-
make-it-harder

30 years after apartheid
How to save South Africa

The rainbow nation needs an alternative to decline under the ANC
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IN 1994 SOUTH AFRICA provided some of the most joyous scenes of the
late 20th century, when it elected Nelson Mandela as its first black
president. The more or less peaceful transition from apartheid to multiracial
democracy demonstrated what can happen when political enemies show
courage and imagination. Yet as our Briefing this week explains, 30 years
later the question is whether South Africa’s hard-won democracy can
reverse the country’s perilous decline. After a creditable first decade,
Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) has presided over economic
stagnation, rampant crime, failing public services and epic corruption. Most
South Africans say they would do away with elections if an unelected
government could provide safety, jobs and housing.
When they vote on May 29th, they should throw out a party that has proved
unable to govern. But that seems unlikely. Many voters still associate the
ANC with liberation itself. So the next five years will test whether South
Africa’s young institutions can withstand yet another assault from predatory
politicians, and whether its opposition can reinvent itself. Despite all the
difficulties, South Africa still has a fighting chance.
The ANC’s popularity has been steadily declining. Polls suggest it will win
less than 50% of the vote for the first time and thus need to form a coalition.
The best option for South Africa would be for the ANC to work with the
Democratic Alliance (DA), a moderate, liberal party that governs well at a
local level. But that, too, is unlikely unless a disastrous result forces its
hand. Instead the ANC could reunite with its extremist offshoots, the
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), parties
that would want to nationalise land, banks and mines, and which sometimes
sound as if they hate every white person save Vladimir Putin. Alternatively
it could cling to power with a slim majority, or in a coalition with a minor
outfit.
Hopes that the ANC might reform itself have repeatedly been dashed. When
Cyril Ramaphosa, one of the negotiators who helped end apartheid, became
president in 2018, he pledged a “new dawn” after almost a decade of
grotesque graft, known as “state capture”, under his predecessor, Jacob
Zuma. The Economist urged South Africans to vote for the ANC the next
year, reasoning that a strong mandate would empower Mr Ramaphosa to
clean up his own party. He deserves some credit for a few reforms, and for
bolstering a justice system subverted by Mr Zuma. But Mr Ramaphosa
failed because, ultimately, he put party unity above the national interest. He
has pussyfooted around party figures alleged to be corrupt, many of whom
are standing for re-election. Power has become so lucrative that people kill
to become local ANC candidates. Since 2022 almost 100 people have died
in political assassinations.
The consequences of all this have been dire. Mr Ramaphosa has mostly
indulged his party’s failed statist and racially biased approach to the
economy. On average, the unemployment rate has risen by about half a
percentage point annually since 1994, to 33%, and is the highest in the
world. GDP per person is lower than it was 15 years ago. Policies that, in
effect, force companies to give stakes to black-owned firms have deterred
foreign investors. Private investment as a share of GDP is a third of what it
was in 2008. A bid by BHP, an Australian mining giant, for its London-
based rival, Anglo American—minus its South African mines—shows that
foreign investors have a dismal view of the country. The World Bank
reckons that crime reduces GDP by at least 10%. The ANC has put tariff-
free access to America at risk by allying itself with autocrats in Russia and
Iran.
After the election the ANC will start looking for a successor to Mr
Ramaphosa, who cannot serve as president beyond 2029 and will step down
as party leader before then. But that offers little cause for optimism. The
next generation of ANC leaders will feel pressure to copy the racial
nationalism and populism espoused by the EFF and MK. Recent legislation
shows which way things are going. In March parliament approved a bill to
allow land expropriation without compensation in the national interest. On
May 15th the president approved a law that promises national health care,
with no clear way to pay for it, and dramatic restrictions on private health
insurance.
If the ANC remains in power, how can South Africa protect itself?
Fortunately, it has a feisty press, a vibrant civil society and unbowed judges.
Their importance was emphasised on May 20th when the Constitutional
Court barred Mr Zuma, who now leads MK, from running for parliament,
owing to a criminal conviction in 2021. Honourable people in the ANC
must defend the rule of law, as some did at great personal cost during Mr
Zuma’s presidency. NGOs and activists will have to keep fighting for clean
party funding and independent prosecutors.
If the economy and institutions can weather the coming storm, the election
in 2029 offers a chance for change and renewal. There is no shortage of
ideas for how to fix South Africa. Jobs are scarce partly because labour
laws make it expensive to hire and hard to fire anyone. Lowering the cost of
transport—which can be equivalent to more than half of low-wage workers’
net pay—would make getting a job more attractive. Granting title deeds to
the millions who lack property rights would offer them dignity and assets.
Paying private chains to run failing state schools would help the 80% of
ten-year-olds who cannot understand what they read.
After the ANC
Yet saving South Africa is not just about clever policies; it is also about
winning elections. The moderate opposition parties need a new vision as
bold as that of 1994. They must explain how growth helps people more than
a zero-sum fight over a stagnant economy, and demonstrate that better
government in opposition-run regions benefits everyone who lives there.
Above all they must ensure that they appeal to the black majority. If South
Africa wants to inspire the world again, it must show that a failing
democracy can redeem itself. ■
For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to
our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/how-to-save-south-africa

The new brains trust
What India’s clout in white-collar

work means for the world
In time its tech firms could be as formidable as China’s manufacturers
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
INDIA HAS long been seen as the world’s “back office”. Tata Consultancy
Services (TCS), an IT firm now worth $170bn, undertook its first project
for an American client in 1973, reworking the accounting software of a
hospital in Detroit. The rise of “global capability centres”, where
multinational companies carry out complex tasks, from design to research,
is increasingly making that view out of date. The question is whether GCCs
will themselves be superseded, too, as India creates some world-beating
global companies of its own.
Back-office firms still matter to India. The IT sector is a juggernaut,
generating about $250bn in annual revenues, or 7% of GDP. But GCCs are
increasingly important, too. The country now hosts some 1,600 of them.
Amazon’s biggest office in the world is in Hyderabad. A fifth of Goldman
Sachs’s staff are in India, as are a fifth of the world’s chip designers. New
GCCs are opening at a rate of roughly one a week.
It is hard to be sure how much GCCs matter to the Indian economy, because
they feature in companies’ internal accounts. However, they are thought to
employ some 1.7m of its IT sector’s 5.4m workers, with salaries over four
times the national average. By one estimate, they create about $120bn in
value and are growing by 11-12% a year. If so, GCCs already represent
over a third of India’s services exports, which would make them its biggest
export category after IT services themselves.
The shortfall is in India’s own roster of global companies. If it could create
them, it would capture more of the rents from global trade. However,
excluding professional-services firms like TCS, the country’s biggest
companies, from HDFC Bank to Reliance (energy, retail, telecoms), are
mostly domestically focused. Although India’s startup scene is promising,
few of its software firms matter outside the country.
One reason to hope this will change is that GCCs themselves are a
launchpad for entrepreneurs, and their growth looks sure to continue.
Remote work has made it easier for firms to collaborate at a distance.
Foreign companies may want to keep work involving intellectual property
in-house. In addition, India is the world’s largest producer of tech talent
after China. In the past the first destination for graduates from the famed
Indian Institutes of Technology was a desk in the West. Today, although
much outsourcing and GCC work is routine, demanding and better-paid
jobs are increasingly tempting India’s most talented graduates to stay at
home.
China offers a comparison. In the 2000s a lot of foreign investment went

into Chinese manufacturing. This gave its people experience of working at
the global frontier of technology. A decade later their expertise strengthened
home-grown giants, including BYD, which makes electric vehicles, and
Shein, a fast-fashion house. Imagine an Indian chip-design firm built on
talent from the Indian arms of Nvidia and AMD.
This evolution faces risks. Just as China’s rise triggered a backlash, so

might India’s services—and, given industrial policy today, at an earlier
stage. Trade tensions in artificial intelligence and chip design could spread.
The good news is that, in contrast to the “China shock” of the 2000s, the
growth of Indian services has been steady, giving the world time to adjust.
With enough time, India’s home-grown giants could prove as formidable as
China’s. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/what-indias-clout-in-white-collar-work-
means-for-the-world

Letters
Letters to the editor
On disinformation, digital payments, South-East Asia, Italy, Ravel’s “Boléro”, Tesla cars :: A
selection of correspondence

On disinformation, digital payments, South-East Asia, Italy, Ravel’s “Boléro”, Tesla cars
Letters to the editor

A selection of correspondence
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
Letters are welcome via email to [email protected]
The disinformation wars
There are many novel ways of producing disinformation, as your articles in

the May 4th issue effectively illuminated (“Bad news”, “A steep, steep
hill”). However, there is nothing new about disinformation itself. In
Rossini’s opera, “The Barber of Seville”, Figaro’s cunning use of
misinformation is central to the plot. In the military domain, Churchill
stressed its importance (“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should
always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”). But during the second world
war people in many countries were well aware of fakes and listened to the
BBC because it was thought to be reliable.
What is truly novel today is the number of people who see messages on
social media and non-attributed websites as their only source of news and
appear not to assess whether a received message is likely to be accurate.
Here is another shortcoming for the education system to remedy.
PROFESSOR TREVOR TAYLOR

Director
Defence, Industries and Society Programme
Royal United Services Institute
London
You suggest that tech firms, NGOS, media outlets and government agencies
should co-ordinate to label, muzzle or remove deceptive content. This
assumes that these bodies always have an interest in exposing the truth.
The “weather weapon” story of last year’s Hawaiian wildfires was quickly
and publicly debunked (they were not started by a laser beam). So what did
cause the fires? Lightning strikes, arson, climate change, new agricultural
practices, electrical power-line failure, inadequate firebreaks, poor
firefighting? Surely allowing all viewpoints to be aired and criticised
publicly is much more likely to come up with the truth and a solution. If it’s
left to the “grown-ups” to censor content, then it will not only be
disinformation that is removed but inconvenient or embarrassing
information as well.
PETER FATTORINI
Skipton, North Yorkshire
Falsehoods have become part of Western self-understanding. The West as a
whole suffers from institutionalised muddled thinking, such as in gender
theory, and not just among a few marginal academics and lawyers. The
problem is not that outsiders are exploiting social media to destabilise the
West, it is that the West has destabilised the whole value of truth in
journalism, academia and politics. Yanking the West back to recognising the
fundamental test of truth (upon which “free speech” should be based) would
be the pre-condition for undermining the credibility of disinformation in
social media.
DAVID WARBURTON
Berlin
Economics is the key driver of disinformation. Publications carrying

alternative facts are highly profitable because they can deliver to their
customers (advertisers) a stream of easily persuaded fools. Adtech
companies such as Google are only too happy to facilitate the trade,
advertisers get an audience that is provably gullible, and everyone makes
money. It’s just business.
JOHN MARSHALL
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Digital payments
The Economist’s special report on national digital-payment systems (May

11th) suggested that MOSIP is a public version of India’s Aadhaar code.
The MOSIP team wishes to clarify that Aadhaar is a closed-source,
proprietary software, while MOSIP is a unique, open-source technology
that was not set up through the imitation of any existing technology. The
piece also described countries adopting MOSIP as “piggybacking on India’s
success”. Such phrasing diminishes the efforts sovereign countries are
making towards digital transformation and autonomy, and undermines
MOSIP’s core principles of customisation and vendor-neutrality.
Moreover, the adoption of MOSIP does not directly result in the

establishment of payment rails. It enables the establishment of good digital
ID systems, bringing down the cost and effort of eKYC (electronic “Know
Your Customer” processes), leading to better financial inclusion, which can
then become a basis for faster payments. Our focus remains, as always, on
empowering global populations with technology that will allow ease of
access to rights and services through open-source, human-centric
technology.
MEGHNA DAS
Head of communications
MOSIP
Bangalore
Hypocrisy on Gaza
The support from South-East Asia’s Muslim leaders for Gaza (Banyan, May
11th) is pure grandstanding for a domestic audience. Neither Indonesia nor
Malaysia has done much to help the Rohingya, a horrifically persecuted
Muslim minority in Myanmar, their own backyard. Unlike Gaza, the
Rohingya have a credible claim of genocide. Unlike the Rohingya, Gaza
has a government-in-waiting that doubles as an internationally recognised
terrorist organisation. Indonesia’s president-elect, Prabowo Subianto,
accused Western countries of a double standard when it comes to Gaza (By
Invitation, May 4th). Sadly, his position is a cover for his own country’s
failings. This continues a tradition of Muslim leaders using Israel as a
punch bag to prop up their own governments.
ILYA GURIN
Mountain View, California
Italy’s leftish turn
It is a historical fact that the intellectual establishment and mainstream

media in post-war Italy leans left, including broadly the national
broadcaster, whatever the government of the day (“Meloni and the media”,
April 27th). It is not for nothing that Antonio Gramsci, who theorised the
weaponisation of culture to spread communism, was born here. And so was
Umberto Eco, who recognised Italy’s perennial strife with his theory on
eternal fascism.
This is a country where left-wing “engaged” citizens look down upon the
rest with so much disdain. Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, rightly
refuses to be drawn into this trite blame game, which would not end
whatever she might say. It is time to stop this debilitating fight about the
past and put our energies to more productive use looking to the future. And
if free speech is about diversity of opinion, then overcoming the groupthink
generated by our intolerant echo chamber may not be a bad thing to bring
about more discerning citizens.
Rest assured that Ms Meloni’s Italy is not and never will be Viktor Orban’s
Hungary.
BRUNO GEDDO
Milan
Arousing music
Your retrospective piece on Ravel’s “Boléro” did not mention its hilarious
use in Blake Edwards’s “10” (“Can’t get you out of my head”, May 4th).
“Boléro” played in the background during Dudley Moore’s sex escapades in
the film, introducing a new generation to Ravel’s work and its supposed
aphrodisiacal effect.
ALAN MARGOLIS
Philadelphia
Repairing a Tesla
Schumpeter asked if Tesla can be both “a metal-basher” and a tech firm

(April 27th). As someone who’s had an unfortunate brush with a car-park
wall, I can tell you that Tesla body parts, being mostly aluminium, cannot
be bashed and must be replaced. Three months on, the problems of Tesla’s
supply chain are clear, but that’s another story.
PHIL RHYS THOMAS
London
https://www.economist.com/letters/2024/05/23/letters-to-the-editor

By Invitation
Powerful states are finding it harder to dodge legal
challenges, says Marc Weller
Israel, America and the ICC :: The law professor believes the ICC’s creeping jurisdiction is
part of a broader trend
Olaf Scholz on why Vladimir Putin’s brutal imperialism

will fail
European security :: Germany’s chancellor says Europe needs more military muscle

Israel, America and the ICC
Powerful states are finding it

harder to dodge legal challenges,
says Marc Weller
The law professor believes the ICC’s creeping jurisdiction is part of a
broader trend
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
LAW IS A leveller. It allows the weak to defeat the strong. An issue is

decided according to agreed standards, not relative power. And these
standards supposedly apply equally to all. Moreover, the ruling of an
independent court can be enforced through the institutions of the state.
In the international arena, the rules have traditionally been different. While
states are also supposedly equal in the eyes of international law,
international decisions have depended largely on power relations. There is
simply no mechanism to determine which state is acting in accordance with
international law and which is not, unless the parties to a given dispute have
consented to it. Strong states fiercely defend the sovereign freedom to claim
to be in compliance with their obligations in the absence of any binding
mechanism to verify that assertion.
The proposed indictments by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defence minister,
Yoav Gallant, challenge this principle. A confirmation of charges by an
authoritative body of this kind fundamentally changes the dynamics of the
situation. There is no longer a claim matched by a counterclaim put by the
other side, but an apparent truth. Israel’s claim that it applies humanitarian
law in an exemplary way, already dented by the finding of the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) that a plausible case of genocide can be made against
it, will now be far more difficult to defend.
This explains the shrill responses of Israel and America to the application
for arrest warrants by the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. Mr
Netanyahu attacked the chief prosecutor for having committed “a moral
outrage of historic proportions”. President Joe Biden chimed in, objecting,
like Mr Netanyahu, to any suggestion of equivalence between Israel and
Hamas.
True, the prosecution also applied for warrants for three of Hamas’s leaders.
But Mr Khan did not assert in any way that the terrorist outrage of October
7th is somehow equivalent to Israel’s war in Gaza. Had he not addressed
both the initial attack and the response, he would have been accused of bias,
acting in relation to one but not the other. Instead, the prosecution is
insisting on the obvious fact that all must comply with the basic rules of
humanitarian law, even if provoked by unspeakably vile acts of terrorism.
Beyond the rhetoric, what really incenses both Israel and America is
revealed in a more measured comment by Antony Blinken, America’s
secretary of state. He objected that the ICC “has no jurisdiction over this
matter”.
America, like Israel, chose to stay away from the Rome Statute. An
international treaty only binds the states that have become a party to it.
Hence, the argument is that the ICC, a creature of that statute, cannot
concern itself with a situation affecting a non-member like Israel.
The ICC ruled in 2021 that Palestine can be regarded as a party to the Rome
Statute. Hence, jurisdiction extends to acts committed on Palestinian
territory, and those committed by Palestinian nationals abroad. Accordingly,
acts by Israeli soldiers in Gaza or the West Bank are subject to ICC
jurisdiction, as are outrages committed by Palestinian subjects on Israeli
territory.
America successfully applied tremendous pressure on the ICC to drop an

investigation into the conduct of its own military personnel in Afghanistan,
which had acceded to the Statute in 2003. Conversely, America applauded
the ICC when it announced a prosecution against Vladimir Putin and an
associate in connection with the war in Ukraine. There, the situation is
similar. Russia did not sign the Rome Statute but Ukraine has accepted that
it applies in relation to its own territory. Hence, the ICC could hear cases
about atrocities committed by soldiers of a non-party state in Ukraine.
This trend towards ever-increasing jurisdiction is reflected in other ICC

decisions. For instance, the court is pursuing members of the junta in
Myanmar in relation to the forced displacement of Rohingyas, a Muslim
minority group, even though Myanmar has not signed the Statute.
Many Rohingyas have been pushed into Bangladesh. The ICC claims
jurisdiction over the junta’s acts against Rohingyas in Myanmar, daringly
arguing that the offence had at least its final effect in Bangladesh, which is a
state party to the Statute. Oddly, America has not protested loudly against
this arrogation of power by the ICC.
Similarly, the ICJ, which addresses cases between states rather than crimes
by individuals, has increasingly made itself available for cases brought by
so-called third parties claiming to act in the international public interest.
Recently, the Gambia was allowed to bring an action for genocide against
Myanmar. There is no real connection between the two countries on this
issue. But the court has accepted that any state can defend fundamental
rights enjoyed even by foreigners living in other states, provided the states
concerned are under its jurisdiction on the issue in question. Similarly,
South Africa took on the mantle of defending the international laws of
humanity when it obtained an interim order against Israel before the ICJ
earlier this year, requiring compliance with the UN’s Genocide Convention
and the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Now, where the ICC is concerned, America, like Israel, insists that third
states have no power to construct an international court that exercises legal
powers over its citizens without their consent.
However, under the doctrine of universality, any state has the power to
pursue the gravest international crimes through its own courts, even if
committed by foreigners on foreign territory. Hence, in the 1990s, for
instance, several states started trying Nazi war criminals uncovered on their
territory. Now, the 124 member states of the Rome Statute, and the ICC
itself, are asserting that the court is merely exercising collectively the
powers that each member state enjoys individually to help enforce the
international legal order.
Some years ago African members of the ICC threatened to withdraw from
the Rome Statute. Several of them, including South Africa, refused to
comply with arrest warrants against the then president of Sudan, Omar al-
Bashir. They claimed, somewhat unjustly, that the court was biased against
their continent, given the fact that virtually all of its cases concerned
situations in Africa.
Ironically, now it is precisely states like South Africa and the Gambia that
deploy the mechanisms of international law in situations where the Western
defenders of the international “rules-based system” prove hesitant to see
them applied. The space where America and Israel—and for that matter
Russia or Myanmar—can act without international legal challenge is
shrinking.■
Marc Weller is professor of international law and international

constitutional studies at the University of Cambridge. He has served as an
adviser on peace negotiations in numerous countries, including Kosovo,
Myanmar and Sudan. The views expressed are his own.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/by-
invitation/2024/05/23/powerful-states-are-finding-it-harder-to-dodge-legal-
challenges-says-marc-weller

European security
Olaf Scholz on why Vladimir

Putin’s brutal imperialism will fail
Germany’s chancellor says Europe needs more military muscle
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
EARLIER THIS month, outside the small Lithuanian town of Pabradė,

alongside Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nausėda, I witnessed German
Boxer tanks roaring over a sandy plain. Less than 10km from the border
with Belarus, deafening mortar shells were being fired. Bushes and trees
were cast in thick layers of smoke. And yet the contrast could not have been
greater compared to the time when Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched into
Lithuania 83 years ago and turned that country and the other states of
Central and Eastern Europe into “bloodlands”—a term aptly coined by
Timothy Snyder, a historian. This time, German troops came in peace, to
defend freedom and to deter an imperialist aggressor together with their
Lithuanian allies.
It is at moments like this that you realise how far Europe has come. Former
foes have become allies. We have torn down the walls and iron curtains that
separated us. For decades, we even managed to banish war between our
peoples to the history books. Because we all adhered to a few fundamental
principles: never again must borders be changed by force. The sovereignty
of all states, large and small, has to be respected. None of us should ever
have to live in fear of our neighbours again.
By attacking and invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has shattered every

single one of these principles. I called this assault on Europe’s peace order a
Zeitenwende, a historic turning-point. Even in his public statements, Mr
Putin leaves no doubt about his motivations: he wants to restore an imperial
Russia, first by subjugating Ukraine and Belarus into puppet states.
Nobody, except—perhaps—Mr Putin himself, knows where and when this
ruthless pursuit of imperialism might end. But we all know that he has no
qualms about turning yet another country into a bloodland.
And yet, Mr Putin’s brutal imperialism will not succeed. Today, the
European Union and its members are by far Ukraine’s biggest financial and
economic supporters. Germany alone has already committed €28bn ($30bn)
in military assistance, second only to the United States. But we must not
forget that Mr Putin is in this for the long haul. He believes that
democracies like ours will not be able to sustain supporting Ukraine for
what might be years to come.
Proving Mr Putin wrong starts at home—by maintaining broad public

support for Ukraine. This means explaining, again and again, that assisting
Ukraine is an indispensable investment into our own security. It also means
addressing the concerns of those who are afraid that the war might spread.
That is why it is important to be crystal clear that NATO does not seek
confrontation with Russia—and that we will not do anything that could turn
us into a direct party to this conflict. So far, this strategy has kept support in
Germany high; in fact, it keeps increasing. So Mr Putin should take it
seriously when we tell him that Germany will support Ukraine for as long
as it takes.
The most fundamental promise any government owes its citizens is to
provide for their safety and security, in all of its dimensions. Without
security, everything else is nothing. In Germany, we changed our
constitution to establish a €100bn fund in order to rebuild and modernise
our army. Our goal is to turn the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest
conventional force. As of this year, and in the future, we will be spending
2% of GDP on defence. For the first time since the second world war, we
will permanently station a full combat brigade outside Germany—in
Lithuania. The soldiers we saw in Pabradė are only the vanguard. And we
will contribute a German division in higher readiness to NATO, as well as
other significant air and maritime assets. These are unprecedented, tectonic
shifts in Germany’s security and defence policy.
And we are not alone. Sweden and Finland joined NATO, making the
alliance even stronger. Many allies now honour NATO’s 2% pledge on
defence spending. What I witnessed in Pabradė holds true across all of
Europe: NATO allies and European partners are standing together, closer
than ever before.
For decades, NATO has been the ultimate guarantor of peace and security in
the Euro-Atlantic area. It still is and must continue to be so in the future.
Europeans can and will have to contribute more to the transatlantic burden-
sharing. This is true regardless of the outcome of the US presidential
elections in November. I therefore support President Emmanuel Macron’s
proposal to have a conversation about the future defence of Europe. I said
earlier this year that we must strengthen the European pillar of NATO—and
we must strengthen the European pillar of our deterrence. To be clear, there
will not be any “EU nuclear weapons”—that is simply unrealistic. There is
also no intention to question the sovereignty of the French dissuasion
nucléaire. At the same time, I welcome the fact that the French president
emphasised the European dimension of the French force de frappe.
We need to discuss how to get the right mix of capabilities to defend Europe
and to deter any aggressor—today and in the future. In addition to nuclear
deterrents, we are looking at strong conventional forces, air and missile
defence, as well as cyber, space and deep-precision strike capabilities. We
are investing in these areas together with our allies and partners, thus also
strengthening our European defence industries to meet the challenges
emerging from the Zeitenwende.
Given how close our countries in Europe are, given the values and interests
we all share, I cannot think of any possible scenario in which the vital
interests of one of us are threatened without the vital interest of Germany
being threatened as well. This is the strongest foundation that NATO’s
European pillar could possibly have. It reinforces the message shared by all
allies, on both sides of the Atlantic: an attack on one of us is an attack on all
of us. Nobody should ever dare to attack a single inch of the alliance, as we
will defend it together. Whoever dismisses this as lip service should look at
what we are doing on the ground. Pabradė might be a good place to start
looking. ■
Olaf Scholz is the chancellor of Germany.

This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/by-
invitation/2024/05/23/olaf-scholz-on-why-vladimir-putins-brutal-imperialism-will-
fail

Briefing
Next week’s election is South Africa’s most important since
1994
Dawdling and decay :: It may force the country’s indecisive leader to make a fateful choice

Dawdling and decay
Next week’s election is South

Africa’s most important since 1994
It may force the country’s indecisive leader to make a fateful choice
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | CAPE TOWN
SINCE TAKING office in 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa has turned

indecisiveness into an art form. No matter the problem, South Africa’s
president will dither about the solution. Six years after pledging a “new
dawn” he has yet to get to grips with the country’s multiple crises, including
record unemployment, the highest murder rate in 20 years and widespread
corruption.
So it is troubling that Mr Ramaphosa may soon have to make a momentous

choice. On May 29th South Africa will hold national and provincial
elections. The Economist’s poll tracker suggests the ruling African National
Congress (ANC) will win its lowest share of the vote ever, probably falling
below 50% for the first time. South Africa’s proportional voting system
means that it would then need to form a coalition to govern. Potential
partners range from thuggish black nationalists to multiracial liberals,
making Mr Ramaphosa’s decision a fateful one for South Africa, and this
election the most important since 1994, when Nelson Mandela became
president.
Mr Ramaphosa’s options will be determined by how far the ANC’s vote

share falls. If it ends up closer to 40% of the vote than 50%, it may need to
join forces with one of the bigger opposition parties. That presents it with a
stark choice between pragmatism and populism. It could opt for a “grand
coalition” with its biggest rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA), which
campaigns for clean, liberal government. Alternatively Mr Ramaphosa
could turn to one or both of the next most popular parties: the Economic
Freedom Fighters (EFF) or uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). The first is an ANC
offshoot which adores Vladimir Putin, castigates white South Africans and
wants to nationalise much of the economy. The second is backed by Mr
Ramaphosa’s predecessor as president and leader of the ANC, Jacob Zuma,
who was jailed in 2021 for contempt of court after ignoring a summons
from an inquiry into corruption during his presidency. When he was
arrested, his supporters rioted, leading to hundreds of deaths and billions of
dollars in damage. Any deal involving the ANC and either of these parties
would horrify investors and all those who believe in what Mandela called
the “rainbow nation”.
Don’t go lose it baby
Even if the ANC does well enough in the election to ally with a relatively
moderate minor party, Mr Ramaphosa will face a variation on the same
dilemma. Thirty years after the end of white rule South Africa is in trouble.
Graft is endemic, GDP per person is lower than it was in 2008 and the state
is becoming ever less effective. The temptation to resort to ruinous
populism to stay in power will only increase. Though the worst outcomes
may be averted this time around, South Africa cannot escape fateful choices
for ever.
To appreciate the stakes, rewind to when Mr Ramaphosa took over. The
new president would speak of “nine wasted years” under Mr Zuma. The
implication was that his predecessor’s reign was an aberration: that the era
of corruption so severe it was dubbed “state capture” was the fault of one
man—and could be resolved by another. Yet that was never likely to be the
case, given the nature of the ANC, what it has done to the South African
state and Mr Ramaphosa’s own failings.
Start with the ruling party. The ANC is an ideological mishmash, a blend of
communism, socialism, black nationalism, Christianity and other ideas. But
the assumptions that the state should be the chief source of development,
that the ANC must wield influence over the state and that markets cannot be
trusted are shibboleths. In 1997 South Africa ranked 47th of 123 countries
in the Economic Freedom Index, a ranking by the Fraser Institute, a
Canadian think-tank, based on the size of the public sector, the extent of
regulation and so on. By 2021 it had slipped to 94th, just ahead of
Nicaragua. The institute’s survey of the attractiveness of mining
jurisdictions places South Africa, once the commodities giant of the
continent, in 62nd place out of 86 countries, behind Congo.
Regulations around affirmative action and “black economic empowerment”

(BEE), whereby firms must give stakes to black-owned companies and use
black-owned contractors, have raised the costs of investment. By one
measure—gross fixed capital formation as a share of GDP—private-sector
investment is down by a third since 2008. Labour-market regulations more
in keeping with France than with a developing country raise the cost of
hiring.
The deliberate blurring of the lines between party and state predated and
outlasted Mr Zuma. The ANC has a long-standing policy of “cadre
deployment”, whereby loyalists are appointed to public jobs on the basis of
loyalty to the party, not competence. Mr Ramaphosa chaired the ANC
committee responsible for this between 2014 and 2019, according to
News24, a South African news organisation.
The blend of state and party abetted a culture of entitlement. “The bedrock
of state capture was the ANC’s ideology,” argues Mcebisi Jonas, a former
cabinet minister, who says he left Mr Zuma’s government to avoid taking
part in its corruption. Many in the ANC behave as if the point of power is to
acquire the lifestyles once enjoyed only by the white minority. As a
spokesperson for Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, declared, “I did not
join the struggle to be poor.” Both Mr Mbeki and Mandela turned a blind
eye to graft.
Under Mr Zuma corruption was grotesque. The largest state-owned firms

were robbed of about 57bn rand ($3bn), according to the inquiry whose
summons Mr Zuma ignored. The former president used public funds to
build a family compound with a swimming pool that he claimed was a
justified expense since it was to be used by firemen in case of
conflagrations.
Still grazing
Mr Ramaphosa, who was Mr Zuma’s deputy, called the ANC “accused

number one” over corruption. But how much has changed? Billions of rand
in emergency spending during the pandemic broke procurement rules,
according to the police. Last month the speaker of parliament resigned after
being accused of taking bribes. Local media report that the police are
investigating allegations of corruption against Paul Mashatile, Mr
Ramaphosa’s deputy and potential successor. (Both deny wrongdoing.) In a
sign of the lethal competition for party jobs, which come with access to
public funds, assassination attempts on politicians and officials claimed the
lives of 37 people in South Africa last year, according to ACLED, a
conflict-monitoring group. Just 10% of South Africans think the
government is doing enough to stop graft, down from 25% in 2018, notes
Afrobarometer, a pollster.
A long and bumpy road
Over time, corruption and patronage have corroded the state. Data from the
World Bank suggest that the effectiveness of South Africa’s government has
plummeted since 1996. The result is a bad mix: heavy-handed regulation
and administrative incompetence. “It’s like a black hole,” one adviser to the
president says of the national bureaucracy. Local government is even worse:
the vast majority of ANC-run municipalities were not given clean audits in
their most recent review by a watchdog.
A report published in November emphasised the role of “collapsing state

capacity” in South Africa’s economic malaise. (Growth has consistently
lagged behind other emerging markets: in 1994 South Africa’s GDP was
almost double that of Malaysia; now it is about 20% smaller.) Because the
ANC kept spending after the commodity boom slowed around 2010, debt as
a share of GDP has more than tripled, from 24% in 2008 to 75%. South
Africa’s shocking unemployment rate (33%) has risen by about 0.5
percentage points a year on average since 1994. Entrenched joblessness is
the main reason South Africa is so unequal. The richest tenth are about as
wealthy as their counterparts in Greece, but the bottom decile is as destitute
as the poorest Cameroonians.
State failings are clearest in infrastructure. Last year Eskom, the state-run
power company, had to schedule a record number of blackouts because its
generation fell so far short of demand. Almost 40% of piped water is lost
before it reaches customers. Dysfunctional railways and locomotives mean
that Transnet, the state freight firm, is unable to transport what firms want it
to shift. The lost exports amounted to about 1bn rand a day over the past
two years.
There is a vicious cycle in which criminals exploit a weak state, further

weakening both the state and the economy. CEOs regularly cite mafias as a
brake on business. The World Bank reckons that crime costs South Africa at
least 10% of GDP annually. Last year South Africa was the seventh most
crime-addled country in the world, according to an index compiled by the
Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, an NGO, worse
than Honduras, Libya and Syria. Over the past year reports of “tanker
mafias” have proliferated: gangs who first sabotage the water network and
then sell water from tankers to some of the country’s poorest people. Just
15% of murders are solved. No one has been sent to prison for crimes
committed during state capture, or for instigating the riots after Mr Zuma’s
brief jailing (Mr Ramaphosa remitted his sentence). The government spends
more money protecting “VIPs” (including politicians) than it does on the
Hawks, its equivalent of the FBI.
Mr Ramaphosa’s supporters argue that he is an institutionalist trying his

best to repair the damage. In 2020 he launched Operation Vulindlela, an
effort to overcome bureaucratic inertia in areas like electricity and
immigration, supported with money and people seconded from the private
sector. Vulindlela has removed regulations restricting private investment in
renewable electricity, and so helped reduce power cuts this year. Yet all too
often the president has appointed a commission to study an issue rather than
fix it. When Mr Ramaphosa tried to appoint a “red tape tsar” it took months
for him to start work, partly because of red tape.
The bigger issue is that Mr Ramaphosa has repeatedly prioritised the

interests of his party over those of the country. He can sound moderate
when speaking but the legislation actually passed by the ANC shows his
willingness to indulge the worst instincts of his party. In March, for
example, parliament approved a bill to allow expropriation of land without
compensation in the “public interest”. On May 15th he signed a law
creating a vast but unfunded state-run health-insurance scheme. Few details
were given about its cost. By one estimate personal income taxes would
have to go up by 30% to pay for it. Doctors worry they will go out of
business. Medical associations fear their members will soon be joining the
many skilled emigrants to have left the country since 1994.
The president’s favourability ratings have fallen from an average of 57% in

2019 to 43% this year. This mostly reflects the poor state of the economy.
But Mr Ramaphosa has also not properly explained a scandal that broke in
2022, in which hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been stuffed in a
sofa were stolen from his game farm. (The president says he had sold some
buffaloes to a Sudanese tycoon.)
Soweto blues
No wonder the ANC’s support continues to fall. Record shares of South

Africans tell pollsters that they are pessimistic about the future, are
dissatisfied with democracy and have lost trust in their political leaders. In
local elections in 2021 the party lost control of the five largest cities; most
urban South Africans now live in municipalities not solely run by the ANC.
The ANC is being kept in office, like many “liberation parties” across
Africa, by older rural voters. They are more likely to remember apartheid
and depend on welfare payments. A conversation with Nyaniso
Mhlabandela, in Qunu, a rural village, is indicative. Asked how life is, he
responds with a grim litany: crime, shoddy roads, a lack of jobs and no
water for several years. Nonetheless, he explains, “I’m going to vote for the
ANC once again…I don’t believe that other political parties can bring
change. I have no hope in them, I will stick to the one I know.”
The way things are going
Apathy also helps the ANC. In 1994, the first election after the end of
apartheid, 86% of those eligible went to the polls. In 2019 that share was
just 49%. Perhaps only a quarter of those born since apartheid ended will
bother to vote this time.
This is an indictment not just of the ANC but of the opposition. In 2006
62% of South Africans told Afrobarometer they trusted the ruling party, but
only 29% said the same of its rivals. In 2021 the ANC’s tally had
plummeted to 27%, but trust in opposition parties was also lower, at 24%.
South Africa is quite unusual in having a primary opposition party—the DA
—that does not capitalise much on the ruling party’s troubles. This is partly
a matter of race: black people vote overwhelmingly for the ANC or its
offshoots; minorities generally opt for the DA. But the DA’s leaders have
affirmed the suspicions of the majority by suggesting that colonialism was
not all bad and by issuing a campaign ad in which the “rainbow” flag, a
symbol of post-1994 South Africa, is burned. John Steenhuisen, the DA’s
(white) leader, says the idea was to warn voters about how bad an ANC-
EFF coalition would be. The party has long been stuck at little over a fifth
of the vote.
Some close to Mr Ramaphosa suggest he would rather try to do a deal with
the DA than the EFF. He chaired the ANC committee that expelled Julius
Malema, the EFF leader, in 2012, so there is little love lost between them.
But others in the party would prefer to “bring the family back together”, as
a party official puts it. Since the EFF will do well in Gauteng, the most
populous province, and MK will score in KwaZulu-Natal, the second-
largest, a pact involving mutual support at the national and regional level
may emerge.
In truth the president is hoping he can avoid making a big call. Most
analysts assume the ANC will get around 45%, enough to do a deal with a
small party. The ANC may yet eke out a majority by itself. But even if the
vote goes well at the national level, elections for the nine provincial
governments could result in more of the calamitous coalitions involving
extreme parties that plague big cities such as Johannesburg and Durban. If
the EFF does end up with a role, at least in Gauteng (home to Johannesburg
and Pretoria), disaster awaits. Mr Malema’s party admires Zimbabwe’s farm
invasions. He has urged supporters to sing “Kill the Boer” and declared,
“There is an Indian agenda to undermine Africans.” He has magnanimously
stated, “We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people—at least for
now.”
uMkhonto weSizwe, named after the ANC’s old armed wing, could be
worse still. Mr Zuma, now 82, shows no compunction for his record. A
proud Zulu, he has drawn on tribalism to appeal to the country’s largest
ethnic group. The party’s manifesto suggests it would like to ditch the
constitution. His supporters had threatened violence were Mr Zuma to be
banned from standing for parliament—although, when the constitutional
court did just that on May 20th, there was no immediate unrest.
The ANC also faces internal turmoil. The constitution limits presidents to
two full five-year terms. Mr Ramaphosa’s second term will begin shortly
after the elections. Soon thereafter the ANC will become embroiled in a
succession battle.
Whoever comes out on top, the temptation to peddle pat solutions to South
Africa’s problems will be huge. Almost a third of 18- to 24-year olds say
they would prefer a non-democratic government. Nearly three-quarters of
all South Africans say they would ditch elections for a government that
could provide security, jobs and houses. Such despondency is fertile ground
for populism.
Many in the ANC may see the next five years as a last chance to enjoy the
spoils of power. In “Who Will Rule South Africa?”, published last year, the
journalists Adriaan Basson and Qaanitah Hunter note that, in local
government, electoral setbacks have not spurred the ANC to reform. It
would be “delusional”, they argue, to imagine “nefarious elements in the
ANC” will not use “this term of governance as a last-ditch opportunity for
self-enrichment”.
Unless it changes course, South Africa, not just the ANC, will continue its
slow decline. The state is weak, the economy stagnant, the ruling party
decadent. Widespread poverty will mean voters consider radical
alternatives. The ANC will be influenced more by its populist offshoots. Mr
Ramaphosa, as ever, may hope to avoid a defining choice. But dithering is
also a decision of sorts—and a bad one. ■
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/05/23/next-weeks-election-is-south-africas-
most-important-since-1994

United States
Rural white voters in Wisconsin could decide America’s
election
The country road to the White House :: They are less enthusiastic about Donald Trump than
their counterparts elsewhere
What the cases of Robert Menendez and Henry Cuellar

have in common
Corruption trials :: The politics-as-usual defence
How the NFL keeps fans transfixed even when there are no
games
Off-season offence :: The show must go on
Time is running out to fix America’s student-aid mess

The FAFSA foul-up :: The risk of a sharp drop in college enrolment is rising
Fewer migrants are crossing America’s southern border

A migration merry-go-round :: Joe Biden has Mexico to thank—for now
Some would-be American immigrants are paying to get

robbed
U bet :: Police say this is to get access to visas for victims of crime
Politics is the law in Texas

Lexington :: A governor’s pardon implies that courts cannot be trusted, just as Donald Trump
says

The country road to the White House
Rural white voters in Wisconsin

could decide America’s election
They are less enthusiastic about Donald Trump than their counterparts
elsewhere
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Alma, Wisconsin
THE LAST time Larry Jost, a sixth-generation Wisconsinite, even

considered supporting a Republican was at primary school. “I had an ‘I like
Ike’ pin just because I liked the rhyme,” he says. His town of Alma, with
two main streets, is tucked along the Mississippi between a dam and
limestone bluffs. Every Wednesday morning he gathers in his wife’s art
gallery with members of his book club, including a retired local judge, a
carpenter and a farmer. Recently they discussed an anthology of short
stories edited by Langston Hughes. “We’re the last Democrats in Buffalo
County, and that’s why we meet back here in Kevlar vests,” jokes one
member.
Their species became endangered abruptly. In every presidential election

between 1988 and 2012, Buffalo County voted for the Democratic
candidate. But in 2016 Donald Trump won the county by 22 points and
wrested Wisconsin from the Democrats while forging his electoral-college
victory over Hillary Clinton. Mr Trump carried Buffalo easily again in
2020, when he lost Wisconsin to Joe Biden by a mere 20,000 votes out of
more than 3m.
Mr Trump’s persistent appeal to rural white voters is fundamental to his

strength. He is counting on that support in November, and again Wisconsin
looks likely to be a vital battleground. Indeed, as Mr Trump opens
formidable polling leads in Nevada, Arizona and Georgia (other swing
states Mr Biden won in 2020), Wisconsin’s significance has grown. Mr
Biden has a narrow lead in some local polls, and his path to re-election may
depend on winning all the demographically similar states formerly
mislabelled as the Blue Wall: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Barring surprises elsewhere, if Mr Biden swept those three and won one of
Nebraska’s split electoral votes, a likely prospect, he would be re-elected—
just.
The contest emerging in Wisconsin strikingly complicates the story of Mr

Trump’s success with rural white voters. Among states that non-partisan
analysts rate as toss-ups this year, such voters make up a far greater share of
the electorate in Wisconsin (see chart). Yet the Badger State’s rural white
voters have remained decidedly less Republican than those in other swing
states.
In 2020 Mr Biden lost those particular voters by 24 points, compared with
43 points nationally. In Pennsylvania and Michigan Mr Trump won the
rural-white vote by 44 points and 31 points respectively. A recent survey by
Marquette Law School showed Mr Biden improving slightly with
Wisconsin’s rural voters over 2020 (although this was more than offset by a
decline among suburbanites). Mr Jost and his book-club members, then,
may not be so anomalous: the state’s Democratic coalition relies heavily on
rural white voters.
Why is Wisconsin’s liberal vote in the countryside relatively resilient? The

most obvious reason is the state’s long history as a bastion of agrarian
progressive politics, exemplified by the career of Robert La Follette, a
three-term governor and three-term senator early in the 20th century who
championed progressive taxation and government investment in rural areas.
He and his successors in Wisconsin politics, who eventually migrated to the
Democratic Party, won backing from agrarian progressives who “thought
government was a good thing, because it brought them…rural
electrification and utilities and highways”, says Barry Burden, a political
scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That outlook persists.
The recent turn to anti-government populism dates to 2010, as the Tea Party
wave crested. That year, Republicans flipped all three branches of the state
government and Scott Walker, on a mission to take on public-sector unions
and their pensions, became governor. Dozens of rural counties that had
voted consistently for Democrats backed him. What Mr Walker planted, Mr
Trump has reaped.
However, other factors may limit Mr Trump’s vote, besides Wisconsin’s

progressive traditions. The state has small-to-middling university campuses
spread throughout its territory. (Mr Biden does best among younger and
college-educated rural voters.) And because Wisconsin has a relatively
balanced mix of suburban and rural populations, and of university graduates
and non-college-educated voters, polarisation in recent years has been
pretty symmetrical. In four of the past six presidential elections, the
winning candidate’s margin of victory in Wisconsin has been less than one
percentage point.
Country and midwestern
To Democrats’ disgust, Mrs Clinton did not visit Wisconsin once during her
2016 election campaign. Mr Biden and Kamala Harris, between them, have
already visited eight times this year. They do not often hold rallies in rural
areas, but of the 46 offices the Biden campaign has opened in Wisconsin—
more than in any other swing state—nearly half are in rural counties.
Republicans are hoping that despite this outreach, a strong Democratic state
party and emotive issues such as abortion rights and the insurrection of
January 6th, Mr Trump’s personal appeal to rural voters will nonetheless
win the day. His victory in Wisconsin in 2016 was the first by a Republican
in 32 years, and he achieved it with little campaign infrastructure. The
Wisconsin Republican Party remains well-organised and has “gotten very
good at turning out votes”, notes Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who
ran George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign there.
Mr Biden’s biggest problem is his perceived dreadful performance on the

economy and immigration, the issues rural voters—and others—cite as
most important. In the Wisconsin countryside, as in much of rural America,
the problems are entrenched: declining populations, blighted main streets,
dwindling access to health care and abandoned family farms. Charlene, a
farmer in western Wisconsin who has a second job as a cleaner to
supplement her family’s income, says she will be voting for Mr Trump
because of his strength on the economy and (oddly) health care. Her son
struggled to afford care when he fell ill recently. Because of Republican
resistance, Wisconsin remains one of ten states which have yet to expand
Medicaid to cover those whose incomes fall just above the poverty line.
Democrats stress their commitment to rural investment. Mr Biden has

signed a bipartisan bill that pledges to invest some $1.4bn in Wisconsin to
deliver high-speed internet service to under-served areas, partly to tackle
rural isolation from the information economy. But the process will be slow.
The president may well complain that he does not get enough credit for his
economic achievements. But his technocratic policies and pieties about
preserving democratic norms do not impress rural voters, who have “a
tangible feeling that the political system is broken”, says Bill Hogseth, a
community organiser in western Wisconsin.
The familiar theme of rural white rage can be overdone. Still, when rural
voters hear Mr Trump say that Washington is a mess and they have a right
to be angry, his words strike a chord, Mr Hogseth reports. “There’s a lot of
anger here, and so when you have a candidate who’s willing to name that,
it’s going to get some traction.” ■
https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2024/05/22/rural-white-voters-
in-wisconsin-could-decide-americas-election

Corruption trials
What the cases of Robert

Menendez and Henry Cuellar have
in common
The politics-as-usual defence
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | New York
A STONE’S THROW from the Manhattan courthouse where Donald

Trump has been in the dock, an equally picaresque political-corruption trial
is under way with less publicity. Robert Menendez, New Jersey’s
Democratic senior senator, is charged with bribery and extortion, among
other crimes. He allegedly used his influence as chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee to help Egypt and Qatar in exchange for gold
bars, a Mercedes and cash. “This was politics for profit,” Lara Pomerantz, a
federal prosecutor, declared in her opening statement. Mr Menendez, who
asserts his innocence and has declined to resign from office, was a “United
States senator on the take”, she added.
Bribery cases can be hard to get across to a jury if the alleged quid pro quo
is subtle or indirect. Mr Menendez’s habits of personal finance have
provided prosecutors with some useful visual aids. Last week they showed
jurors photos of the alleged loot seized from the senator’s home: not just the
now-famous gold bars, but also wads of cash stuffed into a Timberland
boot. Federal agents found more cash in bags and in two of the senator’s
jackets. The FBI got so flustered counting the money by hand that it had to
have two cash-counting machines brought in to tally what turned out to be
$486,461.
Mr Menendez has said that, overall, the charges against him have
“misrepresented the normal work of a congressional office”. His lawyers
called him “an American patriot” who was “doing his job”. They did not
deny some of the unsavoury aspects of his behaviour, but told jurors: “You
might not like it, but it is not a crime.”
Courts have indeed narrowed the definition of criminal bribery involving

public officials in recent years. In 2016 the Supreme Court overturned the
corruption conviction of a former Virginia governor, Bob McDonnell,
ruling that prosecutors had overreached by criminalising distasteful but
legal acts. That case too involved salacious testimony about extravagant
gifts. But as the chief justice, John Roberts, wrote in a unanimous opinion:
“Our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes and ball gowns.
It is instead with…the government’s boundless interpretation of the federal
bribery statute.”
Another Supreme Court decision four years later—involving charges

against aides to a former New Jersey governor, Chris Christie—again
limited what official acts could be considered criminal. “What’s taken hold
is this notion that many things that most ordinary people would see as
unseemly or corrupt are really just politics as usual,” says Daniel Weiner of
the Brennan Centre, a think-tank.
Mr Menendez has beaten corruption charges before. He was tried in 2017

on allegations that he traded influence for luxury holidays and gifts. A jury
acquitted him on some charges and was unable to reach a verdict on others.
New Jersey voters then returned Mr Menendez to office and fellow
Democrats rewarded him with his influential committee chair. His
rehabilitation has made Democrats appear hypocritical, at best, as they have
sought to exploit indictments against Mr Trump for partisan gain.
And Mr Menendez is not the only prominent Democrat in Congress facing

corruption charges. On May 3rd federal prosecutors charged a Texas
congressman, Henry Cuellar, and his wife with bribery and money-
laundering in connection with almost $600,000 they allegedly received
from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank. Mr Cuellar has asserted his
innocence and said that his dealings were, in effect, routine: “The actions I
took in Congress were consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues
and in the interest of the American people.”
The charges Mr Menendez faces go beyond bribery. He is also accused of

sharing sensitive non-public information with Egyptian government
officials. But the meat of the case against him is old-school corruption,
including accusations that he exploited his Senate office to help an associate
win financial backing from a Qatari sheikh in exchange for cash, gold bars
and Formula One tickets.
The trial is expected to last six weeks. Mr Menendez is being tried

alongside two New Jersey associates, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. His
wife, Nadine, is also charged as a conspirator (and she has also pleaded not
guilty) but her trial has been postponed until July while she undergoes
cancer treatment. Her absence from the courtroom and the separation of her
trial from that of her husband seems to have encouraged Mr Menendez’s
lawyers to put the blame on her, saying that much of the cash was found in
her closet and that she kept him in the dark about her financial dealings.
Throwing one’s spouse under the proverbial bus may be low even for a
politician; but office-holders deflecting corruption charges by claiming it’s
“just politics”, notes Mr Weiner from the Brennan Centre, is “as American
as apple pie”. ■
Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter
with fast analysis of the most important electoral stories, and Checks and
Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the
state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2024/05/23/what-the-cases-of-robert-menendez-and-henry-cuellar-have-in-common

Off-season offence
How the NFL keeps fans transfixed

even when there are no games
The show must go on
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Washington, DC
NOTHING DRAWS an audience quite like the National Football League.

The season opener in September 2023 attracted nearly 25m viewers, and in
February almost 124m Americans tuned in for Super Bowl LVIII. Yet the
NFL is not satisfied with dominating the media for only five months a year.
It has developed an uncanny ability to turn ordinary off-season events into
spectacles.
Weeks after the season ends the league hosts a televised “scouting
combine” for aspiring players to demonstrate their skills. Then comes the
draft, when 32 teams recruit the best college talent. Since it was first
televised in 1980, the draft has become a three-day extravaganza featuring
live music and celebrity guests. Around 775,000 fans attended in person this
year, and some 12m Americans viewed the first round. The NFL’s draft has
become bigger than some leagues’ championship games.
Dozens of young men becoming instant millionaires naturally makes for

good television. More impressive is the NFL’s ability to turn the most
routine events into social-media phenomena. The release of the annual
schedule of matches, which some teams have made into an art form, may be
the best example of this prowess.
The Los Angeles Chargers are masters of the genre, publishing elaborate
videos to announce their upcoming opponents and mercilessly mock them.
This year the team produced a recreation of “The Sims”, a popular life-
simulation video game. Most of the jokes poke fun at football-related
controversies or their opponents’ weaknesses.
“We’ve really been intentional about making it a big moment,” says Ian
Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice-president of social, influencer and content
marketing. “The clubs obviously add a ton to that.” One team included
man-on-the-street videos collecting opinions about their opponents: “They
peaked in 1970” (the New York Jets) or “Home of the cheese” (Green Bay
Packers). Another prank-called their opponents’ fans. Viewership is up by
almost 50% from last year.
The Chargers’ video—with more than 40m views since its release on May
15th—has resonated beyond traditional football fans. A kicker for the
Kansas City Chiefs, the Chargers’ week-four opponent, recently went viral
after publicly encouraging women to remain at home and embrace
anachronistic social mores. The video depicted him as a Sims character in a
kitchen baking a pie.
“We’re building an army of young sports fans who are diabolically in love
with this franchise because they followed us from the beginning through
social,” says Jason Lavine of the Chargers’ front office. “It would be tough
to find another sports team in North America that would be as online as
us.”■
states/2024/05/23/how-the-nfl-keeps-fans-transfixed-even-when-there-are-no-games

The FAFSA foul-up
Time is running out to fix

America’s student-aid mess
The risk of a sharp drop in college enrolment is rising
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
BY EARLY MAY, people heading to college in America have usually

settled on an institution and sent the first of several large cheques. This
year, a government cock-up has left admissions in a mess. For months
youngsters have been struggling to apply for student loans, Pell grants and
other financial aid—the result of a botched effort to revamp the system
through which these are doled out. The question is no longer whether this
will drive down the number of people starting degree courses this autumn,
but how sharp the drop will be.
At the heart of the problem lie changes to the Free Application for Federal
Student Aid, or FAFSA—the web form that must be completed to qualify
for most federal, state and institutional assistance. No tears were shed when,
in 2020, Congress blessed plans to simplify it. Its 100 or so questions have
long put off low-income students in two minds about higher education, and
exasperated everyone else. Yet the new version did not limp online until
months after this year’s college-application season had started. And it was
riddled with bugs.
Colleges have continued to hand out places. But applicants have faced long
delays in finding out if they will receive enough aid to afford their courses.
Institutions that would usually require applicants to accept offers by May
1st have had to push their deadlines back. The bigger worry is that,
frustrated by flaws in FAFSA, many youngsters are abandoning plans for
college. By May 10th the number of high-school seniors who had
completed an application for aid was 17% lower than at the same point last
year.
First-year enrolments could end up anywhere between 2% and 10% lower

than would have been the case without the screw-up, reckons Katharine
Meyer of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Her “reasonable worst-
case scenario” would see a fall as bad as the slump in the first year of the
pandemic, which separated high-school seniors from college counsellors
just as it threw their study plans into chaos. MorraLee Keller of the
National College Attainment Network, an NGO, notes that FAFSA hassles
could also push up dropouts among existing students, who must fill out a
form each year that they wish to take out a loan or bank a grant.
College-going rates in America were already moving backwards: between
2018 and 2021 the share of high-schoolers proceeding straight into higher
education fell by seven percentage points (see chart). The FAFSA foul-up
has marred one of the last years in which demographic trends are in
colleges’ favour. The total number of 18-year-olds in America will soon
start to decline. Missing enrolment targets could be perilous for small
private colleges, the least famous of which operate close to the wire. Past
experience suggests that community colleges will see the biggest falls.
Months of fiddles have improved the new FAFSA system. But the window
for warding off bad outcomes is closing: once America’s schools shut for
the summer it gets harder to nudge those who are on the fence about higher
education to fill out the form. Ashley Logan of I Know I Can, which
promotes college access in Ohio, reels off activities her outfit hopes will
push up the number of local youngsters who apply for aid—some of this
funded with extra cash from the government. But she is “braced” for many
to fall through the cracks. ■
states/2024/05/21/time-is-running-out-to-fix-americas-student-aid-mess

A migration merry-go-round
Fewer migrants are crossing

America’s southern border
Joe Biden has Mexico to thank—for now
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Los Angeles
A FEW STATISTICS regularly released by government agencies set the

hearts of America’s political establishment aflutter. Monthly inflation
figures are eagerly awaited by Democrats who want to demonstrate that
Bidenomics is helping the middle class, and by Republicans howling that it
is a failed socialist experiment. Jobs figures have much the same effect.
Lately, another measure has joined that list: monthly “encounters” of
migrants at America’s southern border.
Figures released on May 15th show that, after a peak in December of

302,000 apprehensions, the most ever, encounters at the border tumbled by
42% to roughly 180,000 and have stayed relatively flat since January (see
chart). That is still high compared with pre-pandemic figures, but it is a
marked improvement, and one that President Joe Biden will be thankful for
in an election year.
The totals hide big changes in migrant flows. For the first time since the
1990s the area around San Diego, California, had more encounters than any
other part of the border, overtaking the region south of Tucson, Arizona.
This is due, in part, to a surge in the number of Ecuadoreans journeying
north as gang violence has worsened in their country. They are crossing into
southern California in greater numbers than anywhere else. San Diego’s
role as the new centre of irregular migration may also be a product of
increased enforcement in Texas, where Greg Abbott, the Republican
governor, has fought the federal government to place extra deterrents along
the border. These measures (and much tough talk) do not appear to be
stopping migrants from crossing altogether. Many are simply trekking
westward instead.
Seasonal migration trends do not explain the drop, either. Over the past
decade these have broken down. Back when those crossing the border were
mostly Mexicans seeking work, there was a pattern to their movements.
Encounters would stay low in the winter around the holidays, increase in
the spring, when the weather was still relatively cool in the sweltering
south-west, and drop back again in the summer, explains Colleen Putzel-
Kavanaugh of the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank. Now, more
families and migrants from places beyond Mexico are crossing, and their
movements are less predictable.
Instead, two reasons for the decline stand out. First, migration is becoming
ever more responsive to politics, thanks to the speed at which information is
shared on messaging apps and social media. While record numbers of
migrants were attempting to cross the border in December, the Senate was
trying to craft a bill to beef up border security. Among migrants, rumours of
a crackdown were flying. That may have caused more people to cross to try
to get ahead of new policies.
Something similar happened in 2023 when the administration lifted Title

42, a public-health measure that made it easy to remove migrants to
Mexico. “The Biden administration was telegraphing that it was going to
heavily crack down at the border, and so migrants began crossing in very
large numbers,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration
Council, an advocacy group. The rapid pace at which migrants get and
share information may also be why Mr Biden has kept quiet after the failure
of the border bill about any plans he may have to try to stem crossings using
executive action.
Limbolands
Second, and most important, Mexico has stepped up its own migration
enforcement over the past few months to keep order at its northern frontier.
Migrants are stopped short of Mexico’s border with the United States or at
checkpoints throughout the country and bused south to cities near
Guatemala. But Mexico does not have the resources to carry out a mass-
deportation scheme. And the “decompression” policy may have unintended
consequences. Migrants may turn in greater numbers to smugglers to evade
the authorities, and they could attempt more dangerous routes through the
desert, or via boats along the Pacific coast.
Mexico’s busing scheme may not be sustainable, however. Mexican

officials have pledged to help keep encounters at the United States’
southern border below 4,000 a day. But that will depend on whether the
country has the money to keep up enforcement.
Panamanian data suggest that the number of migrants trekking north

through the treacherous Darién Gap is not slowing down—so tens of
thousands of migrants may end up in limbo in Mexico. They do not want to
stay there. Three-quarters of migrants interviewed in the Panamanian jungle
said that if they were delayed on the way to their destination (which, for
most, is the United States) they would simply wait and proceed later.
All this means that Mr Biden still has an immigration problem, despite the
fall in encounters. Some 12% of registered voters polled by YouGov and
The Economist say that immigration is the most important issue facing the
country, second only to inflation. Senate Democrats may yet make an
attempt to revive the prematurely deceased border bill. But Mitch
McConnell, the top Republican in the chamber, says Mr Biden’s only
choice is to “do everything he can do on his own”.
If the president does decide to take executive action, which will surely face
legal challenges, it may not come until after Mexico’s elections on June
2nd. Like many of the migrants in Mexico, American policy remains stuck
in limbo.■
states/2024/05/23/fewer-migrants-are-crossing-americas-southern-border

U bet
Some would-be American

immigrants are paying to get
robbed
Police say this is to get access to visas for victims of crime
5月 23, 2024, 11:50 上午 | Chicago
FROM THE security-camera footage last July, it looks terrifying. Masked

men burst into a liquor store in Bucktown, a wealthy neighbourhood in
Chicago, pointing guns. Customers stick their hands up, as one gunman
waves his weapon furiously. Suddenly, the employee behind the counter
disappears, as shards of glass or liquid fill the screen. He has been shot in
the stomach. The robbers flee in a stolen Kia car. “They said, give us all of
the money,” said Diptesh Patel, the business’s owner, in an interview to
local TV news.
So far, so normal. Liquor-store robberies are hardly rare in America. Yet
according to an indictment unsealed in federal court in Chicago on May
17th, this one was staged: some of the victims (though not the man shot)
had paid to get robbed. The robbery was one of 16 that prosecutors allege
were organised by the defendants, mostly in the Chicago area, but also in
Tennessee and Louisiana. According to the indictment, they were conducted
“so that the purported victims of the robberies could apply for U-visas”. Six
people, four of them Indian nationals, have been charged with conspiracy to
commit visa fraud.
The U-visa was created in 2000 by Congress as part of a broader act

intended to crack down on human trafficking. It is available to victims of
certain serious crimes, and gives the recipient and their immediate family
the right to live in America for four years, with a path to a green card. The
idea is to make sure that victims without legal status in America co-operate
with the authorities.
Police in Houston say that a robbery-murder in January may have been part
of a botched attempt to procure a U-visa. Late last year two suspects were
charged in federal court in Massachusetts with conducting a string of fake
robberies in four states. In 2022 government auditors reported that
safeguards against fraud with the U-visa were weak.
Yet it is not easy even for legitimate victims to get a U-visa, says Kathleen
Bush-Joseph, of the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank. To apply, you
need a police officer to certify you were a victim of a crime. In 2022
Injustice Watch, an NGO, criticised the Chicago Police Department for
refusing about half of applicants. And being certified is only the start.
Congress sets a cap of 10,000 visas per year; the backlog of pending
applications has reached 354,000. Since 2021 applicants have been able to
apply for work permits while they wait to be processed. But even that
process is taking years.
Arranging a fake robbery for a semi-legal status that you may not get seems
quite a risk to take. But many would-be immigrants are desperate. Some
10m people in America have no path to legal status. “People will take the
few avenues that they have,” notes Ms Bush-Joseph.■
Correction (May 23rd): This article was updated to more accurately
explain how U-visa applicants can get a work permit.
states/2024/05/23/some-would-be-american-immigrants-are-paying-to-get-robbed

Lexington
Politics is the law in Texas

A governor’s pardon implies that courts cannot be trusted, just as Donald
Trump says
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
AN AMERICAN military veteran was killed in the street, presumed to pose

a threat when he was exercising his right to carry a gun in public. You might
expect America’s gun-rights advocates to demand justice for the dead man.
But here’s a bit of important context: when he was killed, that man, Garrett
Foster, was marching in a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Austin,
Texas, in July 2020. The person who shot him, Daniel Perry, was sentenced
to 25 years in prison for murder. On May 16th Governor Greg Abbott
pardoned Mr Perry, saying he acted in line with Texas’s “stand your
ground” law, which allows people to use deadly force if they feel
threatened.
More context is coming in a moment. To jump to the bottom line: whether
or not you believe Mr Perry to be innocent, one lesson of this case, a bitter
one, is that to be confident of getting justice under the law in Texas you
must have political power. That is not just what Foster’s family has
concluded. It is what the governor himself implied in voiding the
conviction. He said Mr Perry was the victim of a district attorney who
demonstrated “unethical and biased misuse of his office” in undertaking the
prosecution.
In his proclamation justifying the pardon, Mr Abbott, a Republican, noted

that Mr Perry was driving “on a public road” when he “encountered a group
of protesters obstructing traffic” who pounded and kicked his car. He did
not mention that witnesses testified under oath that Mr Perry accelerated
into the protesters after running a red light. Mr Abbott said that Foster
approached within 18 inches and “brandished a Kalashnikov-style rifle in
the low-ready firing position”. He did not mention that Foster was acting
legally, under Texas’s “permitless carry” law; or that Mr Perry initially said
he “believed” Foster would aim at him, not that he did so; or that witnesses
testified that Foster, who was 28 and accompanying his girlfriend, a
quadruple amputee, kept his gun, a semi-automatic rifle, pointed down, not
at Mr Perry, who drew a handgun and fired five times. According to the
lead prosecutor, Foster’s gun was recovered with the safety catch on and no
bullet in the chamber. Foster was white, as is Mr Perry.
The governor did not mention that in the weeks before the killing, as Mr
Perry posted racist complaints on social media about BLM (“like a bunch of
monkeys flinging shit at a zoo”), he mused about killing rioters or looters.
“I wonder if they will let my cut the ears off of people who’s decided to
commit suicide by me,” he wrote, with the errata of the casual poster. He
debated with a friend when such a shooting might be justified. “I will also
repeatedly say I am in fear of my life,” he wrote, explaining how he would
defend himself in such a case, as he later did.
In his proclamation, the governor noted that the Texas Board of Pardons
and Paroles recommended the pardon. Mr Abbott did not mention that the
board acted unusually fast—not waiting for the appeals process—or that he
had appointed all its members. He did not mention that he pledged to
pardon Mr Perry the day after he was convicted, after Tucker Carlson, then
a Fox News host, accused the governor of disregarding the right of self-
defence.
Mr Abbott accused the district attorney, José Garza of Travis County, of

directing an investigator to “withhold exculpatory evidence” from the grand
jury that indicted Mr Perry. The governor did not mention that the judge in
the case concluded that this accusation did not merit pursuing. But, then,
like district attorneys, judges in Texas are elected, and Travis County
includes the liberal city of Austin. The judge is a Democrat. Mark Jones, a
professor at Rice University, says Mr Perry’s conviction was “in the most
liberal county, overseen by a liberal Democratic judge, and overseen by the
most progressive prosecutor in the state. Put all those things together, and
that’s like waving a red flag in front of Republicans.”
Mr Abbott issued his pardon at a politically opportune moment, just before

early voting began in Republican-primary run-offs in which he is pushing
candidates who will support his legislative priorities. For their part,
Democrats, who have not won statewide since 1994, have little political
reason to make a fuss about the pardon. “The crossover voter is not
necessarily wild about BLM protesters,” Mr Jones says.
All the more reason the rule of law, and perceptions of justice, should stand
apart from politics. Mr Perry was convicted by a jury of his peers, the
bedrock unit of the American legal system. The jury weighed all this
context, including Mr Perry’s claims. That also went unmentioned in Mr
Abbott’s proclamation. But maybe Texans believe a Travis County jury
cannot be fair, just as Donald Trump has insisted a New York jury
considering his criminal case cannot be fair to him. Politics, and
assumptions about politics, are seeping into every American institution, and
so is cynicism about what chance ideals of fairness have against the realities
of power.
“Isn’t worth it, bro”
Reading through the lengthy court record of Mr Perry’s toxic, sad social-
media posts, one wonders, pointlessly, what might have happened if he and
Foster had had a conversation. Both were military men: Mr Perry, then 33,
was serving as an army sergeant at Fort Hood and driving for Uber that
night in Austin to make ends meet. Foster was a libertarian, and Mr Perry
also claimed to prize freedom. Mr Perry insisted he supported peaceful
protest. He seemed, as a Jew, to feel particularly vulnerable to violence.
But probably a talk with Foster would have gone nowhere. Mr Perry’s
family and friends pleaded with him on Facebook that summer to show
more empathy, without much effect, or just to set politics aside. “Isn’t worth
it, bro,” one friend counselled, urging him: “Go to a mountain to a river
enjoy the rest of our life.”
At least in that moment, Mr Perry seemed to understand. “American politics

are horrible,” he replied. ■
Read more from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:

Why the Republicans will convene in a forge of American socialism (May
9th)
Joe Biden is practising some Clintonian politics (May 2nd)
The campus is coming for Joe Biden (Apr 24th)
Also: How the Lexington column got its name

states/2024/05/23/politics-is-the-law-in-texas

The Americas
Criminal gangs are showing their muscle as Mexico’s
elections loom
The villains are thriving :: The next president must make the country safer
Canadians are taking dramatic steps to avoid more ruinous

firestorms
Lessons learned after Canada’s Frankenfires :: The focus is as much on mitigation and
preparation as on suppression
Mexico’s mighty diaspora punches below its weight in

elections
The vote bank in the United States :: But its participation is steadily increasing

The villains are thriving
Criminal gangs are showing their

muscle as Mexico’s elections loom
The next president must make the country safer
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Mexico City and TAPACHULA
IT HAS BEEN a bloody month for Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. On

May 19th a candidate running in next month’s local elections was attacked,
and five members of his team shot dead. That came days after a mayoral
candidate was killed with five others, and an apparent gang shoot-out in
which 11 people died.
For chiapanecos such news is all too frequent. Murders in their state rose
by 60% in the first three months of this year, compared with the same
period in 2023. Criminal groups are fighting to control territory for moving
drugs and migrants, who enter Mexico from Guatemala through Chiapas.
“We used to be a poor-but-safe state,” says Francisco Rojas, a candidate for
mayor of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital. Now Chiapas is dangerous, as
well as poor. It typifies the insecurity under President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador and the government led by his Morena party as his six-year term
comes to a close.
Mexico has suffered under violent gangs for many years. But two features
stand out today. First, the number of places that criminal groups control has
expanded. Second, their influence in local politics has grown. That will mar
the vote on June 2nd, when Mexicans will elect a new president, nine
governors, all 628 seats in congress and over 20,000 local posts.
Crisis Group, a think-tank, reckons that by 2021 major gangs were

operating in a fifth of Mexico’s 2,500 municipalities, up from 11% in 2010.
That figure is probably higher now. In states including Guerrero, Zacatecas
and Michoacán gangs have tightened their grip and act more brazenly. In
March Catholic bishops tried to lessen the violence in Guerrero by
assigning municipalities to warring groups.
The second feature is the gangs’ influence on politics. Local officials are
particularly vulnerable to corruption or intimidation: a municipal policeman
in Chiapas can earn as little as 5,000 pesos ($300) a month. Gangs shape
elections by killing candidates they consider unfriendly. At least 64
candidates, their relatives or political operatives have been killed in this
electoral cycle. Last month 200 candidates for local posts in Zacatecas
withdrew, causing the national electoral body to launch an investigation. In
some cases gangs simply field their own people.
Mr López Obrador, who took power in 2018, is not the only one to blame.
Violence worsened after Mexico’s transition to democracy in the late 1990s
and again after President Felipe Calderón launched his “war on drugs” in
2006. Gangs splintered, multiplied and fought back. They expanded into
human-trafficking and mining, spreading from urban to rural areas.
Territorial control offers scope to extort from avocado producers and bus
drivers, to control the water supply and charge people for it, and even to sell
space in the shade.
But Mr López Obrador’s focus on poverty, which he sees as the main cause
of violence, has not fixed the immediate problem. He kept the army on the
streets, a plausible about-turn given the gangs’ firepower, but ordered the
soldiers not to confront the gangs. This “white flag” didn’t work, says
Carlos Matienzo of DataInt, a security consultancy. It let gangs spread;
violence persisted. With 180,000 murders in the past six years, Mr López
Obrador’s time in office has been Mexico’s deadliest period on record.
Disappearances, mostly murders with no body found, are up too.
Impunity is rife. Mr López Obrador dismantled the federal police. Many

were corrupt but their officers had been vetted and trained, many by the
FBI. The National Guard, which replaced them, are seconded soldiers not
trained in police work. In 2018 the federal police arrested 21,700 people; in
2022 the National Guard arrested just 2,814. The president unhelpfully
denies and plays down the violence, at times even calling criminals
“respectful people”.
He has also weakened security co-operation with the United States, which
is keen to stem the north-bound flow of fentanyl and migrants. Few
expected Mr López Obrador to hew to the approach of Mr Calderón and his
successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, who were cosy with the northern neighbour.
But relations are now needlessly combative, says a Mexican official.
Insecurity tops voters’ list of worries. Xóchitl Gálvez—the main rival to
Claudia Sheinbaum, Mr López Obrador’s protegée and Mexico’s likely next
president—has put it at the heart of her campaign.
Ms Sheinbaum, if she wins, will probably be willing to adjust her

predecessor’s policies. She says she will use nationally many of the same
tools she used when she was Mexico City’s mayor, when murders in the
capital fell. She upped the wages of the city’s police, increased their
intelligence and investigation capacity and improved co-ordination between
them, the National Guard and the attorney-general’s office. Ms Sheinbaum
will have to move quickly or risk ever more insecurity, in Chiapas and
beyond. ■
Correction (May 23rd): This piece has been updated to correct the number
of deaths in Chiapas.
Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin America, to
understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex region.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-
americas/2024/05/22/criminal-gangs-are-showing-their-muscle-as-mexicos-elections-
loom

Lessons learned after Canada’s Frankenfires
Canadians are taking dramatic

steps to avoid more ruinous
firestorms
The focus is as much on mitigation and preparation as on suppression
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | LITTLE SUSHWAP LAKE, British Columbia
STUMPY, SOOT-STAINED foundations of homes, charred fir trees that

crumble when touched and the skeletons of petrol stations offer mute
testimony to the ferocity of the wildfire that roared through the hamlet of
Scotch Creek last year. The smoke from it and myriad other Canadian fires
reached Baltimore, Barcelona, Berlin and beyond.
Wildfires scorched 185,000 square km (71,000 square miles) of Canada in

2023, an area bigger than Florida. The resulting pall forced millions indoors
during the height of summer. The fires also pumped 1,800 megatonnes of
CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, dwarfing Canada’s total emissions in
2022 of 708 megatonnes. Locals called the blazes Frankenstein fires “that
crawl or sprint along like some diabolical monster”. “The fires defy
models,” says John MacLean, chief administrative officer of nearby
Columbia Shuswap District. “They are alien to experience.”
This year’s fire season is already ramping up. On May 14th a blaze raging
over 200 square km forced 6,600 residents of Fort McMurray, in north-
eastern Alberta, to flee. Oil drillers were on alert, too. The province’s tar
sands—one of the most polluting sources of oil in the world—produce 3.3m
barrels per day (b/d) of crude, equivalent to just over 3% of the global
supply. In 2016 a hellish wildfire forced 1m b/d of production offline.
Rystad Energy, a consultancy, warns that the worst-case scenario this time
could put more than 2m b/d at risk by threatening pits, people and pipelines.
Residents have since been allowed to return, and fortuitous rains have
curbed the spread of the fire.
To fight these alien monsters, Canada’s fire services are mustering drones
that drop “dragon-egg bombs”, summoning the long-ignored wisdom of
indigenous peoples and heeding the ancient counsel of an admonishing
cartoon bear. That means relying on mitigation and preparation, rather than
mere suppression, to deal with firestorms that many fear are Canada’s new
normal. Bone-dry ground conditions after a season of scant snowfall and
spring droughts across Canada’s north mean the floors of the forests are
primed with plenty of material to ignite another catastrophic wildfire
season.
Smokey Bear, the dour ursine of the United States Forest Service, who for
decades told North Americans that “only YOU can prevent forest fires”, has
been reincarnated in the form of foreboding-filled fire officials like Dennis
Craig. Hired by the resort town of Kelowna after about 200 homes last year
were reduced to cinders, Mr Craig was given the newly created title of
assistant chief of wildfire mitigation and preparation. Kelowna is one of
many towns shifting its resources from fire-suppression to preparation. And
the onus is on residents. “We’re delivering a hard message to home-owners
this year,” says Mr Craig. “It’s time to start looking at your own properties
and changing your behaviours.”
Fire officials have been going door-to-door, urging people to “firesmart”

their houses. Requests for their visits have gone up ten-fold, according to
city officials. The plans aim to turn buildings and the vegetation around
them into firebreaks, rather than fire hazards. Cedar shingles and hedges
that often adorn properties need to be ripped out and replaced. Decorative
wood mulch is being replaced by gravel. Gutters and vents are having mesh
applied to stop sparks from igniting houses. Pine trees are being pruned
several metres above the ground, to prevent fires in their crowns acting as
launch pads for further blazes. Sprinkler systems are now being installed
outside homes, with plans to set them off before fire arrives. Wooden fences
that served as ignition routes are being removed. Gardening stores are
flogging firesmart-approved trees and shrubs. They are selling out of them.
Technology is buzzing to the rescue as well. Drones equipped with infrared

and night-vision cameras are going where it is too dangerous for firefighters
to tread. They track hotspots and send guidance to the smartphones of those
suppressing fires. Other drones that can cost as much as C$85,000
($62,000) are now equipped with the “dragon egg” fire suppression
technology—ping-pong-sized balls of potassium permanganate injected
with ethylene glycol and dropped from the drone to the ground where they
ignite. They are used to burn fuel in the path of a wildfire, to stop its spread.
Small towns like nearby Vernon are investing in fire vehicles that can
master any terrain and scramble up mountainsides or haul sprinkler trailers
into remote fire spots.
The cost of all this is being borne by property-owners and taxpayers. Don
Iveson, a former mayor of Edmonton who is now climate-investment
adviser for Co-operators Insurance, says those who are reluctant to pay now
may soon find they have no choice, as houses in wildfire zones are
becoming hard to insure. “This is beginning to bite,” he says. “It’s hard to
finance a house if you can’t get insurance. We’re seeing an impact on
property values.”
Last year’s fires were so bad they have prompted a return to the long-
ignored indigenous practice of controlled burns. For centuries leaders of
Canada’s First Nations performed “cultural burns” in the cool of spring to
cleanse the landscape of fire fuels and maintain a careful balance between
woods, deer, bears and birds.
“That recreates nutrients, removes pests, cleans out ticks,” says George
Lampreau, chief of the Simpcw First Nation (pronounced “Seemp”, with a
lip-pursed exhalation at the end), located in Barriere, British Columbia,
420km (260 miles) north-east of Vancouver. The burns also had the effect of
creating firebreaks in the blazes that were started by summer lightning.
They fought fire with fire.
Lessons of the tribal past
Cultural burns were outlawed in British Columbia 150 years ago.

Punishments could entail a three-month prison term. As burns come back,
so does the wisdom of indigenous elders. They work with ranchers and
loggers before fire season begins to create firebreaks. Their methods
nowadays are both ancient and modern: bulldozers scour away dried grass
and undergrowth, along with pristine, towering pine trees, clearing paths
through the forest hundreds of metres wide. Fuel canisters resembling
elongated coffee pots then drip dollops of flame along the cleared ground.
What’s left cannot fuel a fire. The corridors act both as bulwarks against
wind-swept flames and as corridors through which hoses, helicopters and
other fire-suppression equipment can be moved.
Just such a firebreak, as well as the deft work of Chu Chua Volunteer Fire
Department squads under Ron Lampreau, helped arrest fires that threatened
his community during last year’s fire season. “When we first built the
firebreak, there were complaints about clear-cutting. After the fire, the
complainers said we didn’t build the break wide enough.”
Mr Lampreau’s success has led to funding for him to train “Little Campfire
That Could” teams across the country. “We’re building big-ass firebreaks,”
said Mike Westwick, fire-information officer for Canada’s Northwest
Territories, which are also vulnerable to fire.
Annual wildfire-fighting costs in Canada are running at about C$1.2bn on

average over the past decade. Those costs are expected to double by 2040.
Some of the fires, like the two largest ones last year in the northern reaches
of Quebec and British Columbia, cannot be fought by any means. But that
is not necessarily a bad thing, according to Mike Flannigan, research chair
of wildfire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC.
“Smokey the Bear had two messages: preventing fires is good and fire is
bad. That’s not true. Fire has always just been natural. It’s neither good nor
bad.” ■
For more coverage of climate change, sign up for the Climate Issue, our
fortnightly subscriber-only newsletter, or visit our climate-change hub.
americas/2024/05/23/canadians-are-taking-dramatic-steps-to-avoid-more-ruinous-
firestorms

The vote bank in the United States
Mexico’s mighty diaspora punches

below its weight in elections
But its participation is steadily increasing
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Los Angeles
DURING MEXICO’S presidential election campaign in 2000, Vicente Fox,

the winning candidate, rode a horse through Chicago’s Little Village
neighbourhood. He wore a cowboy hat, true to his roots as a rancher in
Guanajuato state. He wasn’t asking for votes—back then, Mexico’s
diaspora had no voting rights—but he distributed phone cards and told
Chicagoans to ring their families in Mexico and tell them to vote for him.
Members of the diaspora were enfranchised in 2005. On June 2nd they will
vote in record numbers.
Yet Mexico’s mighty diaspora still punches far below its electoral weight.
Roughly 97% of the 12m émigrés born in Mexico reside in the United
States. Yet only about 1.5m Mexicans abroad have a voter’s ID card. And of
those, a paltry 227,000 have registered to vote in this year’s elections. With
Claudia Sheinbaum, the ruling Morena party’s candidate, looking well set
to succeed her mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the
diaspora’s vote is unlikely to shift the needle.
Yet their electoral power has been growing fast. In the past century Mexican
officials viewed the diaspora as traitors who had ditched their country, says
Rafael Fernández de Castro of the University of California in San Diego.
Mr Fox was the first candidate to see them as a resource, in part because of
the billions of dollars they sent home every year in remittances. The number
of registered voters abroad, while low, has risen by 25% since the last
presidential election, in 2018.
This year voters can cast a ballot online, by mail or in person at 23

consulates, a third of them in California. Candidates now routinely make
trips north of the border. Last year Ms Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez, her
chief rival, both visited Los Angeles, where Mexicans and their descendants
make up 34% of the county’s populace.
Émigrés tend to vote against the party that was in power when they left
Mexico, says Tony Payan of Rice University in Houston. Because so many
of them emigrated during the seven-decade reign of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, which finally ended in 2000 with Mr Fox’s victory, the
diaspora has tended to favour other parties. This should bode well for Ms
Sheinbaum.
But the composition of the diaspora electorate is evolving. After a long lull
in migration following the global financial crisis of 2007-09, more
Mexicans are again crossing into the United States, most commonly settling
in California. They may decide to vote against the leader of the country they
departed, and his protégée.■
Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin America, to

understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex region.
americas/2024/05/23/mexicos-mighty-diaspora-punches-below-its-weight-in-elections

Asia
Geopolitics helps reignite New Caledonia’s anti-colonial
unrest
New Caledonia, Old Tensions :: Emmanuel Macron makes an emergency dash to the troubled
Pacific island
Vietnam’s ruling communists rush to fill the country’s top

jobs
All-consuming fires :: Amid an anti-graft drive, they will struggle to restore an aura of calm
In the Philippines a decades-long conflict nears its

endgame
Bangsamoro’s moment :: Peace in Mindanao matters for regional security
India’s YouTubers take on Narendra Modi

An unruly corner :: In one corner of India’s internet, dissent survives. For now
Lai Ching-te aims to strengthen Taiwan but maintain the

status quo
Banyan :: It’s already proving tough

New Caledonia, Old Tensions
Geopolitics helps reignite New

Caledonia’s anti-colonial unrest
Emmanuel Macron makes an emergency dash to the troubled Pacific island
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Paris and Wellington
THE RECENT sharpening of international rivalries has an impact all over

the world—even in far-flung parts of the Pacific. It now seems to have
encouraged outsiders to pick at old wounds in New Caledonia. As the
French territory was swept by rioting this month, leaving six dead including
two policemen, dozens of X and Facebook posts with the hashtag
#EndFrenchColonialism alleged: “French police are murderers in New
Caledonia”. When Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, first
denounced meddling by Azerbaijan, it appeared far-fetched. Then Viginum,
an official body in Paris that monitors social-media disinformation,
confirmed it had traced the posts to Azerbaijan, a regime close to Russia
and angry at French support for neighbouring Armenia. The French pointed
to interference not just from Baku but from Moscow and Beijing.
It is a measure of how seriously France takes the troubled nickel-rich

islands, and any hint of meddling in its affairs, that Emmanuel Macron, the
French president, on May 21st unexpectedly cleared his diary and set off
from Paris for Nouméa, the capital. The territory is central to France’s
ambition to act as an Indo-Pacific power, not least since the AUKUS deal in
2021 between Australia, America and Britain scuppered a bilateral strategic
accord it had signed to supply submarines to Australia. France has been
increasingly worried about China’s influence in Pacific countries. In the
words of Claude Malhuret, a centrist French senator: “China is waiting for
New Caledonia to fall into into its hands like a ripe fruit.”
The disturbances had already prompted France to impose a state of

emergency, for at least 12 days, on May 16th. Hundreds of police and
soldiers were flown in. The airport was briefly closed and rioters’ barricades
had to be removed from the road to the capital. New Zealand and Australia
sent military planes to evacuate travellers. To outcries from civil-liberties
groups, the French temporarily banned TikTok, a Chinese-owned video app,
amid claims that rioters were using it to co-ordinate.
Presidential aides say that Mr Macron, who was initially planning to spend
just a day on the island, wants both to show solidarity with residents and to
see if he can get rival political groupings to sit down together. The latest
flare-up was sparked when the National Assembly in Paris passed a law on
May 14th expanding the electoral franchise. At present, French citizens who
arrived in New Caledonia after 1998 do not have the right to vote at
provincial elections, which legislators in Paris consider discriminatory. Mr
Darmanin says it is time to introduce “a minimum of democracy” by
unfreezing the electoral rolls and opting instead for a sliding ten-year
residence requirement.
Kanak (indigenous) political leaders, however, see the measure as an effort

to undermine their political strength. The 1990s agreement to freeze the
rolls, they say, recognised that for decades Paris had skewed the electoral
numbers by offering big financial incentives to French civil servants to
relocate to New Caledonia.
The deal was the product of a complicated history of resentment and
recrimination. France was once reviled across Oceania: for its decades of
nuclear tests on Mururoa atoll; for the bombing of the Greenpeace vessel
The Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985; and for its colonial
rule in New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The Mururoa tests stopped in
1996 and, after a protracted conflict in the 1980s, France in 1988 reached a
political settlement in New Caledonia with the pro-independence Front
National de Libération Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS).
Renewed in 1998 in an agreement known as the Nouméa Accord, the deal

promised economic “rebalancing” to stimulate the emergence of a Kanak
middle class, devolution of powers from Paris, a power-sharing local
executive and, critically, three referendums on independence, originally to
be held 15-20 years later. France shed its status as the bête noire of colonial
powers, and in 2016 Australia and New Zealand welcomed New Caledonia
and French Polynesia into the Pacific Islands Forum, membership of which
was once reserved for the decolonised.
If written into the French constitution, which requires a three-fifths majority

at a joint sitting of the lower and upper houses in Versailles, the new law on
widening the electoral franchise would supersede the voting provisions of
the Nouméa Accord. In any case, say the French, the three referendums
were held, all rejecting independence: by 56.7% in 2018, 53.3% in 2020
and 96.5% in 2021. Pro-independence politicians argue that the third
referendum was invalid because the Kanaks, around 40% of the New
Caledonia population, did not vote because they were burying their dead
from covid-19—hence the big majority. In any case, the Nouméa Accord
stipulates that after three referendums won by “no” voters, negotiations
must be held between loyalists, the FLNKS and France. Until then, “the
political organisation set up by the 1998 Agreement will remain in force.”
Before leaving Paris, officials suggested that Mr Macron might set up some
form of unspecified “commission” to try to unblock the political stalemate.
It now seems unlikely that the vote in Versailles could take place as
scheduled in late June. The presidents of both chambers have suggested it
should be delayed. Pushing it through now would indeed seem to hark back
to the bad old days of French high-handedness. In the 1980s and 1990s,
France became deft at brokering agreements between rivals in its distant
Pacific territory. But since 2021, it has tilted markedly to the loyalist side. It
needs to recover some of the lost spirit of accord. ■
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/05/23/geopolitics-helps-reignite-new-caledonias-
anti-colonial-unrest

All-consuming fires
Vietnam’s ruling communists rush

to fill the country’s top jobs
Amid an anti-graft drive, they will struggle to restore an aura of calm
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
THE MONOLITHIC façade erected by one of the world’s most secretive

ruling parties is intended to project awesome power, competence and
granite-faced consensus. Yet the cracks in the Vietnamese Communist
Party’s front of late have been only too obvious to both ordinary
Vietnamese and foreign businesses.
In March the state president, Vo Van Thuong, was fired for “violations” and
“shortcomings”—words presumed to refer to corruption. Extraordinarily,
Mr Thuong had been in place for little more than a year, after his
predecessor took the rap for a massive scam involving covid-19 testing kits.
Then in April the chairman of the National Assembly, Vuong Dinh Hue,
quit, for (also unexplained) “violations” that supposedly harmed the party,
the state and himself. And on May 16th the powerful head of the party’s
central secretariat, Truong Thi Mai, the first woman to rise so high, resigned
on similar grounds. In short order, then, incumbents of three of the land’s
five most powerful posts have been fired. Such turmoil is unprecedented. It
is assumed to be related to a fierce battle against graft being waged by the
80-year-old general secretary of the party, Nguyen Phu Truong. Mr Truong
calls this campaign his “blazing furnace”.
The downfall of these cadres hints at how corruption reaches to the very top
of the party. Deeply embarrassed, it has rushed to restore calm. On May
18th To Lam, the minister in charge of the police and public security, was
made state president. On May 20th a National Assembly stalwart, Tran
Thanh Man, was made its chairman. And a senior general, Luong Cuong,
has been moved to the central secretariat to replace Ms Mai.
The one to wonder about is Mr Lam. Head of state is not the most powerful
job (that is Mr Truong’s post). But it matters in the conduct of foreign
affairs. President Vladimir Putin of Russia was expected to fly to Hanoi
after a recent state visit to China; but the trip was cancelled for lack of a
head of state to greet him. The presidency is also a potential springboard to
the general secretaryship. The three-term Mr Truong will step down at the
party’s next five-yearly congress in 2026—if his poor health allows him to
last that long.
Mr Lam’s deputy has been made the interim police minister—until a

Politburo-level replacement is found. It is a potent job: Mr Lam was
probably behind Mr Thuong’s downfall. Should one of his own men replace
him, that will strengthen his position. But, says Le Hong Hiep of the
ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, that would bring with it risks for
the country. If he does become general secretary, Mr Lam might use the
levers of power to turn Vietnam into a police state, viewing national affairs
chiefly through the prism of security. It might even, Mr Hiep suggests,
threaten the party’s very survival, by shattering all notions of consensus.
If, by contrast, a security minister is appointed from outside Mr Lam’s

camp, then he might himself become a target for the blazing furnace. The
police force, after all, is among Vietnam’s most corrupt institutions. And Mr
Lam’s family, like those of many senior leaders, have their fingers deep in
business pies. His brother, for instance, has interests in property, energy and
transport. Should Mr Lam have to take the rap for past corruption, then
turmoil at the top would break out again.
In other words, a period of uncertainty, in which the fight against graft and
fierce jockeying for power grow increasingly conjoined, is likely to last at
least until the party congress in early 2026. (The uncertainty would tip into
crisis if Mr Truong were incapacitated before then.) Foreign businesses
riding an investment boom in Vietnam are right to be concerned, less
because the direction of economic policy might change, but rather since
political infighting could prove a distraction from policymaking and might
only aggravate tendencies towards bureaucratic foot-dragging. Mr Hiep
points to delays already in project approvals. Even as the furnace blazes,
some of the shine comes off the Vietnam story. ■
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/05/23/vietnams-ruling-communists-rush-to-fill-
the-countrys-top-jobs

Bangsamoro’s moment
In the Philippines a decades-long

conflict nears its endgame
Peace in Mindanao matters for regional security
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Cotabato and Manila
AHOD “AL HAJ MURAD” EBRAHIM spent most of his life waging war
against the Philippine government in the jungles of Mindanao, in the
country’s south. These days the septuagenarian rebel is behind a desk in
Cotabato, capital of the fledgling Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in
Muslim Mindanao (BARMM). “As revolutionaries we dreamed of having
our own government, and now we have it,” he marvels.
The guerrilla war between Muslim separatists and the Philippine

government is one of Asia’s most protracted conflicts. Its resolution is
entering a final, fraught phase. In 2014 the Philippine government signed a
peace agreement with Mr Ebrahim’s Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF), then the main rebel group, ending fighting that had killed at least
120,000 people since 1970. The accord mandated the creation of the
BARMM as an autonomous region of the Philippines. Its first parliamentary
elections are due in 2025.
Lasting calm in Bangsamoro is needed if its nearly 5m residents—and the

Philippines as a whole—are to thrive. But it also matters for the wider
region. The conflict, along with a separate struggle against communist
insurgents, has long forced the Philippines’ armed forces (AFP) to focus on
security threats from within the country. Nearly 40% of AFP brigades are in
or near Mindanao, reckons Georgi Engelbrecht of the International Crisis
Group, a think-tank with headquarters in Brussels. Ground troops have had
priority, at the expense of the navy and air force.
Stability in Mindanao would free the AFP to focus more on Chinese

maritime pressure around disputed shoals in the South China Sea, which the
current president, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, sees as his country’s
biggest challenge. Peaceful conditions in the BARMM would mean that the
AFP “can be redeployed to focus on external threats”, says David Diciano,
of the government agency overseeing the peace process. In the short term,
that may mean shifting maritime and surveillance assets from Mindanao to
the South China Sea. In the long run, it could hasten the switch to modern,
less ground-heavy armed forces.
The conflict had also been an irritant in relations with the Muslim world, in
particular neighbours such as Malaysia and Indonesia. The ceasefire has
already helped improve ties. Investors from the Gulf have begun looking
more closely at the Philippines; a free-trade deal with the United Arab
Emirates is nearing completion.
The roots of Bangsamoro’s strife stretch back centuries. The region is home
to the Moro, a Muslim people who have chafed at outside rule. Mindanao
was integrated into the newly independent Philippines after the second
world war, but in the 1960s the government of the dictator Ferdinand
Marcos (father of the current president) encouraged Catholic settlement,
spurring Islamist revolutionaries to take up arms for independence.
As the seminal vote in Bangsamoro approaches, there is much to be

celebrated, not least that the ceasefire with the MILF still holds. Life in
Bangsamoro has improved markedly as a result. The poverty rate in the
region fell by 20 percentage points between 2018 and 2023.
A new BARMM government has been created. Mr Ebrahim lists new laws
and regulations drafted and passed, including codes for the civil service,
elections, education and local governance. Japan, which helped broker the
peace agreement, has played a vital role in building up the BARMM. At a
seminar hosted in Tokyo last year by the Japan International Co-operation
Agency (JICA), Japan’s overseas-development body, officials from
Bangsamoro quizzed Japanese academics on the mechanics of voting,
lawmaking and political financing in parliamentary democracies.
A generation of civilian leaders is on the rise. The mayor of Cotabato,

Mohammad “Bruce” Matabalao, the son of a rebel fighter, is an
international-development specialist. His style is technocratic—trim grey
suit, Apple watch and frameless glasses—and he speaks of bringing citizens
free Wi-Fi and app-based public services.
This is a big change from a decade ago, when security was dire and
electricity intermittent, even in the capital. “No one was on the streets after
6pm,” notes Ochiai Naoyuki, a JICA official with long experience in the
region. Nowadays the city is bustling after dark. “We want to help build the
community in a modern way, to show that conflict is in Bangsamoro’s
past,” says Yusop “Yed” Dimaporo, an entrepreneur with several cafés in
Cotabato.
In rural MILF strongholds, former fighters seek new lives. Some have
joined the security forces: last month Mr Marcos watched the graduation of
the first class of former insurgents in the Philippine police. At Camp
Darapanan, a MILF jungle base south of Cotabato, others have taken up
farming. “Before we thought about how to win battles, now we think about
how to develop our economy,” says a former commander. His brigade
commanders now run co-operative farms.
Yet the peace process is incomplete, leading some politicians and civil-
society groups to suggest delaying elections and extending the term of the
transitional government again (the covid-19 pandemic caused the first
delay). The disarmament and reintegration of MILF fighters into civilian
life lags behind schedule: only 26,000 of 40,000 combatants have
completed the “normalisation” process. The central government wants the
final tranche disarmed before the elections, whereas the MILF wants the
government first to fulfil promises of economic aid. The MILF also looks
warily at other local clans, many of which have amassed large private
armies. “What will happen to us if we give up our arms but they don’t?”
says Akmad “Toks” Brahim, a senior MILF leader.
For those who have given up the gun, reintegration into civilian life can be
hard. “The jungle is easy: you just have to use this,” Mr Brahim quips,
miming a gun with his thumb and index finger. “But in the office you have
to use this,” he adds, tapping his head. Bangsamoro remains the poorest
region in the Philippines. The Philippine police have welcomed just a
handful of MILF men into their ranks. Cash assistance to former fighters is
meagre and vocational training is often divorced from local realities. One
foreign aid worker recalls a former fighter who was assigned to a course in
baking, given an electric oven and sent home to a village without electricity.
Large-scale clashes between the MILF and the government have ceased and
are unlikely to restart, but a different kind of violence is surging. Private
firearms are widespread. Power struggles between local clans are spilling
into shootings and armed stand-offs. Radical jihadist groups that reject the
peace deal are much weakened, but remain active and have sought to
exploit the moment: in December a group affiliated with Islamic State
bombed a church in Marawi, a city that militants took over for five months
in 2017, killing four and injuring dozens more.
No wonder, then, that the AFP does not feel confident enough to leave
Bangsamoro’s security in the hands of the police and local forces alone. “At
this stage it’s premature to leave, but the problem is that tensions outside
are also rising,” Mr Engelbrecht notes. Parallel crises in the South China
Sea and Mindanao would be the Philippines’ biggest nightmare. ■
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/05/23/in-the-philippines-a-decades-long-
conflict-nears-its-endgame

An unruly corner
India’s YouTubers take on

Narendra Modi
In one corner of India’s internet, dissent survives. For now
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
“IF IT WEREN’T for YouTube, I would be out of this profession,”

confesses Ravish Kumar, a veteran broadcaster and winner of the
prestigious Magsaysay award, regarded as Asia’s version of the Nobel
prize. Long an anchor at NDTV, one of the few sober news channels in
India, Mr Kumar left in late 2022 when it was acquired by Gautam Adani,
an Indian billionaire known for his close ties to the country’s prime
minister, Narendra Modi. These days Mr Kumar is an independent
journalist with a channel on YouTube, with over 10m subscribers and 20m
views a week. The video-sharing site has become a refuge for independent
voices, from sidelined journalists to political satirists.
Take Dhruv Rathee, a 29-year-old YouTuber, who has emerged as a leading
figure of online dissent. With around 20m subscribers, his channel is among
India’s most popular. A recent video in which he argued that India had
slipped into dictatorship was viewed 32m times in just one month. Other
seasoned journalists, formerly national-TV anchors, like Punya Prasun
Bajpai, Abhisar Sharma and Ajit Anjum, host shows with large audiences.
Adding edge on the digital front are satirists such as Neha Singh Rathore, a
folk singer, and Kunal Kamra, a comedian.
On paper India has a lively media scene with around 400 news channels and
20,000 daily news publications in over 20 languages. But press freedom in
India has been in retreat for a while, and under Mr Modi the decline has
accelerated. According to an annual index of press freedom by Reporters
without Borders, an international watchdog, India’s ranking dropped from
140th among 180 countries in 2014, the year Mr Modi was elected, to 159th
in 2024.
The ownership of prominent media groups is concentrated. Reliance

Industries, a conglomerate controlled by Mukesh Ambani—another
billionaire friend of Mr Modi—controls more than 60 media outlets in
India. As the industry has consolidated, the space for critical reporting has
shrunk.
Other social-media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp are popular, but
for those shunned by mainstream platforms, YouTube is the natural choice
(TikTok has been banned in India since 2020). YouTube has more than
460m users in India, attracting four out of five adult internet users.
India’s YouTubers owe their success to three factors. First is a mastery of

the medium. Mr Rathee’s videos are typically 20-30 minutes long,
presented as detailed explainers on a particular topic. His commentaries are
accompanied by slick animations, charts and newspaper clippings. He often
links Mr Modi to corruption scandals and controversies, something
mainstream outlets assiduously avoid. He is not afraid to be provocative. A
recent video compared Mr Modi’s oratory to Hitler’s. And he mixes
political videos with ones about travel and other topics of more general
interest. One of his more popular videos covered the sinking of the Titanic.
Second is their sophisticated use of social media. Though YouTube is their
main platform, the online dissenters have built up large followings
elsewhere. Mr Rathee has nearly 12m followers on Instagram and Facebook
combined, and Mr Kumar around 9m (see chart 1).
The final reason is simply demand. As Abhinandan Sekhri, co-founder of

Newslaundry, a media-monitoring website, points out, the dominant
Bharatiya Janata Party still wins only just over one-third of the national
vote. A big majority does not want “hyper-partisan content”. Most Indian
news channels offer very similar fare. Debates are unnuanced shouting
matches.
Independence brings its own limitations. For one, it can be a lot of work.
Mr Rathee’s success has allowed him to have a team of 15 to help him
research and produce his videos. But Mr Kumar spends almost 15 hours a
day writing, refining and shooting his videos. With scant resources, most
independent broadcasters rely on secondary sources for their information.
And despite their impressive online growth, their audiences are tiny in
comparison with traditional news channels’. Nor can they boast of
influence. Mr Kumar rues that the government has stopped noticing them
“as if we do not exist”.
Even so, it is trying to rein them in. Over the past year it has passed laws
that overhaul much of how India’s internet is governed. A new broadcast
bill is in the works to regulate cable television and includes language on
monitoring news on online platforms. Independent digital-news outlets have
formed an advocacy group, but individual YouTubers will face the
government’s wrath on their own.
The government is also trying to silence its critics at source. Google reports
that last year it received over 2,100 requests from it to remove content from
YouTube (see chart 2). In April Bolta Hindustan, a Hindi news channel, was
suspended for violating Google’s terms and conditions. The channel’s
owners claim (and Google denies) that the suspension was in response to a
government notice. That same month “National Dastak”, another news
channel, also faced disruption. A spokesperson for Google said that it has
since reinstated Bolta Hindustan and that “only one video” from National
Dastak was blocked. But creators are always worried about government
action or their channel being banned for breaking YouTube’s terms of
service.
Still, those on the fringe are plucky. In early May Shyam Rangeela, a 29-
year-old comedian who regularly posts videos mimicking Mr Modi,
announced his intention to stand for election against the prime minister in
his constituency in Varanasi. His candidacy was stalled for unclear reasons.
But he has vowed to fight on. Mr Modi, on the brink of a third term, may
find that keeping dissenters in check is harder than he thought. ■
Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India, our free
weekly newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/05/23/indias-youtubers-take-on-narendra-modi

Banyan
Lai Ching-te aims to strengthen

Taiwan but maintain the status quo
It’s already proving tough
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
THOUSANDS GATHERED in front of Taipei’s presidential office on May

20th to celebrate the inauguration of William Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s fifth
democratically elected president. Among them were 400 supporters from
his home-town, Wanli. “Everyone is very proud,” said one of them, Chen
Kuo-lung. In the past the small fishing community on Taiwan’s north coast
was known only for its tasty crabs. “Now we’ve also produced a president,”
boasted Mr Chen, adding that China has suppressed Taiwan to make it
momowuwen, “obscure and unknown”, as Wanli used to be. He hopes Mr
Lai can do for Taiwan’s profile globally what he has done for Wanli’s at
home.
Indeed, Mr Lai promised during his campaign to follow his predecessor,
Tsai Ing-wen, in trying to make the country “the world’s Taiwan, rather than
China’s Taiwan”. But Ms Tsai’s calm insistence on affirming Taiwan’s
sovereignty infuriated China’s Communist Party. Over the past eight years
China has cut off engagement with Taiwan’s government, blocked Chinese
tourism to Taiwan, stepped up military drills around the island, banned
many imports from Taiwan and poached almost half of its diplomatic allies,
so that only 12 governments still recognise Taiwan’s.
Chinese officials have called Mr Lai a troublemaking separatist. More

accurately, he is a pragmatic moderate, who hopes to strengthen Taiwan
without provoking China. Taiwan, he said in his inaugural speech, is a
democratic “pilot for peace”, adding that his government would maintain
the status quo. He did not call for any constitutional change or referendum
on Taiwan’s independence, but repeated a formula coined by Ms Tsai, that
the Republic of China (ie, Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China are
“not subordinate to one another”. He called on China to stop intimidating
Taiwan and re-engage with it.
That stance reflects Taiwanese public opinion. Polls there show 80%
support for cross-strait exchanges on the principle of reciprocity. And a
large majority favour keeping Taiwan’s status quo for now or for ever. At
the inauguration, Chang Kuan-ying, a 60-year-old dentist, who was at high
school with Mr Lai, said he was proud of him but hoped Taiwan could seek
peaceful dialogue with China “so that cross-strait tensions will not
continue”. Mr Chang’s worries are shared by many: a recent study by
National Taiwan University found that more than half of Taiwan’s people
believe war could break out in the next five years.
Mr Lai also called for Taiwan’s people to have “no delusions” about
China’s intention of annexing the island. Taiwan will bolster its defences
and ties with other democratic countries, he said. Its strategy to achieve this
includes becoming a key supplier of sensitive technologies such as AI,
drones, satellites and military equipment, in addition to the advanced
chipmaking industry that Taiwan already dominates. “Let Taiwan become
the democratic world’s MVP [most valuable player],” he said.
China was not impressed. Its foreign minister, Wang Yi, condemned Mr Lai,
saying “separatists” like him will be “nailed to a pillar of historical shame”.
And on May 23rd China announced two days of military exercises near
Taiwan. It has also focused on amplifying Mr Lai’s domestic challenges.
Chen Binhua, spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said that Mr
Lai’s views made him a “traitor to mainstream opinion within the island”.
Mr Lai was elected with only 40% popular support, and his party lost the
parliamentary majority it enjoyed throughout Ms Tsai’s tenure. In April
Taiwan’s main opposition Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, sent a
legislative delegation to China to meet senior officials. Since then it has
been calling for Taiwan’s national-security laws to be revised. Senior
officials and Taiwanese civil society are worried.
In his speech Mr Lai called for political parties to co-operate in the national
interest, while hinting at the danger of Taiwan’s pro-unification parties
working with China to subvert democracy: “All our political parties ought
to oppose annexation and protect sovereignty.” On May 17th six
parliamentarians ended up in hospital after a brawl in the chamber over the
opposition parties’ attempts to push through a reform package that would
expand parliament’s powers. On May 21st thousands of protesters gathered
outside Taiwan’s parliament to demonstrate against the opposition parties.
Mr Lai has hardly begun his new job and already the pressure is on. ■
Read more from Banyan, our columnist on Asia:

Narendra Modi ramps up the Muslim-baiting (May 16th)
In South-East Asia, the war in Gaza is roiling emotions (May 9th)
Meet the maharajas of the world’s biggest democracy (May 2nd)
Also: How the Banyan column got its name

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/05/20/lai-ching-te-aims-to-strengthen-taiwan-
but-maintain-the-status-quo

China
Even Xi Jinping is struggling to fix regional inequality
A tale of two Chinas :: Will China’s vast hinterland ever catch up with its wealthy coast?
The number of American students in China is going up

again
Study buddies :: But it pales in comparison to the number of Chinese students in America
Why Hong Kong is sending its old people to Guangdong

One way to stay spry :: Gardens and bigger rooms await

A tale of two Chinas
Even Xi Jinping is struggling to fix

regional inequality
Will China’s vast hinterland ever catch up with its wealthy coast?
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | TONGWEI, GANSU PROVINCE
TO UNDERSTAND WHAT China’s leaders care about, look at where they

travel. Earlier this month Li Qiang, the prime minister, spent three days in
Xinjiang, a poor area in western China where he ordered local authorities to
boost incomes and employment. At the same time Mr Li’s deputy, Ding
Xuexiang, went to Shenyang, a city in China’s north-eastern rustbelt. Mr
Ding called for the region’s “revitalisation”. Two weeks before all that, the
supreme leader, Xi Jinping, presided over a symposium in the city of
Chongqing where he heralded a “new chapter” in the development of
China’s western region.
China’s leaders are trying to fix a problem that has dogged the country for
decades: how to spread wealth more evenly. GDP per person in the west
and north-east, which make up most of China’s land mass and hold a third
of its population, is 70,870 yuan ($9,800) and 60,400 yuan, respectively.
Along the coast it is 124,800 yuan. China’s richest provincial-level unit,
Beijing, is four times wealthier than its poorest, Gansu (see map). And the
richest areas are pulling further ahead.
China is hardly the only country struggling with regional inequality. India’s
economy is driven by its relatively rich southern and western regions,
which leave parts of the north and east in the dust. British politicians talk of
“levelling up” neglected areas. China’s leaders, though, have unique
concerns. They worry about the security and stability of the hinterland,
which contains most of China’s natural resources. And they are embarrassed
that such gaping inequality exists in their socialist country. Mr Xi, after all,
has promised to create a more egalitarian society under the banner of
“common prosperity”.
Today’s uneven picture dates back to the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the
late 1970s. China’s former leader set up special economic zones along the
coast that were free to experiment with market activity. The policy was a
resounding success and expanded to other parts of the coast. “Let some
people and some regions get rich first,” said Deng. He promised that the
rest of China would catch up eventually.
As the years went on, the coast became prosperous by making cheap goods
and shipping them abroad. But China’s hinterland remained poor. Some
worried that the growing disparity could lead to unrest. One influential
scholar, Hu Angang, wrote that China might go the way of Yugoslavia, a
socialist country that had broken up in the early 1990s. So in 2000 China
launched the “go west” strategy to help its western provinces. In 2003 a
similar plan was unveiled to revitalise the north-east.
At the heart of the campaigns were big infrastructure projects. Since the go-
west strategy was introduced, some 40,000km of railways have been laid in
western China, more than the total length of track in Japan. Officials also
built roads, bridges and airports. Many of these efforts were tied to the Belt
and Road Initiative, an ambitious attempt to recreate the ancient Silk Road
trade route that linked China with Central Asia and Europe.
Officials have given inland areas cash as well as concrete. Whereas coastal
provinces largely rely on taxes they raise themselves, those in the west and
north-east are showered with funds from the central government. Last year
they received 5trn yuan, making up over half of the budget in some
provinces. Wealthy cities have been paired with poor inland ones and told to
assist them directly. For example, some food-processing companies in
Shanghai are pressed to buy agricultural goods from Zunyi, 1,700km to the
west.
For a time these policies helped to bridge the gap between regions. In the 15
years after the go-west plan was put in place, GDP per person in western
provinces rose from just 35% of coastal levels to 54%. In the north-east, it
rose from 62% to 71%. Abject poverty is now rare in the hinterlands. But in
the past ten years regional inequality has remained sticky—or got worse.
Today residents of western provinces earn about 57% as much as those on
the coast. North-easterners earn 48% as much. Many locals seem to have
given up on the north-east. Its population shrank by 10% between 2010 and
2020 because of low birth rates and emigration.
Provinces in the landlocked interior cannot trade their way to riches as
easily as those on the coast did. China’s poor neighbours—such as
Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—have relatively little demand for
its goods. For all the talk of reviving the Silk Road, it is still cheaper to send
products to Europe by container ship than by train. So most exporters would
rather invest in factories near ports.
The situation inside China does not help. Tongwei, a dusty county in Gansu
province, has had a high-speed railway station linking it to the coast since
2017. But the railway does not bring in new business, explains Li Hongwei,
who sells refrigerators and televisions in the county seat. Instead, he says,
young people use it to travel to find jobs in eastern cities. A study from
2020 backs him up. Researchers at the Nanjing University of Finance and
Economics and the University of Cambridge looked at 285 cities with high-
speed rail connections in China. It found that, while big cities benefited
because the railways brought in more workers, small cities saw
“insignificant” economic effects.
That is not to say that China’s spending on infrastructure has been a

complete waste. The country’s inland areas were in need of public
investment when the go-west policy was introduced. But the government
has also ignored market signals, squandering money on vanity projects.
Some 200km north-west of Tongwei, city planners have spent over a decade
constructing Lanzhou New Area. Its skyscrapers and factories are built on
bulldozed hills and supplied with water from three reservoirs dug for the
purpose. It features a replica of the Parthenon. Officials insist people are
flocking to the city. But many flats are still empty, say locals.
Put your Han up
All this worries China’s leaders, who—like over 90% of the population—
belong to the Han ethnic group. Most members of ethnic-minority groups
live in the country’s hinterland. Officials doubt their loyalty and fear they
may try to secede. Economic development, the officials reckon, will keep
them happy and bind them to Beijing. But the government’s cultural and
security policies often alienate minority groups. And even its development
efforts risk generating more anger than gratitude. For example, nomads on
the Tibetan plateau have been forcibly settled in villages. Mongols have
been turfed off northern grasslands to make way for mines. And the
government has encouraged Han citizens to migrate to the interior. That’s
good for development, but one suspected aim is to dilute minority
populations.
A clear goal is to make China’s 22,000km of land borders more secure. To

this end the government has encouraged people to settle in areas around the
borders, which are generally poor. Many of the families living in these
places were exempted from the “one-child policy” (which was rolled back
in 2016) and given cash subsidies. Border towns have been ordered to build
more industrial parks, tourist attractions and libraries.
China’s inland areas are important not just because of the risks they pose,
but because of the riches they hold. Most of the country’s rare-earth
elements are dug up in the north-east. Oil and coal is found in the west.
Parts of that region also offer strong winds, dependable sunlight and swift
rivers that can generate power. China has built the world’s biggest network
of ultra-high-voltage energy lines to transport electricity from the west to
the east.
But all this natural wealth may actually be holding inland regions back.
Some places are suffering from a kind of “resource curse”, says Andrew
Batson of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm. Their economies have
become so dependent on digging things up that too little capital and labour
have flowed to higher-value sectors, such as manufacturing or services. Part
of the problem is that the state-owned firms leading the development push
tend to focus on resource-intensive industries.
Experts suggest doing more to tempt private firms to invest in the west and
north-east: not always easy, because local governments there tend to be
more bureaucratic and corrupt than those on the coast. China could also
focus less on hard infrastructure and more on the softer sort. Government
spending per high-school student in the west is just 60% of that in the east.
Of China’s top 100 universities, only 16 are in the west. The predictable
result is less dynamism. China’s eastern provinces and cities have five times
as many high-tech firms as the hinterland.
The risk to Mr Xi and the Communist Party is that as economic growth
slows, poor areas will be hit hardest and regional inequality will rise even
faster. So the government has continued to pour resources into western and
north-eastern provinces. Two decades ago such efforts were compared to
“making water flow uphill”, according to the memoir of a former official.
That has not discouraged party leaders, says David Goodman of the
University of Sydney. “Communist parties thrive on the belief they can
change nature.” ■
Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to

understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the
world.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/05/21/even-xi-jinping-is-struggling-to-fix-
regional-inequality

Study buddies
The number of American students

in China is going up again
But it pales in comparison to the number of Chinese students in America
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | BEIJING
ON HIS VISIT to China last month Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of

state, spent time talking to students at New York University’s Shanghai
campus. Both countries, he said, needed to develop “rising generations who
know each other, who know about each other and, hopefully, who
understand each other”. For America that has become more difficult. The
number of American students studying in China fell from a high of around
15,000 in the 2011-12 school year to a low of around 300 during the covid-
19 pandemic.
The good news is that the number has been creeping back up again, to
around 800 today. And there are signs that both sides want to see it rise
higher. When China’s leader, Xi Jinping, visited San Francisco in
November he announced a plan to bring 50,000 young Americans to China
through exchange and study programmes over the next five years.
Lately there has been a flurry of activity. American institutions such as

Harvard, Princeton and Purdue are launching new initiatives or restarting
old ones in China. Jean Oi, the director of Stanford’s China programme,
says her school resumed its activities in the country with a seminar last
summer. Now it has a group of 20 students there for a quarter of the
academic year.
Much of the action is happening at the university level, but some new
ventures involve secondary-school students. They might visit China for a
conference or a tour. Such programmes, even if not that ambitious, are
important, says Rory Truex, a professor at Princeton. “At this point any
China experience is good experience for American students,” he says. And
it could always lead to more. Mr Truex notes that his own career as a China
specialist began with an eight-week summer programme while in
university.
Although things have loosened up since China ended its “zero-covid”

restrictions in late 2022, suspicion and paranoia on both sides continue to
limit engagement. Mr Blinken’s words are encouraging, but the State
Department warns against travel to China because of arbitrary law
enforcement, among other things. The department has also not reinstated
the Fulbright exchange programme with China, which Donald Trump
suspended. China’s incessant warnings about foreign spies aren’t helping.
Some Western academics with a history of researching sensitive topics are
forgoing travel to the country.
Chinese students, in contrast, are still going to America in droves. There are
nearly 300,000 of them in the country. But some are also nervous. They
have heard the stories of Chinese academics hounded by American
authorities. Cong Cao of Nottingham University says he knows Chinese
students who have declined generous scholarship offers. They “are afraid of
going to the US for fear of being locked up in ‘small black rooms’ at
American airports”.
Yet the exchanges are “even more important as things get more tense”, says
Ms Oi. American and Chinese students who find common ground today
may grow up to become leaders who keep the Sino-American rivalry in
check. America might also take a more tactical view of things. The result of
the current situation, warned Mr Truex in a recent article, is “a serious and
overlooked knowledge asymmetry” which gives China “the upper hand in
understanding its strategic rival”. ■

world.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/05/23/the-number-of-american-students-in-china-
is-going-up-again

One way to stay spry
Why Hong Kong is sending its old

people to Guangdong
Gardens and bigger rooms await
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | HONG KONG
YEE HONG HEIGHTS, just outside the city of Shenzhen, looks more like
a mountain retreat than a care home. Its 260 residents can wander through
gardens fringed with palm trees. But the classes on how to use an iPad are
perhaps more important. Some 70% of the residents come from Hong
Kong. The training allows them to talk with their children back in the city.
More and more Hong Kongers are living out their twilight years in
Guangdong, the province where Shenzhen is located. Around 89,000 people
aged 65 or over were “usually staying” in the region last year, according to
official data. That’s 32% more than a decade earlier. Hong Kong’s
government is behind the rise. In 2014 it launched a scheme that covers
living costs and cross-border transport for old people needing care who opt
to move to Guangdong. It pays for most of the Hong Kongers at Yee Hong
Heights.
All of China is ageing, but the situation in Hong Kong is particularly bad.
At 86 years, the city’s life expectancy is the second highest in the world. By
2050 one in three of its residents will be over 65. The ageing population is
putting pressure on care homes, which already have a shortage of beds. The
average wait time for a government-subsidised spot is 16 months. Without
exporting the elderly, the city’s future looks decidedly grey.
The central government backs Hong Kong’s efforts. It wants to develop the
Greater Bay Area, which encompasses Macau, Hong Kong and much of
Guangdong. Part of the plan involves deepening co-operation in care
services. Whereas space in Hong Kong is limited, Guangdong has a surplus
of housing, which older Hong Kongers might fill. If they spend their
pensions in Guangdong, it would help the economy, too.
The central government is also keen to blur the boundary between the
mainland and Hong Kong, which long operated with much autonomy. A
harsh security law passed in March is the latest sign of China’s tighter grip
on the city. Officials in Beijing are eager to show that they can provide
solutions to problems that Hong Kong cannot fix on its own.
Regardless of the government’s motivations, old people should benefit.

Care homes in Guangdong are often surrounded by nature. Many have
doctors on site. And the rooms are much bigger than those in Hong Kong’s
facilities. Care is also cheaper on the mainland. Applicants to Yee Hong
Heights are usually offered a bed within a month, says Mandy Lau Shuk-
yin, a manager there. After they arrive, she says, “they don’t want to go
back to Hong Kong.”■

world.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/05/23/why-hong-kong-is-sending-its-old-people-
to-guangdong

Middle East & Africa

The death of the president changes the power dynamic in
Iran
The battle for control of Iran :: The supreme leader’s son may be the beneficiary
A death, an illness, and an uncertain Middle East

Succession :: The region could be on the cusp of real change
The revolt against Binyamin Netanyahu

The Israel-Hamas war :: His war cabinet and generals want a new plan—and a new boss
How many people have died in Gaza?

Deaths in Gaza :: The fog of war may be thick, but some figures are solid
The ICC’s threat to arrest Binyamin Netanyahu has

shocked Israel
Israel and Hamas in the dock :: America and Israel have reacted with outrage at the implied
equivalence between Israel and Hamas
A live-streamed attempted coup in Congo shakes the region

The coup will not be televised :: The involvement of Americans in the botched putsch is
embarrassing for Washington as it tries to maintain influence
Chinese weapons are taking over in Africa

Arms for Africa :: Sales are helped by low prices and a lack of scruples

The battle for control of Iran
The death of the president changes

the power dynamic in Iran
The supreme leader’s son may be the beneficiary
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
HAD THE supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, looked a touch less
steely when delivering his eulogy, more Iranians might have believed the
demise of his president was just an accident. Even Mr Khamenei’s officials
contrasted his perfunctory manner towards the deaths of Ebrahim Raisi and
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, in a helicopter crash on
May 19th with the supreme leader’s uncontrollable sobbing after the
assassination of his top commander, Qassem Suleimani, four years ago.
The rescue efforts compounded Iranians’ suspicions. First responders in the

Red Crescent were stunned that rescue workers had to proceed on foot. Nor
could they believe the delays they faced reaching the site. Strange, too,
thought many in Iran, that the two helicopters escorting the president
returned safely to Tabriz. The initial reports spoke of fog and “a hard
landing”. But the helicopter, according to the rescue team, had exploded.
Mr Raisi’s chief of staff, who was part of the convoy, claimed that the skies
had been clear.
Mr Khamenei has every interest in downplaying this crisis. He is old and

obsessed with who will succeed him. Iran’s population of almost 90m is
exhausted by the many and ever more frequent shocks that disrupt their
country. To prove his left hand is still steady at the wheel (his right was
paralysed in an assassination attempt in the 1980s), Mr Khamenei swiftly
named a caretaker president and a new foreign minister. Shops stayed open.
The currency briefly tumbled but then recovered. “They’re showing it’s
business as usual,” says a university lecturer in Tehran.
Mr Khamenei has a history of falling out with his presidents, so conspiracy

theories of an inside job were inevitable. Even so, the thinly disguised relief
of some around him has surprised Iranians. Of all Mr Khamenei’s five
presidents, Mr Raisi was considered the most loyal. Many had tipped him to
be the next supreme leader.
For decades Mr Khamenei had groomed him as the yes-man at the heart of
his deep state. He was an obedient politician, cleric and sayyid, or
descendant of the Prophet. Critically, he had no son to set up a rival
dynasty. And his lack of charisma and nous seemed to lessen any threat to
the power of Mr Khamenei and his son, Mojtaba, who manages his father’s
powerful bayt, or household. “When you went to see [Mr Raisi], he’d talk
just about whether you’d had lunch,” says an exiled Iranian who knew him.
The Khameneis helped Mr Raisi rise through the ranks of the judiciary and
the rich clerical foundations. In 2021 they engineered the presidential
election to ensure he would win.
It did not go to plan. To Mojtaba, another contender for the succession, it

seemed as if Mr Raisi was getting ahead of himself. He called himself
ayatollah, one of the requirements for becoming supreme leader, though he
lacked the qualifications. (Mr Khamenei pointedly dropped the title in his
eulogy.) He enjoyed the backing of his father-in-law, the most powerful
cleric in eastern Iran. And he even began acquiring an international profile.
Such was his confidence, he had a public spat with Mohammed Bagher
Qalibaf, the long-standing speaker of parliament and a close relative of Mr
Khamenei with business ties to the bayt. As they say of someone rising in
stature in Persian, “He had grown a tail.”
Some who know Mojtaba say he began to worry that Mr Raisi could be
building a camp of malcontents within the establishment. Clerics muttered
against the Khameneis for plotting to turn a revolution against a monarchy
into another dynasty. Nationalist generals in the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps complained of wasting their energy enforcing the wearing of
the veil. And powerful families like the Rafsanjanis, who had lost power
struggles with Mr Khamenei but retained much of their wealth, harboured
dreams of revenge. “The winner from Raisi’s death is Mojtaba,” says a
former presidential adviser.
Mr Raisi’s departure makes it easier to nudge things in Mojtaba’s favour.

On May 21st Mr Khamenei reshuffled the Assembly of Experts, the body
that selects the supreme leader where Mr Raisi had played a prominent role.
In line with the constitution, the regime has also set the date for a new
presidential election on June 28th. Once again, Mr Khamenei will look to
the Guardian Council, the body that vets electoral candidates, to weed out
undesirables. Possible candidates include the new caretaker president,
Mohammad Mokhber, a loyal bureaucrat who has managed the bayt’s huge
business empires, or Saeed Jalili, a hardline conservative and former
presidential hopeful. If their economic mismanagement and zealotry,
respectively, reduce the turnout, so much the better. For Mr Khamenei, the
elected institutions should be subject to the theocratic power of his wilayat
al-faqih, or rule of the jurist.
Harder to secure will be any popular mandate for Mojtaba’s assumption of

power. Such is the disaffection with the regime that many Iranians cheered
their president’s demise. “Exit pursued by bear,” a wag with a knowledge of
Shakespeare posted online, hoping wild animals would find him before the
emergency teams did.
Perhaps the most obvious trajectory for Iran now is that a new president is
installed who is loyal to the military hardliners who underwrite the regime,
and that Mojtaba Khamenei succeeds his father as the supreme leader.
Without popular support or a powerful internal constituency of his own,
Mojtaba would be beholden to those hardliners. Isolated from global
markets, the regime and the economy it controls would continue to decay.
Mounting popular dissatisfaction and internal struggles for power could
make Iran more repressive and belligerent, with alarming consequences for
its citizens and neighbours.
There is, however, another path. Perhaps Mojtaba could set Iran’s
modernisation in motion. The 55-year-old scion, says a former official who
knows him well, is captivated by the model of Muhammad bin Salman, the
Saudi crown prince. Like him, he might relax Iran’s religious rules, release
political prisoners and seek a new relationship with America and perhaps
even Israel. Were this their reward, he says, most Iranians would accept his
succession.
It is an alluring idea, but, unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran has experienced over a
century of struggle against dictatorship. As the shah, an earlier secular
modernising autocrat, learnt to his peril in 1979, absolute rule of a country
as complex as Iran can be any supreme leader’s undoing. ■
Sign up to the Middle East Dispatch, a weekly newsletter that keeps you in
the loop on a fascinating, complex and consequential part of the world.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/middle-east-
and-africa/2024/05/21/the-death-of-the-president-changes-the-power-dynamic-in-iran

Succession
A death, an illness, and an

uncertain Middle East
The region could be on the cusp of real change
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | DUBAI
SINCE MARCH 2023, when Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore
diplomatic ties, the two longtime foes have tried to put on a show of
friendship. The routine has not been convincing. Then, for a moment this
month, they seemed to take the unity act to another level. The Iranian
president vanished, and the Saudi king fell ill. It was a reminder that both
countries are on the brink of profound transition.
Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash on May 19th plunged Iran into
political uncertainty. But anyone hoping it will become less belligerent in
the region is likely to be disappointed. Mr Raisi was not the main architect
of Iran’s foreign policy. Regardless of who replaces him as president, Iran
will continue to support militias across the Middle East and to seek closer
ties with Russia and China. Nor is its nuclear stand-off with the West likely
to ease.
Still, his death will make ripples abroad. Mr Raisi was not alone on the
helicopter: Hossein Amirabdollahian, the foreign minister, was also killed
in the crash. Arab officials were surprisingly fond of him, a diplomat who
spoke their language and knew the region. He had close ties with Hizbullah
and other Iran-backed groups.
European diplomats, by contrast, found his lectures insufferable. They are

happier with his interim replacement, Ali Bagheri-Kani, a conservative who
is close to Iran’s supreme leader but remains open to serious discussions
with his Western counterparts. He has been Iran’s lead negotiator in failed
attempts to revive the multinational nuclear deal.
Whether they will have anything to discuss is another matter. Days before
Mr Raisi’s death, America and Iran held indirect talks in Oman (Mr
Bagheri-Kani represented his side). They hoped to calm tensions in the
region after a series of tit-for-tat attacks between Israel and Iran last month.
That dialogue is probably now suspended. Iran is unlikely to do much
diplomacy until after its presidential election, scheduled for June 28th. By
the time a new Iranian president takes office and forms a cabinet, America
will be close to its own vote in November. There will be little time for any
serious diplomacy.
Instead, America will be focused on striking an agreement elsewhere. On

the same day that Mr Raisi’s helicopter crashed, Saudi Arabia announced
that King Salman, its 88-year-old monarch, was being treated for
pneumonia at his palace in Jeddah. It was his second health scare in a
month, after a brief stint in the hospital in April. The royal court has been
tight-lipped about his condition. But it was serious enough that Muhammad
bin Salman, the crown prince, postponed a planned visit to Japan and stayed
close to home.
Unlike Iran’s case, there are no questions about succession in Saudi Arabia:
Prince Muhammad will ascend the throne after his father dies. He has been
the kingdom’s de facto ruler since he became heir apparent in 2017. For
years, Saudi-watchers have wondered if his father held a veto over a few
pet issues: normalisation with Israel, for example, or legalising alcohol in
the kingdom. The ambiguity probably suited Prince Muhammad, since it
allowed him to move slowly on controversial decisions. But it will end once
he becomes monarch, and that is not far off: even if King Salman recovers
from his lung infection, he probably does not have long to live.
On May 19th Prince Muhammad met Jake Sullivan, America’s national

security adviser, to talk about a defence treaty. It is meant to be part of a
broader deal that would also see Saudi Arabia normalise relations with
Israel. But the Saudis say they cannot take such a step unless Israel commits
to create a Palestinian state—something Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime
minister, will never accept.
With a three-way deal thus blocked, the Saudis are instead pushing for a
bilateral agreement with America. They would agree to curtail ties with
China, in exchange for the defence treaty and American help with a nuclear
programme. They would also promise to normalise ties with Israel once a
new Israeli government makes that possible. Perhaps that is not far off,
since Mr Netanyahu is embattled and now may soon be indicted for war
crimes.
American officials, though, say this is a non-starter, in part because a

defence treaty is unlikely to get through the Senate if it is not linked to
Saudi-Israeli normalisation. That leaves the future Saudi king with a
difficult choice. He could recognise Israel without any concessions from Mr
Netanyahu, which would secure the defence pact but at the risk of both
domestic and regional anger. Or he could postpone the whole deal
indefinitely.
All this makes for an odd moment. Mr Raisi was not the most powerful man
in the Islamic Republic, and King Salman is arguably not the most powerful
in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Yet the death of the former and the illness
of the latter both herald a moment of real change in the region. ■
and-africa/2024/05/23/a-death-an-illness-and-an-uncertain-middle-east

The Israel-Hamas war
The revolt against Binyamin

Netanyahu
His war cabinet and generals want a new plan—and a new boss
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Jerusalem
FOR MONTHS generals and ministers in Israel have been warning from
behind the scenes that the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime
minister, lacks a coherent strategy for the war in Gaza and its aftermath.
Now at last these bitter arguments are breaking into the open. Israel’s war
cabinet and security establishment are drawing ever closer to an open revolt
against Mr Netanyahu, and are clear they want a sharp change of direction
or new government. The shift comes as the prime minister faces the threat
of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Meanwhile Jake Sullivan, America’s national security adviser, landed in
Israel on May 19th. He had just been in Saudi Arabia, where he was
finalising a blockbuster security deal with the kingdom that includes
proposals for remaking how Palestinians are ruled.
The pivot against Mr Netanyahu began not with the politicians but with the
Israel Defence Forces (IDF). In off-the-record briefings generals have
accused him of blocking any day-after plans for Gaza and “squandering”
Israel’s gains in the war. “It’s the prime minister’s job to set strategy,” says
a general. “But when there is no strategy, it is the army’s job to warn of the
dangers.” Because Mr Netanyahu has resisted the creation of an alternative
force or authority to govern Gaza, there has been a vacuum which the
remnants of Hamas have re-emerged to fill.
Besides the generals, two key figures have flipped from being reluctant
partners of Mr Netanytahu, as ministers in his war cabinet, into open
opponents. On May 15th Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, who is also the
subject of a request from the ICC, stated in public that his plans to create a
new governing entity in Gaza, with heavy Palestinian representation, “had
not been discussed and worse, no alternative has been proposed instead”.
Three days later, Benny Gantz, Mr Netanyahu’s most powerful rival, said
that “crucial decisions have not been made,” and accused a “small
minority” of “taking control of the bridge of the Israeli ship and steering it
to the rocks”. He said he would quit the war cabinet if there was no change
of course by June 8th.
Mr Netanyahu has responded dismissively, accusing Mr Gantz of

advocating policies which would mean “an end to the war and Israel’s
defeat”. Two big questions now loom. The first is whether the government
will fall. Polls suggest Mr Gantz’s party would win an election if one were
held now, making him Israel’s probable next prime minister.
Were his party to quit the government, the residual Netanyahu coalition
would still hold a majority in the current Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Most
Israelis favour an early election, but a further five defectors from the
coalition would be needed to denude it of a majority. Alternatively, the
government could be brought down by the exit of the more extreme parties
on whose support it relies. So far there is no clear sign that the government
is about to lose its parliamentary majority, but that could change quickly.
If Mr Netanyahu bends to the demands of his more centrist critics, or is
toppled, the second question is what a new policy on Gaza would look like.
The Biden administration proposes that a “revitalised” Palestinian Authority
(PA) should take over in Gaza. But building up its capacity will take years.
Mr Gantz is sceptical about the PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, and
prefers the putative new authority in Gaza to be led by a cross-section of
Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Palestinians. Mr Gallant seems to prefer
giving control to local elements in Gaza, aligned perhaps with Mr Abbas’s
Fatah movement.
The likes of Mr Gantz and Mr Gallant agree that Israel should not run
Gaza’s affairs; all implicitly think, however, that the IDF should retain a
strong security presence in the strip. There is less agreement on the end-
game that follows any de-escalation of the war. The Biden administration
wants a pathway to an eventual Palestinian state. Mr Gallant and Mr Gantz
are reluctant to endorse this, not least because it would be unpopular in
Israel.
This is the maelstrom in which Mr Sullivan has flown. America is keen to

secure a ceasefire and hostage swap. This, it hopes, can lead to a wider
American-sponsored regional deal including “normalisation” between Israel
and the Saudis. If, on the other hand, Mr Netanyahu remains in power and
continues with his approach of endless war in Gaza and threatening a full-
scale invasion of Rafah, the last redoubt of Hamas, America may hold up
deliveries of munitions. That risks worsening Israel’s case at the
International Court of Justice.
Ultimately the decision to end Mr Netanyahu’s government and its failed

policy in Gaza lies with Israelis. They face a choice between permanent
military occupation of Gaza; letting Hamas retain offensive capabilities; or
relinquishing partial control to an outside authority that includes
Palestinians but excludes Hamas. Mr Netanyahu has been put on notice by
his ministers and generals that he cannot ignore this reality for much
longer.■
and-africa/2024/05/19/the-revolt-against-binyamin-netanyahu

Deaths in Gaza
How many people have died in

Gaza?
The fog of war may be thick, but some figures are solid
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
FROM THE very start of Israel’s war against Hamas, the death toll in Gaza
has been disputed. On May 8th the controversy over the numbers, which
media organisations including The Economist use, intensified after the UN
appeared to revise down its death toll for women and children. The UN
switched from using the overall figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of
Health (MoH)—which is controlled by Hamas—to using a count that
included only people who had been identified. Some saw this as proof that
the MoH death toll is bogus. In reality the count has inevitably become less
reliable as the war has dragged on. The list of identifiable dead is legitimate
and marks the lower estimate for the lives lost in the war—about 25,000 at
the very least, of whom around 14,000 are women, children or old people.
At the war’s start the MoH death toll was probably fairly accurate. At this
time, the numbers were based solely on deaths registered at hospitals and
morgues. In past Gaza conflicts, the figures produced by MoH matched
those independently calculated by both the UN and Israel.
On October 26th, the MoH released the names, IDs and ages of everyone it
claimed had died in the war. It put the death toll at around 7,000, 68% of
them women, children under 18, or people older than 60. Two academic
articles published last year in the Lancet, a medical journal, analysed the
patterns of IDs and ages and the implied death tolls of different age groups,
and concluded that the figure seemed right.
But as the fighting has continued, the quality of the overall MoH death
count has dipped. Most hospitals can no longer collect data. In mid-
November, the MoH began to add deaths from media reports to the hospital
death count (see chart). This is a routine way to estimate deaths during
wars, but it is fallible. The media may focus on recording deaths of
innocents. Some deaths can be missed, where bodies are buried under
rubble, say. Others may be double-counted. Commentators, particularly
pro-Israeli ones, have been quick to point out inconsistencies in the MoH
figures. Sometimes the supposed cumulative male death toll drops from one
day to the next.
The MoH continues periodically to publish credible named lists of the dead.
These include only deaths registered through the hospital system, and more
recently via an online form for reporting dead relatives. The UN, the World
Health Organisation and Human Rights Watch, a monitor, say they are
trustworthy. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) produced an analysis, seen by
The Economist, of the named list published on January 6th. The IDF
confirmed that most—83% of the 14,121—were real people, whose name
and ID matched official records. The rest were either missing an ID number,
had an invalid number, or the name and ID did not match records. Of those
identified, only 1,407 were verified as Hamas militants or members.
An analysis of the list including deaths up to March 30th by Mike Spagat of

Royal Holloway University and Every Casualty Counts, a charity, found
that 84% of the 21,703 entries appeared complete, with a valid ID. Our
analysis of the latest list of deaths until April 30th found that 84% of the
24,686 IDs were valid.
In other words, while not all entries on the named list are complete, there is
good reason to believe those on it are dead. That would mean, as of April
30th, that at least 24,686 Palestinians had died during the war—of whom at
least 13,816 were women, children or old people—around 70% of the total
that the MoH says have died. Even Israel has indicated it expects the true
death toll to be higher than the MoH list would imply. The IDF claims to
have killed 14,000 militants, but the list contains fewer than 10,000
working-age men. In March the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said
that up to 32,500 people may have been killed in Gaza, and that up to 60%
of them were civilians. Whatever the true figure, the loss of life has been
immense. ■
and-africa/2024/05/23/how-many-people-have-died-in-gaza

Israel and Hamas in the dock
The ICC’s threat to arrest

Binyamin Netanyahu has shocked
Israel
America and Israel have reacted with outrage at the implied equivalence
between Israel and Hamas
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Jerusalem
IT HAD BEEN been expected in Israel for weeks, but was still a shock
when it came. On May 20th the prosecutor for the International Criminal
Court (ICC), Karim Khan, announced that he was requesting arrest warrants
for Binyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s prime minister and
defence minister, as well as the leaders of Hamas, the Islamists who
launched the deadly attack on Israel on October 7th last year, on charges of
war crimes.
The prospect of their leaders appearing in the dock along with the
perpetrators of a massacre against them is unthinkable for Israelis. But it is
a sign of the horror with which many have come to view their government’s
devastating war in Gaza. Mr Khan, a British lawyer, issued detailed and
lengthy accusations against both sides. He opened with the allegations
against the Hamas chiefs, Yahya Sinwar (pictured right), Mohammed Deif
and Ismail Haniyeh, detailing the murder, sexual assault and kidnapping of
Israeli citizens. But the charges against the Israeli ministers were no less
pointed.
Mr Khan noted that Israel has the right to protect its citizens, but he accused
it of having pursued “starvation as a method of war” in Gaza. Israel has
denied this charge, pointing to the aid convoys that have been allowed
through. But this has mainly happened in the past couple of months and
under international pressure. There is ample evidence that Israel has closed
routes into Gaza and disrupted the supply of aid. Earlier in the war Israeli
ministers also made clear in public their intention to impose a “total siege”
on Gaza. Mr Khan has chosen to focus on these war tactics, rather than the
bombing of civilian areas. He has also chosen, at least for now, to target
Israel’s political leaders rather than its generals. Nor did the charge sheet
include the allegation of genocide. Mr Khan may be sticking to crimes that
are easier to prove.
The judges in the ICC’s pre-trial chamber must now decide whether there is
enough evidence to issue the arrest warrants. Even if they do, Israel has not
ratified the Rome statute setting up the ICC, so is under no legal obligation
to hand over its leaders. Mr Sinwar and Mr Deif are hiding in Gaza and Mr
Haniyeh rarely, if ever, travels to a country which is a party to the treaty. A
trial in The Hague is unlikely.
But it is still devastating; far more so for Israel, a country with a

democratically elected government and aspirations to be part of the Western
world, than for Hamas, a terrorist group. Some Western leaders have
already criticised the ICC for implying an equivalence between the leaders
of Hamas and Israel. However, if the prosecutor’s request is granted, they
would be legally bound to arrest Mr Netanyahu if he travels to their
countries.
America, which like Israel is not a signatory, has a different dilemma. For
months Joe Biden, the president, has both publicly and privately beseeched
Mr Netanyahu to allow more aid through and to go to greater lengths to
avoid civilian casualties. In recent weeks he has delayed at least one
shipment of arms that could be used in Israel’s offensive on the city of
Rafah. The ICC prosecutor’s claims are in line with the American
criticisms, but Mr Biden nonetheless called them “outrageous”.
America has a mixed relationship with the court. Donald Trump, Mr

Biden’s predecessor (and possible successor), issued sanctions against the
ICC for investigating allegations of war crimes committed by American
troops in Afghanistan. Mr Biden lifted those sanctions and worked with the
court on issuing an arrest warrant last year for Vladimir Putin, the president
of Russia. America’s response this time, however, is shaped by the fact that
Israel is one of its closest allies.
At home, Mr Netanyahu got rare support from his political foes. “It is not
possible to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu, Sinwar and Deif,” said
Yair Lapid, an opposition leader who has told Mr Netanyahu to resign.
“There is no such comparison. We cannot accept it and it is unforgivable.”
Benny Gantz, another rival of the prime minister also rallied round him.
But this will almost certainly be short-lived. Israeli security officials have
been quietly warning politicians that withholding humanitarian aid early in
the war would come back to haunt Israel. “It should have been clear they
would have to walk back the bombastic statements on besieging Gaza,” said
one army officer. “So why do it in the first place?” ■
and-africa/2024/05/20/the-iccs-threat-to-arrest-binyamin-netanyahu-has-shocked-
israel

The coup will not be televised
A live-streamed attempted coup in

Congo shakes the region
The involvement of Americans in the botched putsch is embarrassing for
Washington as it tries to maintain influence
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IN THE VERY early hours of May 19th around 50 armed and camouflaged
men screeched through Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. First they attacked the
home of Vital Kamerhe, a government minister. After a fruitless 40-minute
firefight with his guards, the attackers moved on to the Palais de la Nation,
the official residence of Félix Tshisekedi, the president.
There, the supposed leader of the coup had ample time to live-stream his
rebellion on Facebook. “We can’t put up with Tshisekedi and Kamerhe any
longer,” declared Christian Malanga, an eccentric Congolese politician and
former army officer, as his men held up flags of the Republic of Zaire, as
Congo was named until 1997 when Mobutu Sese Seko, a kleptocrat, was
deposed by Rwanda-backed rebels.
By dawn this Keystone coup was neutralised and Mr Malanga was dead,
according to the army. The security forces said they arrested dozens of
people, including three Americans and a British man. Two of the Americans
were Mr Malanga’s son, Marcel, and his business associate, Benjamin
Zalman-Polun, a convicted marijuana dealer. The president, who has been
in office since 2019 and was elected to a second term in chaotic elections in
December, was unharmed. But the attack, coming amid an escalating
rebellion in the east of the country once again backed by Congo’s neighbour
Rwanda, has many on edge.
“This was an ambiguous, strange, bizarre but also telling affair,” says Jason
Stearns, a former head of the UN Security Council’s investigation team in
Congo. “Why would you start at Kamerhe’s house and then move to the
palace? Who seriously thinks that with 50 people, poorly trained and
outfitted, you could overthrow a government?”
Many Congolese have asked the same questions. Some suspect domestic
politics were at play and point to the bad blood between Mr Kamerhe and
Mr Tshisekedi. The two men teamed up before a rigged election in 2018 put
them both in power. But the president moved against his former ally after
taking office. In 2020 Mr Kamerhe was jailed on charges of embezzling
almost $50m, though he was later acquitted on appeal. Mr Kamerhe, who
has his own presidential ambitions, is now angling to win a leadership
election in the national assembly. That would possibly give him powers to
block Mr Tshisekedi’s stated aim of amending the constitution, a move
critics say could pave the way for the president to extend his time in office
beyond his current term limits.
Mr Tshisekedi’s supporters insist that this was a genuine attempt to

assassinate the president. Ruling party officials say the coup must have been
backed by America. They say Mr Malanga had the tacit support of Rwanda,
which is accused by the UN of backing the rebel M23 group in eastern
Congo. They also suspect the involvement of Kenya, whose relations with
Congo have been strained since its troops were booted out of the country
for failing to defeat M23.
The American ambassador, Lucy Tamlyn, has promised Congo’s authorities

the “fullest” co-operation as they investigate and “hold accountable any US
citizen involved in criminal acts”. Even so, the participation of three
Americans in this fiasco is embarrassing for Joe Biden’s administration,
which is trying to maintain influence in Congo, given the country’s vast
reserves of critical minerals, such as cobalt, which is used in batteries for
electric vehicles.
America is currently considering a request by Congo’s government to ease

its sanctions on Dan Gertler, an Israeli businessman. America’s Treasury
Department has accused him of using his close friendship with Joseph
Kabila, Congo’s previous president, to amass a fortune through corrupt
mining and oil deals. It reckons these cost Congo more than $1.3bn in
revenues between 2010 and 2012 alone. Under the proposed deal, Mr
Gertler, who has denied any wrongdoing, would have to sell his assets in
Congo.
American diplomats fret that loss of their influence would open the door for
Russia, which has sealed alliances with several of the military juntas that
have seized power in west Africa and the Sahel in recent years. Polling last
year by the Congo Research Group at New York University and local think-
tanks found that Congolese viewed Russia more favourably than any other
foreign country. Almost 61% of respondents had a “good opinion” of
Russia, compared with 35% for America. ■
and-africa/2024/05/23/a-live-streamed-attempted-coup-in-congo-shakes-the-region

Arms for Africa
Chinese weapons are taking over in

Africa
Sales are helped by low prices and a lack of scruples
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
WHEN SOLDIERS from China have made forays onto African battlefields,
they have done so cautiously as UN peacekeepers. The sales teams that
market their weapons overseas are far more gung-ho and have been fanning
out across the region—armed with brochures and freebies—in search of
new customers.
They are signing deals with an increasingly diverse list of clients, from
historic friends to would-be buddies, keen to be kitted out with Chinese
weaponry. Among the weapons China has delivered are warships to
Djibouti and Mauritania and drones to Nigeria and Congo, according to a
database maintained by the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI), a think-tank. It found that no fewer than 21 countries in
sub-Saharan Africa took major deliveries of Chinese arms between 2019
and 2023. Perhaps seven in ten African armies now field armoured vehicles
that are, like so many other products, made in China, reckons Janes, a
publishing company specialising in defence.
These sales are not just a source of revenue for China’s arms industry, as the
country is expanding and modernising its own armed forces to challenge
America and its allies. They are also helping to extend China’s influence in
Africa, which is fast becoming a playing field for geopolitical rivalry
between America, China, Russia and a host of medium-sized powers, such
as Turkey. Some Western defence officials are concerned that China intends
to establish a naval base on Africa’s Atlantic coast. “There is a larger
architecture here,” says Paul Nantulya of the Africa Centre for Strategic
Studies, a think-tank funded by America’s defence department. “Weapons
sales fit into China wanting to be seen as a preferred partner.”
The package that makes Chinese weaponry competitive is straightforward.

Beijing sells arms at cut prices. When bundled with flexible financing
arrangements, military co-operation and training for officers, it is an
attractive proposition for armies with budgets big or small. It helps, too, that
China is a major investor more than willing to throw in weapons as
sweeteners to other deals or to improve diplomatic and trade relations. It
recently donated $28m-worth of kit to Zimbabwe, for example. “The
Chinese are in a position where they can say that they will deliver you a
whole new army and throw a railroad in,” says Siemon Wezeman of SIPRI.
This combination has made China the largest arms-supplier to sub-Saharan
Africa, dethroning Russia, whose arms exports to the region between 2019-
2023 were 44% lower than in the previous four years. “China has been
looking at new markets, particularly where Russia is on the retreat,” says
Alex Vines of Chatham House, a think-tank in London. Russia’s sales will
probably fall further still as Western sanctions bite (see chart).
It is not just the Russians who are feeling the heat. France used to be the
dominant supplier of weapons in French-speaking west Africa, where
governments are fighting back against jihadists. But China, the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and Turkey are hawking their deadly wares. Senegal, Ivory
Coast and Benin have all recently paraded Chinese armoured vehicles.
One reason is that China and the UAE have fewer qualms about how clients
intend to use their weapons, or whether they have clean human-rights
records. General Christopher Musa, the chief of Nigeria’s defence staff, has
complained that Western suppliers are often unwilling to sell Nigeria the kit
it wants to fight Boko Haram, a jihadist group known for enslaving
schoolgirls. So it has turned to China, which has delivered almost 300
armoured vehicles since 2020. including VT-4 tanks as well as drones and
fighters.
Western officials are worried. General Michael Langley, who heads

America’s Africa Command, warned Congress last year that delays in
approving American arms sales were pushing west African governments to
turn to China, which is offering not just weapons. Xi Jinping, China’s
leader, has pledged more joint exercises and involvement in security
problems. Officers from 50 countries in Africa take military-education
courses offered by China. Among graduates of these courses are eight
defence ministers and ten defence chiefs. (Nigeria’s General Musa is a
graduate of both America’s Army War College and China’s National
Defence University.)
Rwanda has adopted Chinese training procedures and some troops have
been even taught to respond to their own drill sergeants in Mandarin. “One,
two,” they shout, to the delight of Chinese media. “Left, right.”
It may not all be straightforward. China has got itself into sticky situations
before. Its relations with Eritrea deteriorated in the 1990s, after it emerged
that China was also arming its adversary, Ethiopia. Modern weapons may
also make existing conflicts worse. China’s drone sales to Congo have
increased tensions with Rwanda, its neighbour, which has since been
accused of firing a Chinese-made missile at a UN surveillance drone.
Africa’s defence chiefs ought to take note: the missile missed. ■
and-africa/2024/05/23/chinese-weapons-are-taking-over-in-africa

Europe
Le Pen’s hard right looks set to crush Macron’s centrists
European Parliament elections :: The vote in France spells trouble for the president
As the Euro-elections loom, Giorgia Meloni guards her

right flank
Pragmatist or pasionaria? :: Matteo Salvini looks like being Italy’s big loser
Ukraine’s desperate struggle to defend Kharkiv

A city under threat :: It is holding off Russia’s attack — for now
How the hard right both reflects and creates prejudice

Who hates whom? :: It’s one way to get votes
The fight over meat-free meat pits Europe’s traditionalists

against foodie innovators
Charlemagne :: The steaks are high

European Parliament elections
Le Pen’s hard right looks set to

crush Macron’s centrists
The vote in France spells trouble for the president
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | FLIXECOURT
MARKET DAY, and more people are queuing to buy lottery tickets at the
Café du Centre than freshly dug carrots and spinach at the farm stall.
“People here watch their budgets,” says a fresh-produce seller: “They prefer
to shop at the discount store.” Once, this red-brick northern town of some
3,000 people thrived on the back of a big jute-weaving and textiles factory,
opened in 1857. Today, Flixecourt has a poverty rate of 19%, nearly five
points above the national average. Squeezed finances and disillusion are
pushing voters to the extremes. On a recent weekend, ahead of elections on
June 9th to the European Parliament, the only two candidates whose posters
were visible in the town were Jordan Bardella and Marion Maréchal, rivals
from the nationalist hard right.
If France is a test case for whether Europe’s political centre can hold against
the forces of nationalism and populism, Flixecourt captures the dynamics
shaping that choice. For over half a century voters there have entrusted their
town hall to the Communist Party. These days Flixecourt is under strain, but
not deserted. Traffic on its main street rumbles past two boulangeries and a
Turkish kebab joint. Net curtains hang neatly in the windows of its rows of
little terraced houses. The town boasts an indoor synthetic ice rink, charging
€2 ($2.17) a session, and organised a recent rally for baton-twirling
majorettes. A huge modern logistics warehouse by the motorway just
outside the town has jobs to fill. “Unemployment is less of a problem than it
used to be,” says Patrick Gaillard, the town’s Communist mayor. “Those
who really want a job can find one.”
Yet next month, says the mayor, the town is likely to vote overwhelmingly
for the populist right. Already, at the presidential election in 2022, Marine
Le Pen of the National Rally (RN) topped first-round voting in Flixecourt;
65% of voters backed her in the run-off round against Emmanuel Macron,
the centrist president. Last year his government spent over €22bn to cap
energy prices and limit inflation. Locals, however, think that Mr Macron
“doesn’t look after their daily concerns”, says the mayor. The vote, he says,
is a chance to protest by backing the far right: “Voters are never
disappointed, because the party has never been in power.”
National polls suggest the French will vote in line with Flixecourt. Mr
Bardella, the 28-year-old head of Ms Le Pen’s party list, enjoys a poll
average of a remarkable 33%, twice that of Mr Macron’s candidate, Valérie
Hayer. An official from the president’s alliance, Ensemble, says it would do
well if it scores in the high teens, a miserably low ambition. Ms Hayer has
tried to campaign on matters European, exposing the nationalists’
inconsistencies. The clean-shaven and unflappable Mr Bardella, though, is
turning the vote into a referendum on an unpopular president, whom he
accuses of “immigrationism”, weak policing and disdain. He plunders the
populist playbook. There is “no corner” of the country, claims Mr Bardella,
“where the French are sheltered from violence”. Mr Macron, he says,
“weakens everything he touches”.
Flixecourt suggests, though, that this vote may be about more than protest.
Mr Bardella has become a household name, embodying the RN’s
detoxification. This week it said it would no longer sit in the European
Parliament with its German counterpart, the Alternative for Germany, now
considered too extreme. An astonishing 43% of 18-24-year-olds say they
will vote for Mr Bardella in June. His TikTok videos, in which he eats hot-
dogs or takes selfies, regularly get over 1m views. “He looks like a nice
guy,” says a Flixecourt voter. “People here are no longer ashamed of saying
that they will vote for Bardella or Le Pen,” says another.
In the longer run, the normalisation of the RN poses serious questions about
the political centre’s ability to resist its ascent. Mr Macron cannot run for a
third consecutive term, in 2027, and no clear successor is in sight. In the
short run, a crushing result for Ensemble will put a fresh spring in the
opposition’s step. This goes for Ms Le Pen’s RN, but also for the Socialists,
whose candidate, Raphaël Glucksmann, is hard on Mr Macron’s heels from
the left.
Mr Macron will try to rise above a humiliating result. Although Mr Bardella

will doubtless call for fresh legislative elections, there is no constitutional
reason for the president to oblige. His party would lose seats if he dissolved
the National Assembly, and Ms Le Pen’s would be set to gain them. Nor
should a poor European result necessarily affect the running of national
affairs. In January Mr Macron appointed a young new prime minister,
Gabriel Attal, who has an agenda of reforms planned for the rest of the year.
Yet Mr Macron’s fundamental problem remains: he presides over a minority

government. It has periodically been obliged to make use of a special
constitutional provision, known as Article 49.3, to force through its
legislation, including raising the pension age last year. Each time, however,
the use of this expedient puts the government’s survival on the line, since
opposition parties can then table a no-confidence motion. Since 2022, when
Mr Macron was re-elected, his government has survived 28 such motions,
thanks to a fragmented opposition. But in one of them, over the pension
reform, the margin was only nine votes, in a chamber of 577.
Mr Macron does not have many good options. He may hope to continue
muddling through, and risk more no-confidence votes if the government
uses Article 49.3, for instance to pass its next budget. Were he to lose one,
he might re-appoint Mr Attal anyway, which he is constitutionally entitled
to do, and hope for the best. Or Mr Macron may try again to forge a
coalition with the centre-right Republicans, though the party has resisted
such attempts in the past. In short, if the European result is as bad as the
polls suggest, Mr Macron may seek to brush it off as a mid-term bump. But
the new political dynamics would put his minority government under
unprecedented pressure. ■
To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café Europa, our
weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/22/le-pens-hard-right-looks-set-to-crush-
macrons-centrists

Pragmatist or pasionaria?
As the Euro-elections loom, Giorgia

Meloni guards her right flank
Matteo Salvini looks like being Italy’s big loser
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | ROME
JUST WHEN her European counterparts felt they had her taped as a
realistic, if staunch, conservative, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni,
popped up on May 19th at a rally in Madrid organised by the Spanish hard-
right party Vox, seemingly happy in the company of such hardliners as
Marine Le Pen from France and Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier
Milei. Since coming into office, Ms Meloni has largely eschewed
Eurosceptic talk, aware that Italy stands to receive almost €200bn ($217bn)
from the EU’s pandemic-recovery fund. But speaking by video-link to the
crowd in Madrid, she lambasted the European Commission as “a
bureaucratic giant that aspires to regulate every aspect of our lives while
being unable to offer a clear geopolitical vision”. She promised a different
Europe, but left fuzzy the outlines of her nativist nirvana.
The European elections will be the most important test so far of Italy’s
right-wing coalition. But the opposition, split between the centre-left
Democratic Party (PD), the populist Five Star Movement and various
centrist groups, presents no great challenge. Polls have given her Brothers
of Italy (FdI) party around 27% of the vote, a percentage point more than at
the general election in September 2022. That puts the Brothers about seven
and 12 points ahead of the PD and Five Stars respectively.
Vox’s rally offered Ms Meloni a useful opportunity to guard her other flank.
Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, in a somewhat less than fraternal
coalition with the FdI, has adopted an increasingly radical stance as he
searches for a way to stem the flow of support from his party to Ms
Meloni’s. The approach of the European elections has cast a pitiless light on
the League’s decline. Last time, in 2019, it took 34% of the ballot. Recent
polls see it scraping just 8% next month. Italian politics are notoriously
volatile, but even by that standard this is remarkable.
The personification of Mr Salvini’s tilt to the right is Roberto Vannacci, a

serving army general who last year self-published a book so overtly racist
and homophobic that Ms Meloni’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, a
member of the Brothers, dismissed its contents as “ravings” (Ms Meloni
herself made no comment). General Vannacci is standing for the League in
all five of Italy’s Euro-constituencies (this is perfectly legal) and has a fair
chance of being elected in at least one.
But neither the general’s views nor his high media profile have improved
the fortunes of the embattled League. In some recent polls, Forza Italia, the
party created by the late Silvio Berlusconi, has overtaken it. Widely
expected to crumble into insignificance after its founder’s death last year,
Forza Italia, which espouses liberal conservatism, has experienced a modest
revival under its new leader, Antonio Tajani, a former president of the
European Parliament and Italy’s current foreign minister.
By contrast, Mr Salvini has presided over the loss of more than three-
quarters of his party’s support. It is a tribute to his bombastic charisma that
he has managed to keep his job until now. But if the vote next month
confirms that the League has fallen to third place in the coalition, it could
finally be up for grabs.
All of which has a bearing on the future direction of Europe’s nationalist

right. It may be growing in strength. But it is divided. Vox belongs to the
European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European
Parliament, as do Ms Meloni’s Brothers. Ms Le Pen’s National Rally is in
the rival Identity and Democracy (ID) group along with the Alternative for
Germany, so her attendance at an ECR jamboree hinted at a possible
rapprochement.
Not the least of the obstacles to an accord has been the fact that the
representatives of Italy’s nationalist right are split between the two groups
and are keen to maintain their separate identities. In the outgoing
parliament, the League is the biggest member party of the ID, providing 23
of its 59 MEPs. This time round, it can expect to get around seven. The
Brothers, with perhaps as many as 24 seats, will become altogether more
attractive allies. ■
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/23/as-the-euro-elections-loom-giorgia-
meloni-guards-her-right-flank

A city under threat
Ukraine’s desperate struggle to

defend Kharkiv
It is holding off Russia’s attack — for now
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Near Vovchansk
ANNA SITS in silence for most of the car journey from Kyiv to Kharkiv,
her face contorted with worry. “The Russians come closer, closer, closer,
but he’s just not listening to me,” she says. Anna made a point of visiting
her 75-year-old father regularly, checking in on him at the simple brick
house he built 45 years ago near Kharkiv’s glimmering Pechenihy reservoir,
east of the city and close to the Russian border. This time, with the din of
artillery in the background, she had come to persuade him to leave—to
escape a Russian advance already enveloping Vovchansk, 25km to the
north. After a hug and a few tears, the initial conversation does not go well.
“The TV and radio say it can’t get worse,” insists Petro. “The Russians are
losing. Sanctions, losses. Reinforcements are coming our way. They can’t
come further.”
Ten days after the start on May 10th of Russia’s offensive in Kharkiv
province, the pace of the advance has slowed. For now, Ukraine is holding
the Russians roughly halfway through Vovchansk—a town, just 5km from
the border, that is now being turned to ashes—and at positions roughly 9km
inside Ukraine further west, near Lyptsi. With an estimated 48,000 troops
ready, Russia does not have the forces for a major attack on Kharkiv city,
Ukraine’s second biggest. But local military leaders insist that the situation
remains precarious, and could change quickly. Russian columns were halted
only after several experienced brigades were redeployed and came to the
rescue, one says; Vladimir Putin will “surely” try his luck by opening a new
attack elsewhere in the region.
A Russian column is already forming further north in Sudzha, on the other

side of the border from Sumy, a regional capital north-west of Kharkiv.
Ukraine’s army is also bracing for another strike just east of Vovchansk,
towards the village of Bilyi Kolodiaz. Battles have also reactivated near
Kupiansk, a railway hub, with Ukraine in effect losing control of the nearby
village of Berestove on May 17th.
It is still too early to be sure about the eventual aims of the Russian
operation. Also on May 17th Mr Putin declared that his only intention was
to create a buffer zone between Ukraine and the border city of Belgorod,
insisting there was “no plan” to threaten Kharkiv itself. But this possibly
reflects evolving battleground realities rather than intentions. Retrieved
military plans, details of which were shared with The Economist, suggest
the Russians were probing to see if they could partially encircle Kharkiv
and put pressure on the Ukrainian formations to the east of the Pechenihy
reservoir. The operation was supposedly planned for May 15th-16th but was
brought forward by nearly a week for unknown reasons.
According to the plans, the Russians had identified two axes of attack on
either side of the reservoir. The push on the western axis was intended, over
72 hours, to bring Russian troops to within artillery range of Kharkiv city at
the village of Borshchova. They were stopped by a rapidly redeployed
grouping from the elite 92nd Brigade, which pushed them back a full 10km
from their initial goal. But up until that moment, the story had been about
Ukraine’s poor defensive fortifications, about how the 125th Brigade that
should have repelled the attack in fact fled from positions while under
pressure, and about serious Ukrainian losses.
On the Vovchansk axis, further east, the Russian plan had been to fight past
Anna’s father’s house on the reservoir, right down to the town of Pechenihy.
The Russians initially made quick work of this operation, sweeping through
an area that should have been prepared with minefields and serious
engineering fortifications but wasn’t. “They were just simply allowed to
walk through,” complains Denys Yaroslavsky, a special-forces officer
whose social media posts on May 12th alerted the outside world to the
possibility of a wider reverse. “We were watching them cut through the
border fence on screens at about 11pm on May 9th, and I said to my men to
watch how they would blow themselves up on mines. There were no
explosions; they simply carried on.”
Many of the soldiers in Kharkiv are angry that Russia was able to advance
so far so quickly. Some of them criticise delays in Western aid, which they
believe encouraged Russian aggression and weakened Ukrainian defences.
Others suspect that incompetence, or even treachery, played a more
significant role. Conspiracy theories to the effect that politicians in Kyiv or
Washington may be selling Kharkiv down the river ahead of an ugly peace
deal are also circulating. Official Ukrainian narratives that present a rosy
picture are not helping to calm nerves. “[President Volodymyr] Zelensky is
being kept in a warm bath,” complains Mr Yaroslavsky. “We think the
president should tune into the situation on the ground and not ape Putin, a
man whose life revolves around the papers his aides bring him.” A
government official, who asked to remain anonymous, suggests that Mr
Zelensky had already sensed he might not be receiving the full truth.
“That’s what he yells at his generals, at least.”
Oleksandr Husarov, the head of the Pechenigi municipality, says optimistic

news reports about Ukrainian strength have themselves created different
problems in the effort to evacuate people from towns near Vovchansk.
When the Russians seized much of the area at the start of the war in 2022,
the occupation was not as harsh as in other areas of Ukraine. Some
mistakenly believe the occupation will be mild if it happens this time round
too, says Mr Husarov. Even the most stubborn can be “shaken out” of that
belief when they see the “burned earth” left behind by Russian glide bombs
and drones, he adds. But Anna’s father remains unconvinced. Petro insists
he was lucky to be home when a Russian Shahed drone smashed into it in
early March; that way, he could put out the fire. He won’t be preparing an
emergency suitcase, he tells his increasingly exasperated daughter, who is
packing up mementoes of her childhood—documents, photographs, an
antique floral table service—into carrier bags. “All of Ukraine is
exploding,” he says. “Besides, where would I go?” ■
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/20/ukraines-desperate-struggle-to-defend-
kharkiv

Who hates whom?
How the hard right both reflects

and creates prejudice
It’s one way to get votes
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | AMSTERDAM
GEERT WILDERS is the most powerful politician in the Netherlands. His

party came first in the general election last November and will be the
biggest in the new government. He is also a convicted hate-monger. Dutch
courts found him guilty of “insulting a population group” in a speech in
2014. Mr Wilders’s offence was to lead an audience in a chant that called
for kicking out “Moroccans”—people of Moroccan descent, who form the
Netherlands’ most stigmatised ethnic group.
This seems bizarre. The Netherlands and Morocco are far apart and have no
history of conflict. But there is a large Moroccan-Dutch minority stemming
from guest-worker programmes launched in the 1960s. As Muslims they are
targets of religious prejudice, and their young men commit more crimes
than other Muslim groups. So since Dutch politics turned rightwards in the
2000s, race-baiters have singled them out. In 2016 a report by the EU’s
Agency for Fundamental Rights, found the Netherlands had the most
discrimination against North Africans of all countries surveyed.
In other European countries, different minorities get targeted as the

Moroccan-Dutch are in the Netherlands. Every society has ethnic
hierarchies; someone always ends up at the bottom. Europe’s shift towards
the hard right has mainly hit predictable outsiders: Muslims and immigrants
from Africa and the Middle East. But each country has its peculiarities.
Depending on local circumstances, nationalist politicians pick various
minorities to demonise.
In some countries stigmatised groups are legacies of geography and war,

especially amid the shifting borders of eastern Europe. Romanian
nationalists long campaigned against the country’s ethnic Hungarians. (In
recent years anti-Hungarian sentiment has ebbed, forcing AUR, a new hard-
right party, to look for other enemies.) Bulgaria’s Revival party is nominally
anti-Turkish, though it spends more time attacking gay people. In the
former Yugoslavia the antagonisms of war in the 1990s persist: Croatian
and Kosovar nationalists fulminate against Serbs; North Macedonians look
askance at ethnic Albanians.
Similarly, in the Baltics the most resented group are the ethnic Russians left
over from Soviet times. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated those
tensions. Studies last year by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German think-
tank, found Russian-speakers felt Estonian- and Latvian-speakers were
treating them worse. (Estonian- and Latvian-speakers agreed.) The same is
true in Finland, where natives lump Russian immigrants with those from
Arab and African countries among the least favoured ethnicities. “It’s
mostly a suspicion of them not being loyal,” says Emma Nortio of the
University of Helsinki, who studies national-identity issues.
In Poland, with its history of domination by the Russian Empire and the
Soviet Union, Russians have fallen since 2022 to being the least popular
national group, according to the country’s Public Opinion Research Centre.
They now rank below Europe’s traditionally most-stigmatised ethnicity: the
Roma. Ukrainians, historically disliked in Poland, were welcomed as
refugees from Russian tanks.
Being white and Christian helps: refugees from North Africa and the
Middle East tend to be stigmatised. But the nature of the crises they flee
makes a difference. In Germany, surveys in 2017 found that Syrian refugees
were seen as warmer and more competent than North Africans, as they were
viewed as genuine victims. In the 2000s radical Islam stirred anxieties. But
as terrorism in Europe has ebbed, the focus has changed to gang crime. In
Sweden that has led to more negative attention for Kurdish Swedes, less
associated with Islamism but prominent in drug networks. The religious
dimension remains crucial; in France antipathy towards North Africans is
markedly higher than towards black Africans, according to the latest report
by the country’s anti-discrimination monitor. Antisemitism tends to rise
when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heats up. And in its most recent reports
the authority has found a dramatic rise in racism against Chinese and other
east Asians, linked to the covid-19 pandemic.
Current events can also reduce prejudice. In the 1990s Italians stigmatised
Albanian immigrants. But as Albania has grown more stable and less poor,
they have slipped off the list of feared minorities.
Psychologists often explain group antipathy as a function of perceived

threats. “Narratives embedded around fear are the ones that get traction,”
says Stefania Paolini of Durham University. Fear of economic competition
can explain why poorer citizens tend to dislike immigrants more. (Though
wealthy people may dislike foreign rich folks too: Swiss-Germans resent
better-educated German immigrants.) Populists playing on fears of
demographic decline pick on Africans. To profit from fear of terrorism or
cultural change they attack Muslims. When elite conspiracies are the target,
antisemitism comes into play.
And when all else fails, they go after the Roma. Robert Fico, the Slovakian
prime minister who survived an assassination attempt on May 15th, began
his political career as a left-wing populist and is currently a right-wing one,
but his Roma-bashing has remained constant. Portugal long lacked a big
far-right party, explains Alexandre Afonso of Leiden University: it had little
immigration, and those who did come, such as Brazilians, were not viewed
unfavourably. So when the hard-right Chega party launched in 2019 it
targeted the small, impoverished Roma population. Chega is now polling at
18%. ■
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/23/how-the-hard-right-both-reflects-and-
creates-prejudice

Charlemagne
The fight over meat-free meat pits

Europe’s traditionalists against
foodie innovators
The steaks are high
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
WOULD A steak au poivre by any other name taste as juicy? What if it

featured only imitation “meat”, cleverly recombined vegetable protein
disguised as beef? To traditionalists in France—starting with farmers who
rear the soon-to-be steaks—the answer is a resounding non. A decree passed
in February and due to come into force on May 26th spells out that all
meaty terms, whether it be an entrecôte, a jambon or even a saucisse, are to
be reserved for cuts of dead animals and nothing else. Those who fret that
Europe may be consumed by war and economic torpor will be heartened to
see its leaders can still find the time to keep dastardly vegan burgers off the
menu. But not everyone is happy. A budding industry of startups
increasingly able to produce cutting-edge faux flesh in Petri dishes is
wondering whether this is yet another case of Europe regulating first, thus
innovating never. Can Charlemagne chew his way through this meaty
debate?
Whereas Americans indulge in soy milk or vegan yogurt, Europeans have to

make do with “soya drink” and something ominously called “oatgurt”.
Imposing this odd nomenclature on non-dairy substitutes mattered little in
the 1980s, when the European Union first caved in to lobbying by farmers
dealing in actual mammaries. (Peanut “butter” and ice “cream” were among
the few exceptions tolerated.) These days supermarket shelves are stuffed
not just with oatgurt but with vegan burger patties and “no-fish fingers”.
Having convinced politicians Champagne must hail from the eponymous
French region and Parmesan cheese only from Parma, Big Farm has tried to
extend its grip even to generic agricultural terms. A bid to outlaw vegetarian
sausages—or at least calling them sausages—made headway at EU level in
2020 but narrowly failed. Now individual countries have taken over the
task. France revived a previously shelved ban on meaty terms, which it
unveiled (not uncoincidentally) at the height of farmers’ protests earlier this
year. A few months earlier Italy earmarked “salami” for pork products;
Poland has considered a similar move.
For now the vegan burgers are safe. France’s highest court in April stayed
the decree until the EU’s top court can rule on whether banning foods in
one European country but not another is in line with the bloc’s single-
market rules. (The court is not expected to opine until next year; it takes
longer for a European judge to make a decision than it does for a farmer to
rear a cow from birth to abattoir.) Lobbyists are already rehearsing their
arguments for when the ruling is made and the debate reopened. The
farmers plead that a steak is a steak and something made from chickpeas or
grown in a lab is not. Plenty of other words are available to veggie-food
producers; one lobby group suggests vegans can refer to their burgers as
“roundies”, a term that is sure not to catch on. Peddling a squishy substance
made of vegetables or grown in a lab as “meat” confuses consumers into
thinking the two have similar nutritional qualities. Tosh, say the tofu-eaters.
Consumers understand full well a no-meat burger is not made of animal
flesh: it is exactly what they are looking for. Anything that helps reduce the
carbon hoofprint of livestock, which accounts for at least one-tenth of
global emissions, can only be good.
As always in Europe, the divide is in part a result of geography. Northern

Europeans in Denmark or the Netherlands, who seem to consume food
mainly as sustenance, are not much fussed about what gets called meat.
Look to southern Europe, where cooking is seen as essential to nourish the
soul as well as the body, and the farmers’ case is more likely to be heeded.
This is particularly true when the substitute “meat” is made not of
vegetables but the product of advanced industrial processes that mimic
nature, which Italy boasted of being the first in the world to ban last year (a
decision that itself may not be in line with EU rules). Fighting the culinary
future is a time-tested campaign strategy: hard-right culture warriors in
Poland and Italy have fabricated scare stories of Eurocrats in Brussels
plotting to force citizens to eat insects and worms to protect the planet.
(This is not true. Probably.)
Ceci n’est pas une saucisse
The debate is about more than just a name. The science needed to make a
passable meat-like product from cells was pioneered by Europeans, notably
the Dutch, almost 30 years ago. Europe has more firms researching the
“cultivation” of substitute meat and seafood than America or anywhere else:
a rare case of leadership in a cutting-edge field. But for now the fruit—or
meat—of that research is edible only overseas. Singapore authorised cell-
grown “chicken” for sale to the public in 2020, America in 2023. Earlier
this year Israel was the first country to authorise a lab-made “beef”.
Australia, Britain and Switzerland are reviewing applications, including for
products made by EU firms. But within the bloc, where such novel foods
need the kind of regulatory approval reserved for pills and vaccines, no
authorisation has yet been sought. “Cultivated meat was born in Europe but
the concern is the rewards will be reaped in the rest of the world,” says Seth
Roberts of the Good Food Institute, a pro-vegan campaign group.
Even if the food-safety authorities find no fault with such culinary
innovation, politicians stand ready to step in. France, Italy, Romania and
nine other countries recently demanded that cultivated foods should be the
subject of a “renewed and broad debate”, Euro-speak for discussing
something for so long that it is, in effect, banned. For what would happen to
farmers should they face such competition, they asked? Without real
livestock and their grazing habits, what would become of the continent’s
grasslands? The “strategic autonomy” of Europe apparently depends on
consumers being told what they can and cannot eat. Scientists aren’t
allowed to make fake cows, but politicians still have no trouble coming up
with real bullshit. ■
Read more from Charlemagne, our columnist on European politics:

The EU’s best-laid plans for expansion are clashing with reality (May 16th)
National days offer a study into the inner psyche of Europeans (May 9th)
Europeans lack visceral attachment to the EU. Does it matter? (May 2nd)
Also: How the Charlemagne column got its name

https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/23/the-fight-over-meat-free-meat-pits-
europes-traditionalists-against-foodie-innovators

Britain
Could the Labour Party blow its big opportunity?
Paranoid android :: Sir Keir Starmer’s party is terrified of letting victory slip through its
fingers
What’s behind Britain’s earthworm cataclysm?

Wiggly wormageddon :: Their numbers may have declined by a third
“A day of shame” for the British state

Blood, debt and tears :: The biggest scandal in the history of the NHS is at last properly
acknowledged
The sorry story of children in care in England

A system under strain :: The state is struggling to perform one of its most basic functions
When is a non-alcoholic drink alcohol-free?

Alcoblocks :: A quirk of regulation is holding back growth in the British market
Rishi Sunak’s snap election is odd and illogical—much like

him
Bagehot :: For a man who says he has a plan, the prime minister acts in an impulsive way
The world’s first museum of homelessness

A permanent home :: A new venue in London dedicated to an overlooked group

Paranoid android
Could the Labour Party blow its

big opportunity?
Sir Keir Starmer’s party is terrified of letting victory slip through its fingers
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
BRITAIN WILL hold a general election on July 4th. Announcing the news
in Downing Street on May 22nd, his expression plaintive and his jacket
soaked with rain, Rishi Sunak had the air of a man who knew what the
result would be. Since he took office in October 2022, the prime minister
has tried anything and everything to reverse the Conservative Party’s ailing
poll numbers—diligent promises to reduce inflation and health-care waiting
lists; bellicose swagger about deporting migrants; an offer of stability, then
change, then stability again. To no avail.
The Labour Party now has an average poll lead of 23 percentage points, a
deficit that no governing party has successfully overcome in an election
campaign. The central scenario of The Economist’s prediction model, which
draws from polls and the results in individual constituencies in elections
dating back to 1959, is that Labour will win 381 seats to the Tories’ 192
(see chart 1), a thumping majority of 112 MPs. The model gives less than a
1% chance that the Conservatives would win a majority of seats if an
election were held tomorrow. A separate analysis by The Economist, based
on 100,000 responses to surveys conducted by WeThink, a polling firm,
shows that 96% of voters have become less likely to support the Tories than
they were at the election in 2019. Polling by Ipsos finds that voters think it
is “time for a change” by a margin of 73% to 18%.
Yet in the Labour Party the mood is less hubris, more terror of letting
victory slip through its fingers. At a gathering of Labour thinkers on May
11th David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, rattled off a list of recent
elections where parties that had enjoyed strong poll leads ended up
suffering defeat: Hillary Clinton in America in 2016, the Australian Labor
Party in 2019 and the Christian Democrats in Germany in 2021. “The
election this year is still one that we can lose,” he said. Many Labour
candidates report much greater cynicism on the doorstep than polls suggest.
What, if anything, could derail Labour’s chances of finally winning power
again?
First, the economy. Mr Sunak called the election after declaring victory in
the battle against inflation, a fight that has dominated his time in office;
official data show that inflation hit 2.3% in April. That followed news of
strong GDP growth in the first quarter of the year, at 0.6%. For many
Britons it “might still be hard”, acknowledged Mr Sunak, but his hope is
that voters will believe that things are on the up.
The share of Britons who think the economy will be better in 12 months’
time is at its highest level since September 2021, at net -21%, although this
is still pessimistic by long-term standards. Although Labour enjoys a rare
lead over the Tories among voters as the best party on the economy, at 8%,
this advantage is much narrower than its overall polling lead.
Next, closer scrutiny of Labour’s programme. Despite its hefty poll lead,
newspapers and broadcasters still often treat the party as a curiosity. The
campaign will bring greater focus on a policy agenda laced with
contradictions and fragile assumptions—that it can transform public
services without spending more money, or that it can meaningfully tighten
labour laws without businesses feeling a pinch. The leadership will get
more attention, too: Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is more popular
than Mr Sunak but much less than Sir Tony Blair was at this point in the
1997 race. Voters are still unfamiliar with many of Labour’s front-bench
team. It is not too late to make a bad first impression.
Then there is the possibility of a manifesto surprise. Here the contest is

asymmetric. Labour, with everything to lose, will produce a fiscally rigid
manifesto. The perils of risk-taking were made clear in 2017, when Theresa
May’s plan to fund social care for the elderly through housing wealth
contributed to her unexpectedly poor showing. The Tories, in contrast, will
be able to go for broke. In 2007 George Osborne, then the shadow
chancellor, upended Gordon Brown’s premiership with a surprise promise
to cut inheritance tax; Mr Sunak will be tempted to repeat the trick, if only
to shore up the Tory vote in wealthier seats vulnerable to the Liberal
Democrats.
A further unknown is the impact of smaller parties. The goal of Reform UK,
a right-wing insurgent party that emerged from the former Brexit Party,
seems less to be winning seats than inflicting enough damage on the
Conservative Party to shift it in a more radical direction in future. An
average of polls puts Reform UK on 11%, with its support drawn far more
from those who voted Tory in 2019 than from Labour’s ranks. But Labour
is still worried that this split could reverse. “If the government is deemed to
get a grip on immigration over the summer, support peeling away to
Reform could be curbed,” Ellie Reeves, the party’s deputy campaign co-
ordinator, told activists before the election was called.
On the left, too, Labour’s electoral coalition is more volatile than it might
first appear. In local elections earlier this month, smaller parties secured
23% of the vote, with the Green Party making significant inroads in Bristol
and Hastings. It is highly likely that many of these voters will switch to
Labour at the general election, but not guaranteed. Some in the party are
privately alarmed at the intensity of hostility towards Sir Keir in some
Muslim communities over the war in Gaza, which they fear will deny the
party a handful of seats.
There is also the potential impact of online activity. Much of the anger over
Gaza is on TikTok. A faked audio clip circulated recently that purported to
show Sir Keir abusing his staff. Mr Lammy has said that “dark forces from
hostile states like Russia and Iran may seek to interfere.”
None of these factors is likely to change Mr Sunak’s prospects materially,

however. Even if Labour’s poll lead narrows to 15 points, our model still
gives the Tories only a one-in-ten chance of victory (rather than 1-in-100).
But the spectre of throwing it all away means that Labour’s election
campaign will be marked by deep caution. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty,
our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/05/23/could-the-labour-party-blow-its-big-
opportunity

Wiggly wormageddon
What’s behind Britain’s

earthworm cataclysm?
Their numbers may have declined by a third
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
CHARLES DARWIN liked an earthworm. What earthworms felt about

Charles Darwin is less clear. For 40 years he studied them, thought about
them and experimented on them. He exhaled on them to see if they disliked
his breath (they didn’t) and held a poker to them to see if they minded the
heat (they generally did). He wafted perfume and then paraffin in front of
them, and he played them a whistle, a bassoon and the piano. They seemed
nonplussed. He fed them mint (which they didn’t care for), cabbage (which
they did) and other worms, halved (catholic in their tastes, they enjoyed
their diet of worms).
Darwin recorded all this somewhat apologetically. To many people, he
wrote, the subject of worms may “appear an insignificant one”. The modern
world has tended to agree. Unlike “On the Origin of Species”, his book
“The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms” is no
longer a noted bestseller.
Interest in the earthworm is muted. Few scientists specialise in them; they

do not attract large amounts of funding. On Google Scholar a search for C.
elegans, a nematode worm that is a scientific celebrity, yields 1.3m results;
L. terrestris gets only a tenth as many. If people did pay them more
attention, they might be more exercised by the fact that they seem to be in
alarming decline. A recent paper, which collated historic data from previous
studies, suggests that earthworm populations in Britain are falling by 1.6-
2.1% a year, leading to a total fall of around a third in 25 years. It is, says
Dr Ailidh Barnes, its lead author, “concerning”.
Worms matter. Soil should be riddled with them: 1m3 of healthy soil can
contain over 1km of earthworm tunnels. Soil looks static but is constantly,
slowly on the move. Darwin observed that if a layer of cinders or small
stones were put on a field then, within a few years, worms—like magicians
taking away a tablecloth—would have moved the soil from below and left it
on top of the otherwise undisturbed stones.
The volume of earth moved by worms is stupendous. Stand in a field, look

at its mud: what you are looking at will, says Steven Fonte, an associate
professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Colorado State
University, have all “passed through an earthworm gut in the not-so-distant
past”. Worms give earth structure, aerate it and improve crop growth. A
paper by Professor Fonte estimated that without earthworm action, global
grain production would be 6.5% lower, equivalent to “the annual grain
production of Russia”.
Worms are rarely applauded for all this, partly because they have an image
problem. They are subterranean, timid and, admits Professor Fonte, “not
charismatic”. They have suffered from several centuries of negative press:
look up “worms” in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and you will be
offered entries in the “with vilest w. to dwell” vein. It is typical that the
worm’s decline was noticed only because ornithologists wanted to
understand the decline of (more photogenic) animals such as the song
thrush, which prey on them.
What is causing worms to decline is not clear. Fertilisers, ploughing and

pesticides are obvious culprits but soil biodiversity is “woefully
understudied”, says Professor Fonte. More research is needed—the Soil
Association, a charity, has launched a citizen-science project that aims to
create a “worm map” of Britain. So is more appreciation. People often
underestimate how small but “continually recurrent” events can cause great
change. Few creatures, wrote Darwin, “have played so important a part in
the history of the world”. Little by little, worms have transformed the
environment around them. Little by little, they are disappearing. ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/05/22/whats-behind-britains-earthworm-
cataclysm

Blood, debt and tears
“A day of shame” for the British

state
The biggest scandal in the history of the NHS is at last properly
acknowledged
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
DEREK MARTINDALE was 23 in 1985, when he was told that he had

HIV and 12 months to live. He survived but his younger brother Richard,
who also contracted the virus, did not. After Richard died in 1990 Mr
Martindale asked to see his brother’s body one last time but was refused.
Such was the fear of AIDS that hospital staff had already stitched closed his
brother’s nose, mouth and eyes.
Mr Martindale is one of more than 30,000 Britons who were infected with
HIV and hepatitis C through treatment in the National Health Service
(NHS) in the 1970s and 1980s; around 3,000 of them have died to date. Mr
Martindale was also the first victim to testify at the public inquiry into the
infected-blood scandal, which was set up after decades of delays in 2017.
And on May 20th this year he was in a conference centre in central London
to hear Sir Brian Langstaff, the chair of that inquiry, present his final report.
Over 2,500 devastating pages Sir Brian explains how “a catalogue of

failures” led to such “a calamity”. Those in authority—doctors, blood-
services staff and the government—did not put patient safety first, he
concludes. To top it off they then covered it up, compounding the victims’
suffering. “This is a day of shame for the British state,” Rishi Sunak, the
prime minister, told MPs later that day. He offered an unequivocal apology
to the victims, many of whom had died “without seeing anyone held to
account”.
Most of the detail has been known for decades. Blood used in routine
transfusions and blood products given by the NHS turned out to be rife with
infection. Most notorious was Factor 8, a clotting agent extracted from the
plasma of thousands of donors that could be self-administered by people
with haemophilia, a rare genetic condition in which the body is unable to
form blood clots. Doctors looked upon it as a revolutionary treatment; for
many, it turned out to be a death sentence.
That could have been largely avoided, the report concludes. The risks of
hepatitis infection from blood products were known before the NHS was
created in 1948. The NHS “knew, or should have known” the risks of HIV
infection by the end of 1982 yet failed to limit them, in part because
advisers failed to calculate them correctly. Complacency and convenience
took precedence over caution; thousands continued to receive contaminated
blood long after the dangers were understood. Victims were then not told
about their diagnoses for years after they were tested; some unknowingly
infected their partners. Perhaps thousands who were infected with hepatitis
C from a transfusion remain undiagnosed. “The disaster was no accident,”
said Sir Brian.
Other choices could have been made—and were by some. In Sheffield

Children’s Hospital, doctors foresaw the risk of using plasma products
made by pooling blood from large numbers of foreign donors (about half of
the Factor 8 that Britain imported came from America, where drugs
companies actively recruited gay men because their plasma was “rich in
hepatitis B antibodies” and sourced plasma from paid prisoners and drug
addicts). Instead they reverted to giving patients cryoprecipitate, a more
rudimentary but safer product made of plasma taken from a single donor.
Other institutions decided to follow a fatefully different path. At Lord

Mayor Treloar’s College in Hampshire, a specialist school for disabled
children with its own haemophilia centre, doctors continued to give the
children Factor 8. Often they regarded the pupils as “objects for research”;
some students and their parents were never told they had been infected with
HIV. It is likely that around 70% of 122 pupils with haemophilia at the
school died as a result of infected-blood products. Treloar’s was a
“microcosm” of what went wrong in Britain, the report concludes.
Sir Brian’s narrative, though meticulous, neglects to acknowledge that this

was an international scandal. Many other countries also failed to assess the
risks of blood and blood products. Around 4,000 people, many of them with
haemophilia, were infected with HIV in France, for example, compared
with around 1,250 people with haemophilia in Britain. Parts of Britain
pioneered some solutions. Scotland was the first country in the world to be
self-sufficient in heat-treated Factor 8, which eliminated the risk of AIDS
(though not hepatitis); England did not follow.
Whereas Sir Brian piles most of the blame on successive British

governments, perhaps because of the especially centralised nature of the
British state and the NHS, other countries have pointed the finger
elsewhere. In America civil litigation has focused on the pharmaceutical
companies. France placed the blame largely on individual doctors. In
Britain, because it took so long to set up an inquiry, most of the culpable
doctors are now dead.
But even if other countries experienced infected-blood failures of their own,

there are ways in which Britain was particularly egregious. The decisions
taken in the 1980s were broadly “in line with other Western countries”,
notes Anne-Maree Farrell, an expert in medical jurisprudence who
contributed to the report. But in the way that Britain responded to the
scandal, by covering it up, “that’s where the UK becomes an outlier”, she
says.
As other countries were conducting public inquiries into what had

happened, the British government was burying the evidence. Files in the
Department of Health were deliberately destroyed and denials issued;
patients’ medical reports went missing. Victims were stigmatised and given
little support. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister at the time,
said that people had been given the “best treatment available”, a line that
was used repeatedly thereafter and that Sir Brian describes in his report as
inappropriate, unacceptable and wrong. “To save face and to save expense,
there has been a hiding of much of the truth,” he writes.
For this reason the report that was published on May 20th was always
primarily going to be about acknowledging the victims. The inquiry drew
upon more than 4,000 of their statements. Throughout its seven-year span
Sir Brian, a former judge, repeatedly called the process a “collective
endeavour”; the second volume of his report is dedicated entirely to the
personal experiences of the afflicted. His second recommendation was that
there should be a permanent memorial to the victims.
His first was that the victims receive proper compensation. On May 21st the
government released long-awaited details of a scheme that Sir Brian had
first recommended should be established last year. Unusually, it seeks to
compensate victims on grounds such as the social stigma of infection, as
well as awarding damages for financial loss and the costs of care that would
normally be recognised in a court of law. Speed is a priority, so the
compensation scheme will not typically assess claimants individually.
These features will probably make the costs extremely large. Those who
suffered multiple infections can expect to receive at least £2m ($2.5m)
each, with smaller payments being made to affected family members and
carers. The total costs of compensation are expected to reach £10bn.
What will happen to prevent a repeat of this injustice is less clear. Britain
has seen a succession of scandals and cover-ups in recent years, from the
Hillsborough stadium disaster to the wrongful convictions of over 900 Post
Office subpostmasters (the inquiry into which continued this week).
Recommendations to change the defensive culture of public bodies like the
NHS and the civil service often follow, though as Sir Brian himself
acknowledges, they are extremely hard to implement. In the report he points
to specific mechanisms that might help, from existing proposals to improve
patient safety in the NHS to the introduction of a duty of candour for civil
servants. The latter could be “a positive step,” says Emma Norris of the
Institute for Government, a think-tank.
That is for the future. For now, the focus is finally on recognising and
compensating the victims of the infected-blood scandal. “The words come
from you,” Sir Brian told them after receiving a standing ovation. “This is
your report.” ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/05/20/a-day-of-shame-for-the-british-state

A system under strain
The sorry story of children in care

in England
The state is struggling to perform one of its most basic functions
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
JADE BARNETT learned that she was being moved from foster care into a
children’s home a few years ago when she saw her possessions in the back
of a taxi. The children’s home turned out to be near Blackpool, in north-
west England—330 kilometres from London, where she grew up and where
the social workers who were meant to be looking after her were based. She
expected to stay in the home for two weeks. It turned into one and a half
years.
Some 84,000 children in England are in the care of local authorities because
their parents cannot look after them for one reason or another. In an
extremely centralised country, it is one of the few important responsibilities
that those institutions still have. Every year councils spend more money on
the children in their care. Every year the system serves the country’s most
vulnerable children less well.
Adult social care, including nursing homes for the old and frail, is notorious
for straining local authorities’ budgets. But spending on children in care is
rising at a faster rate, says Roger Gough, the leader of Kent County
Council. In England as a whole, local authorities spent more than £7bn
($8.6bn) on looked-after children in the 2022-23 fiscal year, a 36% increase
in real terms compared with 2015-16. That squeezes budgets for everything
else, including help for families not yet in crisis.
Over the ten years to 2023 the number of children in care swelled by 23%,
or by 16% if you do not count unaccompanied children seeking asylum,
whose numbers have risen recently. And the children who enter the care
system are becoming older and needier. Whereas young children tend to
live with foster carers, older ones are more likely to end up in children’s
homes; some require intensive, round-the-clock attention. Caring for them
can be costly—sometimes amazingly costly.
The Local Government Association estimates that in the 2018-19 fiscal

year, England had 120 children who were each costing local authorities at
least £10,000 per week. By 2022-23 the number had jumped to 1,500. One
explanation is that local authorities are now looking after some teenagers
who might once have ended up in psychiatric wards or young offenders’
institutions. Over the past two decades the number of children in custody
has gone from 2,800 to around 400, reflecting not only less youthful
offending but also a growing reluctance to lock them up.
But the main reason for the increase in costs is economics. “It’s simply a
supply-and-demand issue,” says Stuart Ashley, the head of children’s
services for Hampshire County Council. England has too few foster carers
and too few children’s homes. Councils end up competing for scarce places,
with predictable consequences.
England has a “mixed model” of care (in Scotland the state plays a bigger
role). About half of children are placed in foster care by independent
agencies, which charge local authorities for their services; four-fifths of
children’s homes are privately run. To judge by the ratings they receive
from inspectors, private homes are no worse than state ones. But they are
often in the wrong places, because firms tend to build them where property
is cheap (see map). North-West England has fewer inhabitants than London,
but it has 746 children’s homes compared with 164 in the capital.
Hence Ms Barnett’s long journey to Blackpool. She felt thoroughly out of

place there. As a black woman in a mostly white neighbourhood, she was so
unusual that people occasionally asked to touch her hair. When permission
was needed for something, it was not always possible to reach her social
worker. By the time she became an adult and returned to London, she had
lost touch with friends and relatives.
Some children are repeatedly uprooted as local authorities scramble to find

suitable places. Taylor, a young man from southern England, was pulled out
of one town and into another in the year that most children take their GCSE
exams at school. Partly as a result, he has none. He cycled through foster
care, a psychiatric hospital, a children’s home and supported
accommodation. “They’re moved around like chess pieces,” says Katharine
Sacks-Jones, the chief executive of Become, a charity.
It would help greatly if Britain had more foster carers. “Most kids in care
need to be in foster care,” says Andy Smith, the president of the Association
for the Development of Children’s Services, who also works for Derby City
Council. The number of fostering households is falling, perhaps because of
growing competition for spare rooms from renters and adult offspring who
cannot afford to move out. Mr Smith says that he has had to place seven-
and eight-year-olds in residential care—something that was unthinkable
until recently.
But the immediate need is for more children’s homes. And the immediate
reason more children’s homes are not created is that the planning system
makes it hard. Permission is often required to convert a house into a
children’s home. Sometimes the police are the ones to object. An
application for a children’s home in Dudley was rejected in January after
the West Midlands Police pointed out that it was a high-crime area, and that
children in care homes sometimes run away and are preyed upon by drug-
trafficking gangs.
Try to create a children’s home in a quiet area, though, and people raise
other objections. In February Wyre Council in Lancashire rejected an
application to turn a house in a cul-de-sac into a home for two children and
three carers. It feared that cars would park by the roadside, harming “visual
and highway amenity”, and that existing residents might be disturbed by
“talking and noise from car doors”. It mentioned that it had received 65
letters of objection to the home. Suffer the little children? No thanks.■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/05/23/the-sorry-story-of-children-in-care-in-
england

Alcoblocks
When is a non-alcoholic drink

alcohol-free?
A quirk of regulation is holding back growth in the British market
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
NOT THAT long ago asking for an alcohol-free beer in a British pub made
you seem weird. Less so now. Alcohol consumption is falling among
young, affluent and health-conscious consumers. Better brewing techniques
have introduced tastier non-alcoholic options. Sales of alcohol-free beer
rose by 26% in 2022.
Even so, the overall market is still tiny. Non-alcoholic beverages make up a
sliver of Britain’s booze market, at just 3%. That is comparable to the share
in France and America but far behind that in Germany (16%) or Spain
(11%), according to the IWSR, a research firm. Sales growth of alcohol-free
drinks would need to exceed 40% each year to come close to raising their
market share above 10% by 2030, according to the Social Market
Foundation, a think-tank.
Wider availability and better products will naturally help the market to
grow. But so would ironing out a specific wrinkle in the British market.
According to standards set by the Department of Health and Social Care,
drinks must contain less than 0.05% alcohol by volume (ABV) to be
considered alcohol-free. That is less than the alcohol content of burger rolls
or ripe bananas. It is also much less than in comparable markets. The 0.5%
ABV beers made by Big Drop, a British craft brewer, are officially deemed
non-alcoholic in America, Australia and Germany but not at home.
This stringent standard has two consequences. One is for competition.

Complying with the guidance is hard for smaller brands in particular:
producing drinks at 0.05% ABV or less requires expensive equipment to
extract the alcohol. Some don’t even bother trying. Nearly one-third of the
drinks sold and labelled as alcohol-free in Britain ignore the official
guidance, according to the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, a
public-health policy body. That leads to the second consequence: confusion.
More than half of respondents in a poll by Opinium, a research firm, said
there was a lack of clarity over the suitability of non-alcoholic products for
pregnant women, drivers and people who don’t drink for religious reasons.
The government, keen to give more options to people who drink to excess,
has launched a consultation on updating its rules so that drinks with 0.5%
ABV can rightfully claim the alcohol-free descriptor. A labelling change is
not going to make the market go crazy but it would bring Britain into line
with other countries. And it might make it even easier to order something
non-alcoholic next time you are at the bar.■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/05/21/when-is-a-non-alcoholic-drink-alcohol-
free
Bagehot
Rishi Sunak’s snap election is odd

and illogical—much like him
For a man who says he has a plan, the prime minister acts in an impulsive
way
5月 23, 2024, 11:16 上午
OVER THE patter of the rain and the sound of protesters’ speakers blasting
“Things Can Only Get Better”, an anthem of New Labour, it was almost
impossible to hear Rishi Sunak outside 10 Downing Street on May 22nd.
The words were close to inaudible but the message was clear: the prime
minister had spoken to the king, Parliament was to be dissolved and an
election is coming on July 4th. The decision is impulsive, illogical and
entirely in keeping with the manner in which Mr Sunak has governed.
Calling an election earlier than many had expected has some small merit.
The inflation figure for the year to April, released earlier in the day, was
slightly higher than expected, at 2.3%. Although Mr Sunak claimed victory
(“inflation is back to where it should be”) hopes of early interest-rate cuts
by the Bank of England, which would relieve pain for mortgage-holders,
had gone. Higher borrowing costs also leave little room for another round
of tax cuts in the autumn. The main benefit of delaying, at least in the eyes
of the government, had disappeared. So why wait?
But the counter-argument is simple. Mr Sunak heads a government that is

as unpopular now as it was during the nadir of Liz Truss, when inflation
was over 11%, interest rates were marching ever higher and the then-
chancellor could not appear on television without an accompanying graphic
of sterling collapsing. Economically, things have improved. Inflation is
much lower; quarterly growth is near the top of the G7 league table; and
real wages are flying. But Tory polling has not responded. The party stands
at 21% in the polls—worse even than what they scored when Ms Truss’s
economic experiment blew up. If he wins the election, Mr Sunak will be the
most unpopular leader ever to manage that feat. No matter. The great
gamble has begun.
Throughout his career, whatever mess Mr Sunak has found himself in was
almost always of his own making. As chancellor Mr Sunak spent his days
dealing with the chaotic wants of Boris Johnson, a man Mr Sunak had
campaigned for to be prime minister. As prime minister he spent months
renegotiating the terms of a deal in Northern Ireland he had previously
whole-heartedly supported. Britain’s economic woes—of high inflation and
low productivity growth—have been exacerbated by its departure from the
European Union, a decision Mr Sunak was keen on. He practises a rather
odd style of politics: he cancelled a high-speed rail link to Manchester
while in Manchester.
If big calls are bodged, so are small ones. Mr Sunak’s career demonstrates a
weakness for ideas that are at best gimmicks and at worst boneheaded. As a
backbencher he was a loud supporter of freeports, which shuffle economic
activity around rather than generating it. During the peak of a hysterical
bubble about non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Mr Sunak, then chancellor,
pushed the Royal Mint to issue its own. (The plan was quietly dropped in
2023, by which point most NFTs had become worthless.)
For a man who says he has a plan, Mr Sunak operates in a rather last-
minute way. Even setting aside the weather, this was not a smooth election
launch. Cabinet ministers scurried back from their duties, no matter how
important. David Cameron, the foreign secretary, rushed back from Albania,
where he had been welcomed with a street lined with Union Jacks and a
gigantic photo of himself. The government in Tirana is responsible for one
of the few successes of Mr Sunak’s term in office: a deportation deal that
has dramatically reduced the numbers of young Albanians crossing the
Channel in inflatable boats. This was a strange way of saying “thank you”.
The decision to hurl himself at the electorate at short notice is no surprise

from a man who has engaged in a “reset” every six months he has been in
office. First, there was Rishi the technocrat. Then came Rishi the
unconvincing populist, a scourge of wokeness and greenery. Now it is Rishi
the guarantor of Britain’s security. A snap election comes just a few weeks
after the party let it be known that an autumn election was most likely.
Mr Sunak’s slogan is “stick with the plan” but he has stuck with very little.
Even the policies he hails are the ones he once opposed. As chancellor Mr
Sunak pushed to increase taxes paid by employees; as prime minister he has
made a show of cuts for the same people. As chancellor Mr Sunak criticised
a wacky and cruel scheme to send asylum-seekers from Britain to Rwanda.
As prime minister Mr Sunak has made the scheme a flagship policy.
What alternative did he have to calling an early election? Waiting. Hoping

something turns up is not a brave choice but it is a logical one. Things
happen. Labour is underbaked, too. Its advisers are inexperienced; its front
bench does not groan with talent. Rather than being tested over months,
they have to survive only for six more weeks. Waiting would have been
cowardly, but cowards tend to survive.
Why make trillions when we can make billions?

Instead, Mr Sunak has been bold to the point of foolhardy. He has opted for
an Austin Powers strategy. During a game of blackjack, the international
man of mystery is playing against a man who, unbeknownst to Mr Powers,
has x-ray vision. The villain “gambles” on 17, gets a 4 and wins. “I like to
live dangerously,” he gloats to Mr Powers. Next, Mr Powers is dealt a five.
“I’ll stay,” says Mr Powers. “I also like to live dangerously.”
The Conservatives require a miracle to stay in office. Mr Sunak’s own

actions, from his time as chancellor to his tenure as prime minister right
through to the decision-making process that leads to a sodden man making
an inaudible speech, make that miracle less likely. Perhaps the prime
minister has a secret strategy. Perhaps he is simply a gambler. Perhaps he is
just bad at politics. On July 4th, he will find out. ■
Read more from Bagehot, our columnist on British politics:

The narcissism of minor differences, Labour Party edition (May 15th)
The Conservatives’ world has disappeared. Don’t tell Rishi Sunak (May 8th)
Jeremy Clarkson, patron saint of the Great British bore (May 1st)
Also: How the Bagehot column got its name

https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/05/22/rishi-sunaks-snap-election-is-odd-and-
illogical-much-like-him

A permanent home
The world’s first museum of

homelessness
A new venue in London dedicated to an overlooked group
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
“OH GOD, MATE, it takes me back,” says one actor as she pulls a black
plastic bag over her head to demonstrate how she used to wear one as a rain
poncho. Another actor points out the weathered duct tape holding together
“Fred’s Trolley”, a shopping trolley used during the covid-19 pandemic to
serve tens of thousands of hot drinks to homeless people on the street. Both
actors used to be homeless. They are performing as part of the opening
exhibition at the Museum of Homelessness (MOH), the world’s first of its
kind, in north London.
Shelter, a charity, estimates that on any given night 3,000 people in England
sleep rough (very many more live in hostels or temporary accommodation).
But their experiences have been largely overlooked by cultural bigwigs. In
2014 Jess and Matt Turtle, the museum’s curators, were offered a collection
of 7,000 objects from the Simon Community, a homelessness organisation.
They have since collected many more items from anonymous donors on the
streets. After a decade of operating temporary exhibitions the MoH, which
is a charity, signed a ten-year lease on an empty cottage inside Finsbury
Park. From May 24th the museum will be open to the public, who will be
able to see items from its permanent collection and from a special
exhibition called “How to Survive the Apocalypse”.
This is not a normal museum. Twice a week the building is used by

homeless people for meals or drug rehabilitation. Some of them are
uncomfortable being inside: volunteers who helped with the design added a
hot-water tap outside in the garden. Inside, too, the museum does things a
little differently. Rather than label things with little white cards, actors
perform monologues taken from interviews with the items’ former owners.
The homeless people who donated these exhibits matter as much as the
objects themselves. ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/05/23/the-worlds-first-museum-of-homelessness

International
Iran’s new leaders stand at a nuclear precipice
An interview with Rafael Grossi :: The world’s atomic watchdog fears a terrifying regional
arms race

An interview with Rafael Grossi
Iran’s new leaders stand at a

nuclear precipice
The world’s atomic watchdog fears a terrifying regional arms race
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
ON MAY 6TH Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International

Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), travelled to Tehran and met Hossein
Amirabdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister. Less than two weeks later, on
May 19th, Mr Amirabdollahian was dead, killed in a helicopter crash that
also took the life of Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s president, among others.
Their deaths throw Iran’s sclerotic theocracy into a moment of confusion

and uncertainty, one with far-reaching implications for the country’s nuclear
programme. Mr Grossi, fresh from his trip to Iran, recently spoke to The
Economist about the Iranian nuclear file, as well as the other items on his
forbidding to-do list, from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear-power
plant in Ukraine to the “growing attraction” of nuclear weapons worldwide.
The Vienna-based IAEA has two jobs, both enshrined in the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968. One is to promote the peaceful use of
nuclear energy. The other is to ensure that using such energy does not lead
to countries developing the bomb. And the country of principal concern
today is Iran.
Bold plans
Iran’s nuclear programme is expanding rapidly in size and sophistication. It

has 27 times as much enriched uranium as was permitted under the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a multinational nuclear deal
abrogated by Donald Trump in 2018. It is now an “empty shell”, says Mr
Grossi, who was speaking prior to Mr Raisi’s death. That stockpile, some of
which is enriched to 60% purity, close to weapons grade, is enough for
about three bombs (see chart 1). Along with Iran’s use of newer and faster
centrifuges, these developments have “completely superseded” the JCPOA,
he says. The result is that Iran could produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-
grade uranium in just a week and enough for seven over a month, according
to research by the Institute for Science and International Security, an
American think-tank.
When Mr Grossi visited Iran in March 2023 the country promised to co-
operate more fully with the IAEA, including by reinstalling surveillance
equipment it had removed earlier. That progress “quickly stalled”, says Mr
Grossi, with both sides “talking past each other”. He has said that the IAEA
has lost “continuity of knowledge” about, among other things, Iran’s
production and stockpiles of centrifuges, heavy water and uranium-ore
concentrate. These could be used to reconstitute a nuclear-weapons
programme in secret, rather than using known facilities that could be
bombed. On May 7th Mr Grossi returned to see whether he might break the
impasse. There had been hopes that Iran would slow down its accumulation
of 60% enriched uranium by “downblending” it to lower levels. But there
was no such commitment, says Mr Grossi. Iran seems to have been
stringing everyone along throughout.
He is also concerned by a growing number of statements by senior Iranians

that the country might be more open to a bomb. In April, as Israel and Iran
exchanged missile fire, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
unit responsible for the safety of nuclear sites hinted that Iran might rescind
a “fatwa” against nuclear weapons issued by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the
country’s supreme ruler, in 2003. In May Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to Mr
Khamenei, issued the same threat twice within days. “This is unacceptable,”
says Mr Grossi, “unless the country would choose to denounce or leave the
NPT.”
There is no consensus among experts and Western officials on whether

these statements are signals that Iran intends to build a bomb or whether it
simply wants to shore up deterrence against America and Israel at a tense
time. Mr Grossi says he is consoled by the fact that neither the late Mr
Amirabdollahian nor Mohammad Eslami, Iran’s vice-president and head of
the country’s Atomic Energy Organisation, had repeated these statements.
He says a new agreement—“a JCPOA rebooted or a JCPOA 2.0”—is
imperative. Yet the death of Mr Raisi is likely to shake up the system and
complicate the matter in several ways.
A vulnerable and isolated regime could be tempted to develop nuclear

weapons for more security. It could also affect decision-making. Mr Raisi’s
ideological allies have no obvious successor in his mould. Reformists were
shut out of Iran’s sham elections for the presidency in 2021 and parliament
in 2024, and could be again: under the constitution, a presidential election is
due 50 days after a president’s death. It’s possible that a more pragmatic,
conservative candidate could become the next president, making
negotiations over a new nuclear deal possible, if not probable.
Moreover, Mr Raisi was a candidate to succeed the ailing Mr Khamenei.
His death improves the chances of Mojtaba Khamenei, the latter’s son,
taking over instead and could strengthen his allies in Iran’s Revolutionary
Guards—the driving force behind the nuclear programme for almost 40
years.
These issues may dominate a meeting of the IAEA’s board of governors

between June 3rd and 7th. Some Western countries want to refer Iran to the
UN Security Council (UNSC). In the past, the veto-wielding P5 countries
had a “common denominator” on Iran, agreeing on sanctions, says Mr
Grossi. “Now that would not happen,” he acknowledges, in light of deep
splits between America, Britain and France on one side, and Russia and
China on the other. That great-power gridlock, in turn, means that Iran can
proceed with relative impunity.
Mr Grossi warns that an Iranian bomb would have far-reaching

consequences. “The Korean peninsula had very circumscribed…parameters
that made a domino very, very difficult in that circumstance,” he says,
referring to North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities in 2006. “I
think the Middle East is completely different. Here, you would have a
situation which would lead to more countries, if not openly seeking nuclear
weapons, trying to get latency and trying to get closer to that because they
would feel that the system is failing.”
In September Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader,

reaffirmed that the kingdom would seek a bomb if Iran developed one. It is
seeking permission to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel—steps that
would allow it to produce fissile material—as part of a broader energy and
defence pact with America that is under intense discussion. Mr Grossi is
circumspect when asked about that, saying only that he intends to “work
very closely” with the kingdom. But he clearly worries about nuclear
proliferation. “I think it would spread” beyond the Middle East, he says.
“Unfortunately, what we see is a trend, a growing attraction, the lure of
nuclear weapons is there. We cannot deny it. It is very, very regrettable.”
Keep the lights on

The threat from nuclear conflict in the Middle East is not the only terrifying
problem on Mr Grossi’s agenda. Russia has also said it intends to restart the
Zaporizhia nuclear-power plant in southern Ukraine, which it has occupied
and militarised. The plant has repeatedly come under attack from shells and
drones, most recently in April. Mr Grossi, who visited the site in February
and met Vladimir Putin in Moscow the next month, says that talks over the
restart are ongoing and “very delicate”.
He argues that the IAEA has played a vital role. When the invasion began,
he says, no one asked the agency, or Mr Grossi personally, to visit
Zaporizhia; had he asked permission, he says, he might well have been
rebuffed. With the support of America, Britain and France—Mr Grossi
singles out Emmanuel Macron for his support—he chose not only to go, but
to stay. “I went there to visit and I forgot a group of people,” he quips,
referring to inspectors who remained behind and are still present there and
at every other Ukrainian nuclear site. “And then we were there, and who is
going to kick us out?”
That enduring presence has allowed the IAEA to maintain a technical

dialogue with the Russian operators of the plant and to serve as a source of
ground truth. “You may have seen that when it comes to Zaporizhia, there’s
almost no fake news…we have an update every day.” Despite attacks, he
says, both parties have broadly respected his demands to avoid turning the
plant into a military target. “Until this war…ends without an accident, we
will not be able to say mission accomplished. But I think it has been a good
example of what can be done.” Ukrainian officials are more sceptical,
believing that Russia has pulled the wool over the IAEA’s eyes.
If Iran and Ukraine were not enough, the agency’s job is growing. In
March, for the first time in 13 years, Mr Grossi visited Damascus, where he
had a “frank conversation” with Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president. In 2007
Israel bombed an incomplete reactor in the east of the country, believing it
to be part of a Syrian nuclear-weapons programme. It had not been declared
to the IAEA.
Mr Grossi accepts that the agency will get few answers on that—“that piece
of infrastructure was disposed of, to put it mildly”—but he wants the
Syrians to open up on related facilities. He is cagey on whether that will
happen—“we are working on having a possibility to access these places”—
but the dialogue is a start. The IAEA has no contact with North Korea, but
Mr Grossi warns that “the programme is growing in every direction” and
with “a huge question mark on nuclear safety”.
In the coming years, the agency will also have to safeguard a deluge of
nuclear-energy projects (see chart 2). “There’s going to be more nuclear in
the world, in developing countries, in other places,” says Mr Grossi. The
agency expects a 30% rise in the number of countries operating power
plants by 2035. At least 59 are under construction, some in countries with
no nuclear experience. Many are being built by Russia or China, which
have tended to impose weaker safeguards on clients than does America.
Mr Grossi is also in discussions with America, Britain and Australia over

the AUKUS deal, which will see Australia, a non-nuclear country, operate
submarines with reactors powered by highly enriched uranium. Technology
increasingly helps to keep tabs on nuclear material. The agency has
developed “simply amazing” means to detect enriched uranium in the past
few years, he says. “You can build a supermarket on top of a place where 35
years ago there was uranium—we’re going to find it.”
Moving on up?
Mr Grossi says that his Russia-Ukraine shuttle diplomacy “is an indication,

in these times of enormous scepticism about multilateral organisations, of
the role these organisations can play.” The IAEA’s stock has risen
accordingly. In a change from the past, says Mr Grossi, the UNSC “wants
to hear from us, they want to know what is happening”. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, he is mentioned as a possible candidate to succeed António
Guterres as UN secretary-general in two years.
The conventional wisdom is that the next secretary-general will need to be a

woman. Some in the UN are aggrieved at what they see as Mr Grossi’s very
public role in Zaporizhia, says Richard Gowan of the International Crisis
Group, a think-tank. “His candidacy is rather intimately tied to [Zaporizhia]
being intact in 2026, and the Iranians not having a bomb,” says Mr Gowan.
“Neither of which is fully assured.”■
Editor’s note (May 22nd 2024): This piece has been amended so as to
include a reference to research by the Institute for Science and
International Security.
https://www.economist.com/international/2024/05/20/irans-new-leaders-stand-at-a-
nuclear-precipice

Business
Can Nvidia be dethroned? Meet the startups vying for its
crown
Think different :: A new generation of AI chips is on the way
Africa Inc is ready to roar

Big game :: Its businesses are expanding across the continent
Global firms are tapping India’s workers like never before

The world’s office :: They want their brains more than their brawn
Americans are fretting over their body odour

Pits and bits :: They are covering themselves in new types of deodorant
Walmart’s latest product? Its customers

The adman of Arkansas :: The retail giant is selling advertisers access to its shoppers
The Economist’s agony uncle returns

Bartleby :: Pets, drugs and schedule send: another postbag for Max Flannel
Can anyone save the world’s most important diamond

company?
Schumpeter :: De Beers is in peril

Think different
Can Nvidia be dethroned? Meet the

startups vying for its crown
A new generation of AI chips is on the way
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
“HE WHO CONTROLS the GPUs, controls the universe.” This spin on a
famous line from “Dune”, a science-fiction classic, is commonly heard
these days. Access to GPUs, and in particular those made by Nvidia, the
leading supplier, is vital for any company that wants to be taken seriously in
artificial intelligence (AI). Analysts talk of companies being “GPU-rich” or
“GPU-poor”, depending on how many of the chips they have. Tech bosses
boast of their giant stockpiles. Nvidia’s dominance has pushed its market
value above $2trn. On May 22nd it reported that its sales for the quarter
ending in April grew by 262%, year on year (see chart).
GPUs do the computational heavy lifting needed to train and operate large
AI models. Yet, oddly, this is not what they were designed for. The initials
stand for “graphics processing unit”, because such chips were originally
designed to process video-game graphics. It turned out that, fortunately for
Nvidia, they could be repurposed for AI workloads.
Might it be better to design specialist AI chips from scratch? That is what

many companies, small and large, are now doing in a bid to topple Nvidia.
Dedicated AI chips promise to make building and running AI models faster,
cheaper or both. Any firm that can mount a credible threat to the reigning
champion will have no shortage of customers, who dislike its lofty prices
and limited supplies.
Ordinary processing chips, like those found inside laptop and desktop
computers, are in essence designed to do one thing after another. GPUs, by
contrast, contain several thousand processing engines, or “cores”, which let
them run thousands of versions of the same simple task (like drawing part
of a scene) at the same time. Running AI models similarly involves running
lots of copies of the same task in parallel. Figuring out how to rewrite AI
code to run on GPUs was one of the factors that triggered the current AI
boom.
Yet GPUs have their limitations, particularly when it comes to the speed
with which data can be shuffled on and off them. Modern AI models run on
large numbers of interconnected GPUs and memory chips. Moving data
quickly between them is central to performance. When training very large
AI models, some GPU cores may be idle as much as half of the time as they
wait for data. Andrew Feldman, the boss of Cerebras, a startup based in
Sunnyvale, California, likens it to the gridlock in a grocery store on the day
before Thanksgiving. “Everybody’s in a queue, so there are blockages in the
parking lot, there are blockages in the aisles, blockages at the checkout.
That’s exactly what’s happening with a GPU.”
Cerebras’s response is to put 900,000 cores, plus lots of memory, onto a

single, enormous chip, to reduce the complexity of connecting up multiple
chips and piping data between them. Its CS-3 chip is the largest in the world
by a factor of 50. “Our chip is the size of a dinner plate—a GPU is the size
of a postage stamp,” says Mr Feldman. On-chip connections between cores
operate hundreds of times faster than connections between separate GPUs,
Cerebras claims, while its approach reduces energy consumption by more
than half, for a given level of performance, compared with Nvidia’s most
powerful GPU offering.
Groq, another startup, is taking a different approach. Its AI chips, called

language processing units (LPUs), are optimised to run large language
models (LLMs) particularly quickly. In addition to containing their own
memory, these chips also act as routers, passing data among the
interconnected LPUs. Clever routing software eliminates the variation in
latency, or time spent waiting for data, allowing the whole system to run in
lockstep. This greatly boosts efficiency, and thus speed: Groq says its LPUs
can run big LLMs ten times faster than existing systems.
Yet another approach is that taken by MatX, also based in California. GPUs
contain features and circuitry that provide flexibility for graphics, but are
not needed for LLMs, says Reiner Pope, one of the firm’s co-founders. The
GPU-like chip his firm is working on gets rid of such unnecessary cruft,
boosting performance by doing fewer things better.
Other startups in this area include Hailo, based in Israel; Taalas, based in
Toronto; Tenstorrent, an American firm using the open-source RISC V
architecture to build AI chips; and Graphcore, a British company that is
thought to be about to sell itself to SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate. Big
tech firms are also building AI chips. Google has developed its own “tensor
processing units” (TPUs), which it makes available as a cloud-computing
service. (It unveiled its latest version on May 14th.) Amazon, Meta and
Microsoft have also made custom chips for cloud-based AI; OpenAI is
planning to do so as well. AMD and Intel, two big incumbent chipmakers,
make GPU-like chips already.
One danger for the newcomers is that their efforts at specialisation could go
too far. Designing a chip typically takes two or three years, says Christos
Kozyrakis, a computer scientist at Stanford University, which is “a huge
amount of time” given how quickly AI models are improving. The
opportunity, he says, is that the startups could end up with a chip that is
better at running future models than Nvidia’s less specialised GPUs are. The
risk is that they specialise in the wrong thing.
Having previously worked at Google, which developed the currently

dominant “transformer” architecture used in LLMs, Mr Pope of MatX is
confident that his firm has “a somewhat good crystal ball”. And if a new
approach comes along—“state-space models” are the latest thing—its chip
is versatile enough to adapt, he says. Mr Feldman says all modern AI is still
just “sparse linear algebra” under the hood, which Cerebras’s chip can do
very quickly.
Is greatness a transitory experience?
Another challenge is that Nvidia’s software layer for programming its

GPUs, known as CUDA, is a de facto industry standard, despite being
notoriously fiddly to use. “Software is king,” says Mr Kozyrakis of
Stanford, and Nvidia has a significant advantage, having built up its
software ecosystem over many years. AI-chip startups will succeed only if
they can persuade programmers to rejig their code to run on their new
chips. They offer software toolkits to do this, and provide compatibility
with the major machine-learning frameworks. But tweaking software to
optimise performance on a new architecture is a difficult and complex
business—yet another reason Nvidia is hard to dislodge.
The biggest customers for AI chips, and the systems built around them,
include model-builders (such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral) and tech
giants (such as Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google). It may make sense
for such companies to acquire an AI-chip startup, and keep its technology to
themselves, in the hope of besting the competition. Instead of trying to
compete with Nvidia, chip startups could position themselves as acquisition
targets.
Mr Pope says MatX is targeting the “top tier” of the market, which suggests
that it hopes to sell its chips—if not the whole company—to the likes of
OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, whose AI models are the most advanced.
“We would be happy with many kinds of exit,” he says, “but we think there
is a sustainable business here as a standalone company.” That remains to be
seen. Cerebras, for its part, is said to be preparing for an initial public
offering. So far none of the startups has made a dent in Nvidia’s dominant
position. Plenty of people are hoping that one of them will. ■
To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to

the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/19/can-nvidia-be-dethroned-meet-the-
startups-vying-for-its-crown

Big game
Africa Inc is ready to roar

Its businesses are expanding across the continent
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Kigali
GLOBAL GABFESTS tend to be gloomy affairs these days. Bigwigs

bemoan the state of geopolitics, wring their hands over existential risks,
urge greater global co-operation—and go home with little to show for it all.
The Africa CEO Forum, a gathering that took place on May 16th and 17th
in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, offered a welcome contrast. As bosses,
politicians and financiers gathered to discuss the role of Africa’s private
sector in spurring its economic development, the tone was refreshingly
practical.
Instead of dwelling on the grand sweep of history or the changing world

order, the conference’s attendees knuckled down for discussions on how to
boost cross-border commerce and strengthen local supply chains.
Permeating all of this was a conviction that Africa must take control of its
own economic development. As Aliko Dangote, the boss of Dangote
Industries, a Nigerian conglomerate, and Africa’s richest man, summed up,
“We Africans will have to do it. If we wait for foreigners, it’s not going to
happen.”
Some foreign firms have retreated from Africa in recent years as higher
interest rates have made investing in riskier countries less attractive,
particularly ones with volatile currencies and controls on the repatriation of
profits. Political dysfunction in countries including South Africa and a
string of coups along the Sahel have not helped. The flow of foreign direct
investment into Africa slumped from $80bn in 2021 to $48bn last year. In
April Société Générale, a French bank, announced it would sell its
Moroccan business to Saham Group, a local conglomerate. It has already
left a number of other African markets such as Chad and Mauritania. In
August hot-cocoa fans in South Africa were dismayed to hear that Nestlé, a
Swiss food giant, was halting production of Nesquik, a chocolatey
beverage, in the country.
African businesses, meanwhile, are steadily expanding. They are getting

better at catering to the continent’s consumers. Yeshi Group, a conglomerate
from Côte d’Ivoire, is launching a safety-focused beauty brand in Ethiopia,
where harmful skin-bleaching products are widespread. That sort of
tailoring has helped buoy local brands across the continent, says the boss of
a South African supermarket chain.
As they have grown bigger, African businesses have become more

sophisticated in how they manage their operations and supply chains,
observes Matthieu Friedberg, the boss of CEVA Logistics, a French
company with offices in 25 African countries. Arnaud de Rugy, the Africa
boss of Egis, a French construction firm, points to the recent success of
companies like CIRA, a Malian firm, and SCET, a Tunisian one, in winning
contracts for major infrastructure projects in Africa.
Mr Dangote’s enterprise has grown into a pan-African behemoth with

operations ranging from cement production (it is the continent’s leading
supplier) to sugar milling. During the forum it was announced that the
company had secured a deal with TotalEnergies, a French firm, to supply
crude oil to a giant new refinery Dangote has built in Nigeria.
According to McKinsey, a consultancy, Africa is now home to 345

companies with over $1bn in annual turnover, with combined sales of more
than $1trn. Many are turning to neighbouring countries for growth. Since
2018 intra-African exports have grown by 32%, to $109bn last year,
compared with 18% for exports going elsewhere. Almost a fifth of African
countries’ exports now stay within the continent, up from just over a tenth
two decades ago.
Many businesses are betting that such trade will continue to grow. “More
companies will produce in Africa, for Africa, so we’re preparing ourselves,”
says Philippe Labonne, the boss of Africa Global Logistics (AGL), a freight
business with operations in 49 countries. ARISE, an industrial-park
developer focused on Africa, has been helping set up commodity-specific
manufacturing zones, including for cotton in Benin, meat in Chad and
timber in Gabon, which it hopes will spur regional commerce. Liquid
Intelligent Technologies, a pan-African technology group, has built a vast
network of fibre-optic cables across much of the continent and is now
busily constructing data centres.
There is still plenty of work to be done to ease cross-border commerce. The

African Continental Free Trade Agreement, an ambitious plan to more
closely integrate the region’s economies, has been hamstrung by difficulties
tracing the origin of goods and cumbersome visa rules, among other things.
In Kigali Mr Dangote lamented that he requires 35 visas to travel across
Africa with his Nigerian passport, fewer than his French counterpart at
TotalEnergies. It not easy for 54 countries to work together, notes Mr
Labonne of AGL. Plenty more gatherings like the one in Kigali may yet be
needed. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/23/africa-inc-is-ready-to-roar
The world’s office
Global firms are tapping India’s

workers like never before
They want their brains more than their brawn
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Bangalore
LULULEMON, A CANADIAN maker of yoga outfits, does not have many

things in common with Rolls-Royce, a British engine manufacturer. One
thing they do share, along with scores of other foreign companies, is space
in the sprawling Embassy Manyata Business Park in Bangalore. Hundreds
of others, among them Maersk, a Danish shipping firm, Samsung, a South
Korean electronics giant, and Wells Fargo, an American bank, have offices
within a few miles. Many more of these white-collar outposts can be found
in cities including Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad.
Back in the 1990s global firms such as General Electric, a once-mighty
conglomerate, began to rely on Indian workers to perform tedious tasks
such as filling in forms and patching software for mainframe computers.
Over time much of that drudgery was absorbed by Indian outsourcers such
as Infosys, TCS and Wipro. Now foreign firms have begun to think bigger
about the types of white-collar jobs that can be done by India’s cheap but
well-educated workers. Many have set up “global capability centres”
(GCCs) to offshore tasks from data analysis to research and development
(R&D), helping fuel a new wave of services-led growth for India.
It has long been easier to offshore white-collar work to India than the blue-
collar variety. Spreadsheets and emails do not need to travel along the
country’s congested roads or otherwise rely on its shoddy infrastructure.
(GCCs generally have dependable internet connections, a luxury not always
enjoyed in India.) Labour laws covering matters such as redundancies and
—crucially for global firms—working hours are less restrictive for the
country’s white-collar workers, too.
More recently, technologies such as cloud computing and video
conferencing have made it less cumbersome to tap India’s vast pool of
brainy workers. Having learned how to supervise employees remotely
through the covid-19 pandemic, plenty of bosses will have now pondered
whether some roles could be done from farther afield.
All that helps explain why the number of GCCs operating in India has
ballooned from 700 in 2010 to 1,580 last year, according to NASSCOM, an
industry body (see chart). A new centre now opens roughly every week,
two-fifths of them in and around Bangalore. India’s GCCs generated a
combined $46bn in revenues last year, estimates NASSCOM.
Even that may vastly understate their activity. Many multinational

companies do not share the financial details of their GCCs, which means
calculating their economic contribution involves a good deal of guesswork.
Wizmatic, a consultancy based in Pune, thinks the revenues of Indian GCCs
could be as high as $120bn, a sum equal to roughly 3.5% of the country’s
GDP.
These outposts employ some 3.2m workers, reckons Wizmatic. Many

Indian graduates jump at the opportunity to work at one. Students hired by
the country’s outsourcing giants typically earn less than $10,000 a year.
Moving to a GCC can triple that. Most foreign firms setting up these offices
also plump for premium buildings with cafés and other amenities.
Lululemon provides its Indian workers with a space, and time, for exercise,
an uncommon perk in Indian workplaces.
The activities of GCCs are increasingly varied. Lululemon’s workers in

India pore over sales data and tell branches in Dubai to stock more bright
yellows, pinks and greens, and ones in New York to stock more blacks and
greys. Although design is done in Canada, the company’s GCC is involved
in everything from setting prices to managing supply chains. Wells Fargo’s
teams in Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad support the bank’s operations
in areas ranging from lending to managing investment portfolios.
More than 85 foreign semiconductor companies, including Intel and Nvidia,

now conduct design work in Bangalore. Tech giants such as Alphabet,
Amazon and Microsoft also have R&D centres in the city, as do Boeing, an
aircraft manufacturer, and Walmart, a retail giant. Mercedes-Benz, a
German carmaker, employs nearly 6,000 workers at its R&D centre in
Bangalore, its largest such operation outside Germany. Over the past four
years its team in India has produced 32 patents.
In 2010 American multinationals spent $1.7bn on R&D activities in India,

according to America’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2021, the latest
year available, that figure had surged to $5.5bn. Growing geopolitical
tension with the West means that China, India’s principal rival hub for low-
cost R&D, has lost some of its appeal. On May 16th it was reported that
Microsoft had asked hundreds of employees working on advanced
technologies such as machine learning and cloud computing in the country
to relocate.
All this has helped turbocharge India’s services exports, which hit $338bn
last year, or nearly 10% of GDP, up from $53bn in 2005, reckons Goldman
Sachs, a bank. The country now accounts for 4.6% of global services
exports, up from roughly 2% in 2005. India’s goods exports, by contrast,
account for just 1.8% of the global total, up from 1% in 2005.
India’s government has been busily trying to tilt that balance towards
manufacturing, by modernising the country’s infrastructure and doling out
subsidies to foreign firms that produce there. Plenty of other countries are
vying to steal China’s title as the world’s factory. None, however, has as
good a shot as India at becoming the world’s office. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/23/global-firms-are-tapping-indias-
workers-like-never-before

Pits and bits
Americans are fretting over their

body odour
They are covering themselves in new types of deodorant
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | New York
AFTER THREE days in the great outdoors, gnawing anxiety sets in. The air
may be fresh but the woman in the advert is not. The backs of her knees
have begun to emit an unusual smell. Luckily for her fellow campers, she
has packed a tube of Peach and Vanilla Blossom Whole Body Deodorant
Cream, a fresh product launched in January by Secret, a personal-care
brand.
Americans have long had a particular aversion to stench. Last year they
bought $6.6bn worth of deodorant, the equivalent of nearly $20 per person
—more than in any other rich country, according to Euromonitor, a research
firm. Lately companies like Secret have been encouraging them to hunt out
odours from their feet to their “underboobs”. Google searches for “whole-
body deodorant” shot up by 1,000% in the year to March (albeit from a low
base).
“The conversation about body odour is no longer limited to underarms,”

declares Pranav Chandan, who is in charge of deodorants in America for
Unilever, a consumer-products giant. “We know that people are
experiencing unwanted odours all over their bodies,” he says. Earlier this
year Dove and SheaMoisture, two of the company’s brands, launched their
own full-body deodorants.
For the most part these creams, sprays and sticks are deodorants, which
cover up smells, rather than antiperspirants, which stop the sweat that
causes them. That is a good thing, says Andrew Best, a biologist at the
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, because “blocking sweating on
larger parts of your body is asking for overheating”.
One body part that has attracted particular attention is the groin. In 2017
Shannon Klingman, a gynaecologist, launched Lume, a deodorant she first
whipped up in a kitchen mixer, with the goal of masking “front fumes”. The
company has since been acquired by Harry’s, a purveyor of razors.
Some medical professionals grimace at the fragrances used in these

products, which may cause irritation or infections when applied near the
crotch. (Unilever and Procter & Gamble, the maker of Secret, say their
products have been tested with gynaecologists for safety.)
Others sniff at the idea that natural odours must be covered up. Lume’s
website laments how odour undermines women’s “self-worth”. Jennifer
Lincoln, a gynaecologist, thinks urging women to smell like “piña coladas”
will hardly help restore it. (Technically the scent in question is Bay Rum.)
Although the products seem to be mostly targeted at women, fragrances
such as Bourbon Leather ensure men do not feel left out.
Mr Best, who studies the role of sweat in human endurance, thinks being
ashamed of perspiration is like feeling sheepish about “having language or a
big brain”. Still, he does not recommend people abandon deodorant
altogether—nor the occasional shower.■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/23/americans-are-fretting-over-their-
body-odour

The adman of Arkansas
Walmart’s latest product? Its

customers
The retail giant is selling advertisers access to its shoppers
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IN THE ELECTRONICS department, every television is tuned to the same

channel, showing a commercial for a cosmetics brand. At the end of the
aisle is a sponsored stall promoting bags of popcorn. The music wafting
through the air on the in-store radio is occasionally interrupted by
advertising spots. Even at the checkout, a few final commercials pop up on
screen to catch customers before they leave.
Anyone strolling around a branch of Walmart, as more than 200m

Americans do each month, will see thousands of goodies on offer.
Increasingly, its shoppers are being served up as products, too. Walmart, the
world’s top retailer by sales, has discovered that there is serious money to
be made in selling access to its customers. On May 16th the company
reported that its booming advertising business had helped it deliver a 9.6%
increase in operating income, year on year, for its quarter ending in April.
As it carpets its physical and virtual stores in commercials, the company is
taking a growing share of the ad market.
Walmart shifted more than $600bn of stock last year, from televisions to
toilet rolls. By comparison its ad operation looks insignificant, bringing in
just $3.4bn in revenue in the same period. Yet the margins on advertising
are so fat, and those on groceries so thin, that ads contribute an outsized
share of profit. In 2023 advertising made up 7.5% of Walmart’s earnings
before interest and taxes, estimates UBS, a bank. It reckons that Walmart’s
ad business is set to grow by about a quarter every year, contributing 13%
of profit by 2026.
Walmart is still an ad-industry tiddler compared with Amazon, its online

nemesis, which sold $47bn in ads last year. But the retailer is already
comfortably within advertising’s second tier, and is expected to finish the
year ahead of social networks such as Pinterest, Snapchat and X. The
company has “enormous potential” as an advertiser, reckons Andrew
Lipsman of Media, Ads + Commerce, a consultancy.
Walmart’s advertising operation has three main parts. The largest is the
digital ads that appear on its website and app. These are closely targeted,
because Walmart knows what the consumer is searching for, and their
effectiveness precisely measured, since it knows whether shoppers end up
buying the advertised product. Because this is “first party” data, from
Walmart’s own site, it is unaffected by the ever-stricter anti-tracking rules
imposed by Apple and others to protect users’ privacy.
Brands used to grumble that Walmart’s digital ads were poor value. No
longer. In 2021 the company poached Seth Dallaire, a star adman, from
Instacart, a grocery-delivery firm. Mr Dellaire, who had previously set up
Amazon’s advertising business, overhauled the way Walmart’s online ads
were auctioned, with the result that these now deliver a better return for
advertisers than those of either Amazon or Instacart (see chart). In April
third-party “marketplace” sellers were also given the ability to buy display
ads on Walmart.com.
The second part of Walmart’s ad offering is video. Again, it is playing
catch-up with Amazon, which is pouring billions into shows like “The Lord
of the Rings” on its ad-supported streaming service, Prime Video. Walmart
has opted for a less glamorous, behind-the-scenes role. In February it said it
would buy Vizio, a manufacturer of smart TVs with 18m users in America
to whom it can show personalised commercials. And it has done deals with
other media companies to target their viewers with its data. The latest of
these, announced earlier this month, will see data on Walmart’s shoppers
being used to send personalised ads to Disney’s streaming viewers.
Some believe the next step is “shoppable TV”, in which audiences buy
products directly through their TV sets. In November Walmart released
“Add to Heart”, a TV series stuffed with shoppable products. The “rom-
commerce”, as Walmart dubbed the show, will not win any Oscars, but is a
revealing experiment. Shoppable TV “is very much in the early innings”,
says Sarah Marzano of eMarketer, a firm of analysts, who believes it will
take off only if retailers can reduce the friction involved in making a
purchase. (“Add to Heart” relied on texting a link to TV viewers’ phones for
them to complete the transaction.)
The final advertising opportunity for Walmart, with perhaps the biggest
potential, lies in its vast network of bricks-and-mortar shops. Walmart has
more than 5,000 stores in America (including its Sam’s Club subsidiary)
and 10,000 worldwide, adding up to more than a million square feet of
retailing—and advertising—space. That puts it far ahead of Amazon, which
has 538 Whole Foods Market stores and fewer than 100 Amazon Fresh and
Amazon Go outlets. Walmart claims that 90% of American households shop
at its stores at least once a year. Reaching that in-store audience is the “next
frontier”, says Ryan Mayward, an executive at the company.
Advertisers, who are hooked on precisely measurable digital ads, still see
in-store ones as poor substitutes. A survey of consumer-packaged-goods
firms in 2022 by Bain, a consultancy, found that only 17% believed in-store
ads offered a high return on investment. Tracking consumers’ behaviour is
harder offline, and some efforts to do so have backfired. Amazon filled its
stores with video cameras, but removed some of them after customers
grumbled about being spied on. Walgreens, a pharmacy chain, planned to
install thousands of ad-filled digital screens on its refrigerator cabinets, but
changed course last year, citing various technical problems.
Walmart has improved its ability to link online ads to offline sales, using
anonymised payment details to track when a customer buys a product in-
store after seeing it advertised in the app. And it is increasing the number of
places where advertisers can display in-store messages to consumers. Its
stores already show ads on 170,000 digital screens across their electronics
departments and checkouts, and are now experimenting with showing them
on the screens at their deli counters and bakeries.
In-store digital advertising remains a far smaller market than the online sort,
even though 85% of retail sales in America are still made in person. That
imbalance may represent an opportunity: if in-store ads can be made
remotely as effective as online ones, a market worth tens of billions of
dollars awaits, believes Mr Lipsman. Few companies stand to benefit more
than the mightiest retailer of all. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/23/walmarts-latest-product-its-customers

Bartleby
The Economist’s agony uncle

returns
Pets, drugs and schedule send: another postbag for Max Flannel
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
DEAR MAX, My employer has a policy of allowing dogs in the office.

Almost everyone there seems to think this is tremendous but I don’t like the
things. (To be honest, I don’t like people either but I accept that they should
be allowed to come to the workplace.) Is there anything I can do, or do I
have to grin and bear it?
You are not alone: I probably get more letters about this topic than any
other. It’s very hard to admit to disliking dogs, so lots of people end up
suffering them in silence. You could talk to HR about ending the policy, but
would risk being known to all your colleagues as the psychopath who hates
puppies. It’s much better to try to subvert the system. My advice is to say
that you need to bring another type of much less acceptable animal to the
office. If pressed, use the word “wellness” and hint at discrimination if they
do not seem keen. With luck they will reach the conclusion that it is best
simply to ban all pets.
My boss is very enthusiastic about the idea of using psychedelics in the

workplace. She claims it is a way of unlocking creativity and bringing
people together. She wants our team to go on a group ketamine retreat and
keeps sending emails with subject lines like “Let’s ket it on!” Should I go?
No. There is very little evidence that the use of drugs in the workplace
genuinely increases creativity—and lots of experience to suggest that they
make you do things you later greatly regret. If you want to ingest
psychedelics, my advice is to do it at home. If you want to be more creative
in your thinking, go for a long walk. And if you want to bond with your
colleagues, do great work together. Tell her you are on other medication and
cannot participate.
I have noticed that about five minutes before the end of one of my regular
weekly meetings, the person chairing it will say, “I’m conscious of time”.
Aren’t we all?
I doubt it’s meant as a boast. Even if it is, try to be generous-minded. Your

meetings are probably more likely to end when they should.
A colleague of mine has started bringing a skunk to work. She claims that it
is her comfort skunk. I asked HR whether this was really allowed and they
started muttering some twaddle about dogs and discrimination; they also
said that the skunk’s scent glands had been removed. I don’t mind having
animals in the office but this is ridiculous. Lots of my colleagues agree.
What can I do?
This is ringing a bell. My advice would be to go back to HR and see if they

would be prepared to ban all pets. If that doesn’t work, you and your
colleagues could try bringing in other animals. By the time the office
resembles that scene in “Ace Ventura”, they will have to see sense.
My manager often says that “we need to go to the balcony”. Everyone else
nods, but then they don’t actually go anywhere. As far as I can see our
office doesn’t even have a balcony. In a meeting the other week one person
said “this is a two-finger point” and the person running the meeting replied
“let’s double-click on that later”. I have no idea what is going on half the
time. What can I do to keep up?
Just hang in there. Incomprehension is an enormous part of office life. You

will eventually develop a sense of what phrases like this mean. In fact, you
will eventually start saying this kind of rubbish yourself and someone else
will write to me about you.
In order not to interrupt people’s weekends and evenings, the managers at

our company are encouraged to schedule non-urgent emails to arrive
during work hours. The result is that at 9am on a Monday, I get bombarded
by 50 messages that all have to be answered quickly. Now my weekends are
being totally ruined by the thought of all the emails that are being lined up
for me. Can you help?
“Schedule send” is a good thing but it moves work around rather than
reducing it. So unless people stop working at the weekends altogether, their
efforts will eventually affect you. Your only real option is to tell people
what time you want the assault to begin.
I wrote to you before about my boss’s plans to have a ketamine retreat. For
the past few weeks I have been having the weirdest hallucinations. I
regularly imagine there is a skunk in the lift. Yesterday I could swear a man
came to our staff meeting with a grim expression and a Vietnamese pot-
bellied pig. Is it possible that she is drugging us without our permission?
I have good reason to believe that you are not hallucinating and that
something else explains what you are seeing. Please try not to worry about
it. And if anyone from a different office ever has problems they want to
share with me, do feel free to write. Till later in the year. MF
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/23/the-economists-agony-uncle-returns
Schumpeter
Can anyone save the world’s most

important diamond company?
De Beers is in peril
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IN FEBRUARY 1908 Joseph Asscher, a master cutter of diamonds, cleaved

the Cullinan at his workshop in Amsterdam. So tough was the South
African diamond, the largest ever found, that Mr Asscher’s first attempt
split his blade instead. The diamond industry is once again gripped by a
nail-biting separation. This time, its most important company is facing the
chop.
After rejecting a takeover proposal from BHP, the world’s biggest miner,
Anglo American announced a radical restructuring of its business on May
14th. As well as selling its coal, nickel and platinum operations, the British
mining firm will shed its 85% stake in De Beers (Botswana, where its
richest diamond mines are located, owns the rest). BHP has until May 29th
to make a new offer for Anglo. Whatever happens, De Beers’s change of
ownership will mark the end of one of its most enduring relationships—
Ernest Oppenheimer, Anglo American’s founder, joined the company’s
board in 1926. For the industry, it signals the biggest shake-up since 2000,
when De Beers abandoned its policy of trying to control diamond prices by
managing supply.
Anglo could hardly have chosen a worse time to sell its diamond operation.
De Beers’s revenue fell by a third last year and Anglo marked down the
value of its investment by $1.6bn, to $7.6bn. Sales at its April “sight”—an
event where De Beers offloads its rough diamonds—were $445m, down
18% year on year. The company blames weak consumer demand in
America and China. More worrying still is the threat from man-made
diamonds. Lab-grown stones, made using a hot, gassy process called
“chemical vapour deposition”, are essentially identical to the ones De Beers
pulls from the ground—but cost around a fifth as much.
These brilliant creations are now bulldozing parts of the diamond business.
According to Paul Zimnisky, an industry analyst, they will account for a
fifth of the value of diamond jewellery sales globally this year. Consumers
who many in the industry expected to remain loyal to the mystique of a
billion-year-old diamond are increasingly turning to the lab-grown variety.
Edahn Golan, another analyst, says that in America nearly half of the
diamond engagement rings sold this year contain a lab-grown stone.
Pandora, a big Danish jeweller, saw sales of lab-grown sparklers soar by
87%, year on year, during the first quarter.
How scared should potential buyers of De Beers be? It is tempting to see

the firm as a relic, soon to be crushed in an avalanche of innovative man-
made rocks. Lightbox, the lab-grown operation it launched in 2018, has
done little to dull the threat. Pessimists, however, risk applying an excess of
rationality to the irrational business of selling engagement rings to loved-up
blokes. To save itself De Beers must convince them to distinguish between
two indistinguishable diamonds. That may prove even harder than
persuading them to hand over thousands of dollars for a stone in the first
place. But it is not impossible.
A growing wedge in price between natural and lab-grown stones will do

some of the work. That gap will probably widen further as Chinese and
Indian newcomers compete to produce a potentially unlimited supply of
lab-grown diamonds. The cheaper these man-made rocks become relative to
the original, the less attractive they could prove to buyers who regard the
price of a ring as a gauge of their affection, or see the jewels as heirlooms to
be passed from generation to generation.
De Beers must also rediscover its flair for marketing. During the 20th
century the firm spent lavishly on ads that extolled diamonds—and not just
those sold by De Beers (though that used to be most of them). Faced with
protests against blood diamonds, it deftly promoted itself as a supplier of
the conflict-free variety. Yet its marketing muscle has atrophied. The
Natural Diamond Council, a coalition of firms formed in 2015 to pool
hawking resources, has lost the help of Alrosa, a big Russian miner under
sanctions.
“A diamond from the mine is for ever” would be a less catchy slogan than
the 1947 original. Some of De Beers’s actual attempts have been even
worse. When launching Lightbox, it promised something that “may not be
for ever, but is perfect for right now”. Such a brutally unromantic sentiment
may succeed in turning would-be grooms off a lab-grown stone. But the
company must still convince them to pay up for the original. The dripped-
out rapper conjured by the company’s boast that diamonds are “Nature’s
mic drop” does little to sell the permanence of their bling.
Get De Beers in, lad
Whoever buys the firm, then, must be capable of marketing miracles, as

well as running a mine. Such hard-hatted admen are rare, if they exist at all.
If BHP ends up buying Anglo, it would do so primarily for its copper
business, and might well divest De Beers (it shed its own diamond
operation a decade ago). Few other miners are likely to be interested as
they, too, focus on the green-metals boom. Some also speculate that the
government of Botswana, which, in addition to its stake in the company,
owns some mines jointly with De Beers, might decide to play a bigger role,
though a buyout by the government looks unlikely.
That leaves two other sorts of buyers, if De Beers is to avoid going it alone
on the public markets. Among financial investors, sovereign wealth funds
from the Middle East are the favourites. Their coffers are deep and Dubai is
fast emerging as a hub for the diamond trade owing to its proximity to India
and lax regulations. Another option would be for De Beers to become
integrated into a luxury giant. The chairman of Richemont, owner of
Cartier, has already ruled out making an offer. LVMH could conceivably
combine De Beers with Tiffany, the jewellery business it bought in 2021.
There, at least, is an outfit familiar with glittery goods—and the gaudy
prices that come with them. ■
Read more from Schumpeter, our columnist on global business:

What do Joe Biden and the boss of Starbucks have in common? (May 16th)
Can Alibaba get the magic back? (May 9th)
Does Perplexity’s “answer engine” threaten Google? (May 2nd)
Also: If you want to write directly to Schumpeter, email him at

[email protected]. And here is an explanation of how the
Schumpeter column got its name.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/22/can-anyone-save-the-worlds-most-
important-diamond-company

Finance & economics

Can the rich world escape its baby crisis?
The pro-natalist turn :: Governments are splurging on handouts to avert catastrophe
Brazil, India and Mexico are taking on China’s exports

Trade wars :: To avoid an economic shock, they are pursuing a strange mix of free trade and
protectionism
How the Chinese state aims to calm the property market

An aid to digestion :: Officials appear willing to spend public money on private capitalists
At long last, Europe’s economy is starting to grow

Soft launch :: Now for the hard part
Boaz v BlackRock: Whoever wins, closed-end funds lose

Buttonwood :: Farewell to a financial mystery
Shrinking populations mean a poorer, more fractious

world
Free exchange :: Politicians must act now to avert the worst

The pro-natalist turn
Can the rich world escape its baby

crisis?
Governments are splurging on handouts to avert catastrophe
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Flint, Michigan
THREE DECADES ago, when women now entering their 40s became
fertile, East Asian governments had reason to celebrate. If a South Korean
woman behaved the same way as her older compatriots, she would emerge
from her childbearing years with 1.7 offspring on average, down from 4.5
in 1970. Across the region, policymakers had brought down teenage
pregnancies dramatically. The drop in birth rates, which occurred over the
span of a single generation, was a stunning success. That was until it carried
on. And on.
A South Korean woman who is now becoming fertile will have on average
just 0.7 children during her childbearing years if she follows the example of
her older peers. Since 2006 the country’s government has spent around
$270bn, or just over 1% of GDP a year, on baby-making incentives, such as
tax breaks for parents, maternity care and even state-sponsored dating.
When birth rates first began to fall, few could have imagined how much
harder it would be to get women to have more children, rather than fewer.
Officials would love just some of the “missing” births back.
What began in East Asia is increasingly true elsewhere, too. The world
faces a shortage of babies. Among rich countries, only Israel is having
enough children to stop its population from shrinking, and in most places
birth rates are falling (see charts 1 and 2). As a consequence, the great and
the good are growing worried. “A nation’s strength”, warns Emmanuel
Macron, France’s president, “lies in its ability to generate a dynamic birth
rate.” Elon Musk, owner of Tesla and X, predicts the end of civilisation.
Almost every rich country is thus considering increasing its pro-natal

efforts, as are many middle-income ones. In January Mr Macron launched a
campaign to “demographically rearm” France (his weapons of choice:
fertility tests and maternity leave). Donald Trump promises “baby bonuses
for a new baby boom” if he wins re-election in November. China, long
known for its one-child policy, now offers incentives ranging from child
care to tax breaks in order to encourage parents to have three children. Will
such policies be enough to avert demographic catastrophe?
Existing measures tend to benefit professional mothers. Across Europe most
cash incentives are earnings-related—in the form of maternity payments
and income-tax breaks—rather than means-tested, which would direct them
to less affluent types. In Singapore parents receive lump-sum payments, but
only for house deposits, which are beyond poor families. Norway offers
mothers nearly a year off work, with pre-pregnancy incomes provided by
the state, as well as lots of child care.
Even before Mr Macron’s rearmament, France spent heavily on family
policies (see chart 3). Since the turn of the millennium it has disbursed 3.5-
4% of GDP a year on a mixture of handouts, services and tax breaks,
meaning it has the highest pro-natalist spend in the OECD club of mostly
rich countries. But in 2022 fewer children were born in the country than at
any point since the second world war. Similarly, South Korea has little to
show for its pro-natal expenditure: no study has been published in a
reputable journal showing a single extra birth resulting from the billions of
dollars spent.
Researchers did once find a small but enduring rise in the birth rate as a
result of policies in Nordic countries, which combine maternity leave with
generous child care. In the 1980s officials expected that the impact of these
egalitarian schemes would grow with time, as social attitudes adjusted to
make life easier for working mothers. But women in Denmark, Norway and
Sweden who started having children in 1980 turned out to have fewer than
those who started a decade earlier. In fact, it is expectations among potential
mothers that seem to have adjusted: as women became used to generous
benefits, the extra support appears to have become insufficient to prompt
extra births.
Some schemes that try to re-engineer society also backfire. In the OECD
extending maternity leave prompts women to delay having their first child,
and to have fewer over their lifetime, possibly because the increased time
off means more workplace stigma. Heterosexual couples in which a man
takes paternity leave are less likely to have another child, perhaps because
some men find themselves less suited to hands-on parenting than they
imagined.
Governments that simply put cash in the pockets of new parents, and allow
them to decide on their own priorities, may have more luck. Guy Laroque
of University College London and co-authors find that French income-tax
breaks are likely to raise the number of children a woman has. Monthly
payments in Israel will probably have similar effects, according to Alma
Cohen of Tel Aviv University and colleagues. But not only do such policies
have a relatively small impact, they are also fabulously expensive, as lots of
cash goes to parents who would have had children regardless of the
financial incentives available. Each child that resulted from Family 500+, in
the years from the Polish financial-bonus scheme’s introduction in 2016 to
2019, cost $1m. In France each extra child over the past decade has cost
twice that.
The thinking behind such policies dates back to the entrance of women into
the workforce en masse, which happened at around the same time as birth
rates started their long decline. Gary Becker, a Nobel-prizewinning
economist, suggested in the 1960s that the best way to consider children is
as goods that parents purchase according to how many they can afford, both
in terms of time and money. Easing the burden of a career and expanding
household budgets should therefore boost childbearing, he concluded.
Breeding like pandas
Yet the reality of the fall in fertility rates is more complex. For the most
part, it does not reflect changing habits among professionals, as Becker’s
theories would suggest. Instead, birth rates have collapsed because young
women are not having as many children. In 1960 American women had on
average 3.6 children. In 2023 they had 1.6. Remarkably, women aged 30
and above are having more children. It is only younger women who are
having fewer (see chart 4).
Moreover, the decline among younger women is itself concentrated among

teenagers. More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate is
explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children.
Around a third of the missing births would have been unplanned, and the
majority of them would have been to women on low incomes. As Kathryn
Edin, a sociologist at Princeton University who has been interviewing poor
women in America since the 1990s, notes: “When I first started, these
women I met were having their first kids at 16, 17. Now there is something
wrong if you have got a child under 25.” Similarly, in Britain women born
in 2000 had half as many children before they were 20 as those born in
1990. Unlike their rich counterparts, these women will probably not
compensate by having more children later in life.
Meanwhile, there is little evidence that middle-class women wish they had
many more children, which would at least suggest they might be open to
official persuasion. Today, at the age of 24, college-educated American
women want on average 2.2 children—roughly as many as previous
generations. They will now have these children a little later than before,
with the first arriving at the age of 30, compared with 28 in 2000. Although
trends suggest that they will fall short of their ideal family size, the gap may
be the same as for women in previous generations, who missed the target by
an average of 0.25 children.
Attempting to encourage middle-class women to have more children is

therefore unlikely to be successful. Economists think that such women more
confidently plan and predict their future than their less well-off peers. Their
plans tend to involve children only after a predictable path of college, work
and marriage, meaning they are less likely to react to changes in financial
circumstances. Most existing pro-natal policies are trying to do something
much more difficult than merely restoring previous fertility patterns. They
are trying to persuade women to have more children than they actually
want, and are doing so with sums that are small compared with their
lifetime earnings.
Younger and working-class women probably offer policymakers the best

chance of higher birth rates. Indeed, some programmes are now beginning
to explicitly target them. Zhejiang, a province on China’s eastern border, is
offering newly married couples a lump sum, but only if the bride is below
the age of 25. In Russia women who have a child before they turn 25 will
soon be exempt from income tax. Hungary offers a similar benefit to
mothers who have their first child before 30—one of only two policies in
Viktor Orban’s pro-natal push that economists at the Central European
University think has created additional births. Although small families are
becoming more common almost everywhere, women who start young still
tend to have more children over their lifetime, which is why Messrs Orban,
Putin and Xi are focusing on them.
Other evidence shows that working-class women’s fertility is more

responsive to financial circumstances than that of their richer peers. In
America and Europe birth rates among poor women fell sharply after the
global financial crisis of 2007-09, for instance. College-educated women
were more likely to stick to their plans and have children anyway. That is,
in part, because professionals delay having children until they have the
resources required to outsource child-rearing to nannies and nurseries,
making them less reliant on state provision, which was cut back as
governments reduced public spending.
Even existing rich-world pro-natal policies have outsize effects on low-

income women. State-run child-care services often represent a standard of
child care that mothers would not otherwise be able to obtain. Data from
Israel’s Bureau of Statistics suggest that from 1999 to 2005 the country’s
child subsidy resulted in a greater fertility boost for low-income women
than their richer peers. In Norway and Finland the modest boost that pro-
natalist cash gave to birth rates was driven by women with the lowest
incomes. By contrast, when French middle-class families’ child tax credits
were cut in half in 2014, there was no change in their birth rate.
Cash transfers are simply a bigger deal to poor households. In January Rx
Kids, a nonprofit run by a group of doctors, started one of America’s first
unconditional cash-transfer programmes in Flint, Michigan, a hard-up city.
Under the terms of the programme, every local mother is entitled to $7,500,
which is handed out in instalments from when she first falls pregnant to her
child’s first birthday. For the average enrollee, who makes less than $10,000
a year, this represents a hefty 75% increase in her income. The
programme’s most important aim is to alleviate child poverty, says Mona
Hanna-Attisha, who runs the charity, but local officials hope it will boost
the city’s birth rate, too.
At a get-together for participants, young mothers laugh when asked if

$7,500 would be enough of an incentive to encourage them to have another
child; after all, low-income American households typically spend $20,000
in a baby’s first year of life. But such money may well have an impact at the
margin. As one mother puts it, extra cash “might make me keep one I
wasn’t sure I was going to have”. In America poor women are much more
likely than middle-class women to cite financial hardship as a reason for an
abortion.
Birth rates in America, Europe and East Asia have fallen far enough that not
even appealing to women whose fertility reacts most strongly to incentives
is going to stop populations from shrinking. But by 2050 more than three-
quarters of the world’s women will be reproducing below replacement rate,
according to forecasts published by the Lancet, a medical journal. Even if
governments are unable to turbocharge birth rates overnight, they will not
stand idle. Pro-natal policies are only going to gather momentum.
Missing storks
Will governments other than the likes of Hungary’s and Russia’s start to
target incentives at younger, poorer women? Childbearing produces positive
externalities for society. As the sclerotic economies of East Asia are
discovering, shrinking populations mean less innovation, manpower and tax
revenue. Parents are expected to shoulder most of the cost of children,
which is a particular burden for poorer ones. And political calculation may
come into play. Few governments lose votes because their handouts are too
generous.
Yet some considerations should give politicians pause. The extra children
produced by targeted policies will probably not turn into the productivity-
boosting professionals that governments most desire. Only 8% of the
children of American-born non-college-educated parents are themselves
expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree, and during his or her adult life the
average high-school graduate boosts the public finances by less than a tenth
of the net contribution of a college graduate. Therefore the financial
benefits of pro-natal policies aimed at working-class women would
probably be overwhelmed by their costs, given the expense associated with
even well-targeted programmes. The best hope for such policies would lie
in boosting the life outcomes of extra children. Early evidence from trials
such as the one in Flint and covid-19 assistance programmes suggests that
cash transfers lift children’s performance in early schooling and improve
access to health care.
Another consideration for politicians is the morality of such interventions.

Policymakers sought to break the norm of young motherhood for a reason.
Each year a woman goes without childbearing, her expected lifetime
earnings increase. A first-time American mother in her mid-30s will earn
more than twice what she would have earned had she had her first child
aged 22. Women who give birth aged 15 to 19 are more likely to develop
health problems; their first child is more likely to drop out of high school
and to grow up without having both parents at home. In Flint many mothers
express regret that they did not manage to “get things sorted” before they
started to have children. “Hang on,” says one outside a community centre.
“The idea is that I get paid just enough to make me have another kid? But
that’s all that changes? Where doing it [raising a kid] right, later on, it’s all
me? That doesn’t seem right.” The 26-year-old mother of three leans back,
and laughs. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and
markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2024/05/21/can-the-rich-world-escape-its-baby-crisis

Trade wars
Brazil, India and Mexico are taking

on China’s exports
To avoid an economic shock, they are pursuing a strange mix of free trade
and protectionism
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Delhi
AT LAST, IT seemed time for a manufacturing take-off. Having struggled

to compete with China’s industrial might, other emerging markets stood
ready to benefit as their rival’s labour costs surged and rising tensions
between it and the West pushed firms to look for new factory locations. Last
year foreign direct investment into China fell to a 30-year low.
But China has started to fight back. To reverse an economic slowdown and
cement its control over global supply chains, its leaders have launched an
investment spree in high-tech goods, such as batteries, electric vehicles and
other green devices. Weak domestic demand for traditional products, such
as cars, chemicals and steel, mean they are also flooding global markets.
The average price of Chinese manufactured exports fell by nearly 10% from
2022 to 2023. China’s export volumes have surged to near-record levels.
On a recent visit to Beijing, Janet Yellen, America’s treasury secretary, said
that the West would not accept a flood of cheap goods. A few weeks later,
on May 14th, the Biden administration unleashed a wave of tariffs covering
everything from solar cells to syringes. Electric vehicles were hit with a
100% levy. China has other options for its exports, however—namely
emerging markets that value friendly relations with it.
As a result, emerging-market policymakers are worried. “The biggest threat
of Chinese overcapacity is to developing countries,” says Jorge Guajardo,
Mexico’s former ambassador to China. In his country, which is proud of its
car industry, the market share of Chinese-made vehicles has grown from
next to nothing in 2016 to a fifth. Emerging economies are thus introducing
import restrictions on Chinese goods, while accelerating a push for free
trade elsewhere. Their success depends on the sustainability of China’s
approach, as well as the deftness of their own.
Start with the free-trade side of things. Countries with manufacturing

ambitions are desperate for access to big markets, where leaders are
themselves keen to reduce reliance on China. In February Chile signed a
trade deal with the EU. Mercosur, a customs union including Argentina,
Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, has penned an agreement with Singapore
and is eyeing pacts with Japan and South Korea. Having failed to complete
a deal in the seven years to 2021, India has since signed four.
This emerging-market attempt to lower trade barriers with the West is

happening at the same time as they are being raised with China. Officials
see this as necessary to protect domestic manufacturers until China’s
subsidy wave subsides. “In the [late 2000s], Mexican companies would ask
for protections and the government would tell them…‘well, you have to
learn to compete’,” says Mr Guajardo. “That is no longer the case.” Mexico
raised tariffs on 544 products in April. It has slapped an 80% levy on certain
steel imports.
Yet some Chinese goods are so cheap they have the lowest prices even with
sky-high tariffs. Moreover, some products sneak past levies because they
are packaged in third countries. That is why non-tariff barriers and import
bans are also proliferating. India has launched anti-dumping probes into a
variety of products, including unframed glass mirrors and fasteners, which
it says will protect its small and medium-sized businesses. It has also filed
the most anti-dumping cases of any country in the world. China is
retaliating. Sumant Sinha, boss of ReNew, an Indian green-tech firm, says it
is even quietly blocking India’s access to solar equipment.
Unfortunately for emerging markets, China is now at the technological

frontier of manufacturing, providing another reason to avoid antagonising
its leaders. In March Cap SA, Chile’s largest steel producer, decided to
wind down its mills, blaming Chinese import competition. On April 24th
the Chilean government imposed temporary anti-dumping tariffs of 25-
34%, prompting Cap to suspend its decision. But Cap says the tariffs would
need to stay in place for longer to keep its factories open, something to
which the government is reluctant to commit. Even in India, where relations
with China are frosty, plenty of officials recognise that Chinese investment
is crucial for manufacturing.
A better alternative to flat-out protectionism may be to copy China’s

strategy of coaxing firms to invest locally. Thailand has been aggressively
courting Chinese battery firms through an incentive scheme, and two big
cell manufacturers are expected to begin production this year. BYD, a
Chinese electric-vehicle maker, is building factories in Brazil and Hungary.
Foreign direct investment into China may have plummeted, but Chinese
investment into other countries is at an eight-year high.
Can this cocktail of strategies work? One factor is how long China’s export
surge lasts. “It cannot be sustained,” reckons the boss of a big manufacturer
with plants in China and India. He adds that the production costs for his
Indian plants have recently become competitive with his Chinese ones,
meaning a slow shift in production is inevitable. Others are more
concerned. “I don’t know if China can do this for ever. But they’ve been
doing this for the last 25 years,” says Maximo Vedoya, boss of Ternium,
Mexico’s largest steel producer.
Even if China were to reorient its economy, emerging markets would be

wise not to place too much hope in manufacturing growth. Western
countries may welcome more of their exports, but only up to a point. The
West is in the midst of its own subsidy spree to revive domestic
manufacturing. And American tariffs on Chinese goods are limited to just a
few categories that count for $18bn in current imports; in other areas,
Chinese competition will remain robust. The manufacturing take-off may
have to wait a while longer. ■
economics/2024/05/23/brazil-india-and-mexico-are-taking-on-chinas-exports

An aid to digestion
How the Chinese state aims to calm

the property market
Officials appear willing to spend public money on private capitalists
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Hong Kong
THREE DECADES ago much of the housing in China’s cities belonged to

state-owned enterprises, which provided homes to workers at low rents. A
lot has changed since then. China is now blessed, if that is the right word,
with a sprawling commercial property market, which has produced vast
numbers of flats and equal amounts of drama. Since the height of the last
boom in 2020, sales have dropped by more than half. To try to put a floor
under the market, China’s government has turned to a new, old solution. It
wants state-owned enterprises to step in to buy unsold property and turn it
into affordable housing.
The policy was announced on May 17th after an unusual video conference
by He Lifeng, China’s economic tsar. The country’s central bank will offer
cheap loans worth up to 300bn yuan ($42bn) to 21 banks, which will in turn
lend to eligible enterprises owned by city governments. These firms will use
the money to buy finished but unsold flats from property developers,
including private-sector ones. The flats can then be either sold or rented at
below-market rates to low-income buyers.
Excitement followed the announcement. Some observers took it as a sign

that ministers have overcome their reluctance to bail out irresponsible
developers. They hope the state will function as a buyer of last resort to
stabilise the property market, even if that entails public money flowing to
private capitalists.
Moreover, the policy was only one jab in a “combination punch”, as Eva Yi
of Huatai Securities, a brokerage, has put it. The other wallops include
measures to stimulate private demand, such as permitting lower mortgage
interest rates and downpayments. There was a new push for local
governments to buy back idle land from developers, with the proceeds of
special bonds that were previously reserved for other purposes. Officials
also exhorted banks to hasten lending to a “whitelist” of viable but
unfinished real-estate projects. China must “fight the tough battle” to deal
with unfinished housing projects and “promote key tasks, such
as...digesting the existing commercial housing,” said Mr He, in a
combination punch of metaphors.
This flurry of announcements suggests that China’s central government is at

least tackling the property crisis with greater urgency and a wider range of
tools. But the central-bank facility itself will make only a modest
contribution to solving China’s property crisis. For one thing, it is too small.
Flats available for sale at the end of April were worth about 3.9trn yuan,
according to Huatai. Such properties are, in any case, a smaller problem
than the stock of unfinished, pre-sold properties or the overhang of finished,
sold but unoccupied flats that already exist on the market. Robert Ciemniak
of Real Estate Foresight, a research firm, estimates that in recent months,
sales of existing homes in the secondary market have exceeded sales of new
homes for the first time, at least in the nine cities for which reliable data
exist.
The policy also has many moving parts. Before the state can start buying
properties, city governments must buy in to the central bank’s scheme. In
theory, the facility allows them to prop up local developers and expand
affordable housing in one fell swoop. But in beleaguered cities where
unsold inventories are high, the demand for affordable housing will
probably be weak. Other central-bank schemes, including a similar tool for
the purchase of rental housing, have attracted little interest.
A struggling property market ought to expand the supply of affordable

housing automatically, through the magic of lower prices. In China,
however, developers in most of the country are not allowed to reduce prices
too sharply. Local governments worry about the prospect of protests from
existing homeowners, who paid much more for the same flats. With luck,
the central bank’s scheme will succeed in segmenting the market, allowing
property developers to offer realistically low prices to designated state-
owned enterprises, without causing too much uproar. Prices may be truly
flexible only when the state is paying them. Three decades into the
commercialisation of real estate, Chinese property still defies market forces.
■
economics/2024/05/23/how-the-chinese-state-aims-to-calm-the-property-market

Soft launch
At long last, Europe’s economy is

starting to grow
Now for the hard part
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
THERE IS ONLY one problem with chatter about Europe’s “soft landing”:
its economy never truly flew. Whereas America’s growth has consistently
amazed, Europe’s has been miserable. Exclude Ireland, where statistics are
distorted by multinational firms minimising tax, and the EU’s GDP has
risen by about 3% since 2019, compared with a 9% increase in America.
Yet Europe’s outlook is undoubtedly improving. Data published on May

15th show that the euro zone grew by 0.3% in the first quarter of this year
against the previous quarter. This was the first significant growth in six
consecutive quarters and enough for the currency bloc to emerge from a
recession. The same day the European Commission upgraded its forecasts
for EU growth. “We believe we have turned a corner,” cheered a
commissioner.
Inflation has been brought to heel, too. Figures published on May 17th
show that the annual rate of price growth in the euro zone remained steady
at 2.4% in April, only a smidgen above the European Central Bank’s (ECB)
2% target. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices,
fell from 2.9% to 2.7%, meaning that disinflation is being driven by more
than just the collapse of gas prices, which have fallen to around a quarter of
the level they reached in 2022. Encouragingly, this has been achieved
without extra joblessness. The EU’s unemployment rate was 6.1% in the
first quarter of this year, just above its lowest since the turn of the
millennium.
Europe’s south—traditionally its laggard—has grown faster than the north,
with Italy outpacing both France and Germany. In part, this is because of
the EU’s recovery fund, which was launched during the covid-19 pandemic
but is still pumping out funds. Southern Europe also “does better when
inflation is a bit higher”, notes Claus Vistesen of Pantheon
Macroeconomics, a consultancy, since rising prices make debts more
bearable. Meanwhile, northern Europe suffered more from higher gas prices
after Russia invaded Ukraine.
With inflation less of a problem, monetary policy can now support Europe’s
recovery. A handful of the continent’s central banks have already cut
interest rates. Hungary, which started raising them earlier than most
countries, has now lowered them eight times. In the Czech Republic rates
have fallen to 5.25% from 7% in December. Sweden’s Riksbank, a
bellwether for the ECB, cut for the first time on May 8th. Markets expect
the ECB to lower its policy rate three times this year, starting on June 5th.
By contrast, they expect America’s Federal Reserve to cut just once.
Companies are taking advantage of this transatlantic divergence. Sales of

“reverse Yankee” bonds, as euro-denominated debt sold by American
issuers is known, have rocketed. According to Bank of America, if the trend
of the first four months of 2024 continues for the rest of year, sales of such
debt could eclipse the $88bn seen in 2019, when negative interest rates in
Europe contrasted sharply with a post-financial-crisis peak of 2.5% in
America. Many of those bonds—issued with five-year lifespans—now also
need to be refinanced. The debt is mostly used to fund American firms’
European operations.
A real economic take-off would require higher productivity and genuine

investment. Much of the recovery has so far come from domestic demand:
Europeans are in employment and lower energy prices have increased their
spending power. At the same time, however, productivity, as measured by
GDP per worker, has fallen since 2022. Unless workers become more
efficient, Europe will in all likelihood fall still further behind America.
Indeed, the IMF forecasts that European GDP per person will drop from
68% of America’s in 2019 to 66% by 2029. The continent has emerged
from the gloom of the past few years. Now for the hard part. ■
economics/2024/05/20/at-long-last-europes-economy-is-starting-to-grow

Buttonwood
Boaz v BlackRock: Whoever wins,

closed-end funds lose
Farewell to a financial mystery
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
AS ONE OF the leaders of the passive-investing revolution, BlackRock is

usually a disruptive force in the financial world. But the asset-management
giant’s battle with Saba Capital, an activist fund, has cast it in an unfamiliar
role: as besieged incumbent. Ten of BlackRock’s investment vehicles,
known as closed-end funds, are in Saba’s sights.
The funds—worth nearly $10bn based on current share prices—run at a

steep discount to the value of the assets in their portfolios. Like publicly
listed firms, closed-end funds sell shares in an initial public offering and
trade on secondary markets. Since they do not offer new shares to incoming
investors, as mutual and exchange-traded funds do, their share prices are
able to drift far from the value of their assets. Boaz Weinstein, Saba’s
founder, wants BlackRock’s funds to offer to buy back shares from
investors, pointing to a history of poor returns. He argues that if investors
could exit at the full value of their assets, some $1.4bn in value would be
unlocked. Saba is also promoting a slate of nominees to the funds’ boards at
shareholder meetings scheduled across the second half of June. These
representatives will, it says, negotiate for lower fees.
In this sense, the battle is typical of those between activists and their targets.
But in another sense, it represents a bigger struggle. The markdown that has
activist investors licking their lips has long preoccupied some of finance’s
best-known researchers. Closed-end funds, known as investment trusts in
Britain, tend to trade at a large discount to their net asset value (NAV) over
long periods. At the end of last year closed-end equity funds were 10%
cheaper than their underlying assets. On average they have been 7%
cheaper since 1995.
Persistent discounts violate one of the fundamental assumptions of efficient

financial markets: the law of one price. This holds that two identical assets
should converge in price, and that long-term differences must reflect
intervention or friction. Behavioural economists, such as Richard Thaler, a
Nobel prizewinner, hold that the long-standing nature of closed-end-fund
discounts is an argument against the rationality of markets. As far back as
1949, Benjamin Graham, an author and investor, called the discount “an
expensive monument erected to the inertia and stupidity of stockholders”.
BlackRock has pushed back against the activists, arguing that the interests
of the funds’ shareholders risk being trampled by people looking for a quick
buck, who will harm the funds’ investment strategies. But whoever wins the
battle, closed-end funds seem likely to lose eventually. They have found
themselves under increasing pressure in recent years. Other specialist
activists, including Bulldog Investors and Karpus Investment Management,
have deployed Saba-like strategies against a range of closed-end funds. This
year Elliott Investment Management, a larger activist fund, successfully
pursued a British investment trust.
Advocates for closed-end funds, including the funds themselves and
industry bodies, say that this relentless activism is deterring new fund
launches. Indeed, no new ones were established last year, and their overall
number has declined every year over the past decade. But there are other
important factors at play. In recent years, for instance, higher interest rates
have lowered returns on closed-end funds, which often take on leverage to
magnify returns.
More straightforwardly, critics are also winning the argument about the
value offered by such investment vehicles. In the early 1950s, just after
Graham penned his attack, closed-end funds held assets worth almost 70%
of those in mutual funds. As late as the mid-1970s, the ratio was 25%. Now
closed-end funds are outgunned not just by mutual funds but by exchange-
traded ones, too. Among the three categories, they hold just 1% of total
assets. Even before adjusting for inflation, their assets have not increased in
value in 19 years.
For academics interested in solving the puzzle of closed-end funds, their

dwindling size is a slightly unsatisfying conclusion. Although it has taken
longer than half a century, the steady decline in the assets held in such funds
indicates that the market has become a little more rational than suggested
by Graham’s peppery analysis in the 1940s. With no sign that the discounts
are fading, investors have instead voted with their feet. Whether Saba or
BlackRock ultimately triumphs, closed-end funds and the puzzle
concerning them have become a marginal part of finance.■
Read more from Buttonwood, our columnist on financial markets:

Joe Biden, master oil trader (May 16th)
Banks, at least, are making money from a turbulent world (May 9th)
What campus protesters get wrong about divestment (May 2nd)
Also: How the Buttonwood column got its name

economics/2024/05/23/boaz-v-blackrock-whoever-wins-closed-end-funds-lose

Free exchange
Shrinking populations mean a

poorer, more fractious world
Politicians must act now to avert the worst
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IF CURRENT FORECASTS are accurate, 2064 will be the first year in

centuries when fewer babies are born than people die. Birth rates in India
will fall to below the level seen in America last year. Even with
immigration and successful pro-natal policies, America’s population will
only have a little bit of growth left. By 2100 there will be many fewer
migrants left to attract. The world’s fertility rate will hit 1.7. Just two
Pacific islands and four African countries will manage to reproduce above
replacement level.
Sooner or later, therefore, every big economy will collide with a
demographic wall. The bill from pensions and hospitals will pile on fiscal
pressure. Sapped of workers and ideas, economic growth could collapse
while public debt balloons. Just how catastrophic the situation becomes
depends on whether policymakers maintain budgetary discipline, withstand
pressure from angry older voters and, crucially, are willing to inflict pain on
populations now in order to save future generations from more later on.
America and Europe at least have longer to prepare than East Asia, which is
already starting to feel the strain. South Korea has been ageing for a while,
but only in the past four years has its population started to decline. It will
now continue to fall for decades, as larger generations die off. By 2036
twice as many Koreans will be over the age of 65 as under 18. China will
reach a similar point by 2040. America will take until 2100 to catch up.
Still, rich countries will need to spend 21% of GDP a year on old folk by
2050, up from 16% in 2015, according to the IMF. A quarter of that will go
on pensions. The rest will be required for health- and social-care provision.
It is possible that artificial intelligence and pharmaceutical advances will
cut the budget. But recent history suggests that such advances are more
likely to raise it.
The exact size of the demographic hit does not just depend on how quickly
populations age, but also on what they expect from the state. In this regard,
South Korea has a somewhat bleak advantage. The IMF reckons that its
debt-to-GDP ratio, a modest 55%, is unsustainable in the long run and the
government is still struggling to get its deficit below a 3% target. Yet few of
its elderly were promised state pensions. Instead, nearly 40% of them are in
poverty, the highest rate in the OECD club of mostly rich countries.
China is more likely to buckle under the pressure. By 2050 the country’s
leaders will have 100m pensioners on their hands—all of whom have been
promised a basic state pension. Already, one-third of local pension
providers are running deficits. Economists reckon that the central
government’s state-pension fund will run dry by 2035, unless officials take
action. Europe’s generous pensions, and America’s growing social
provision, mean that the West risks a similar fate, albeit at a slightly later
date.
The size of the hit will also depend on how economies adapt to a decrepit
world. Take government borrowing. Its sustainability reflects the gap
between interest rates that prevail when inflation is stable—the so-called
neutral rate—and economic growth, which boosts tax receipts. Ageing
populations bring gloomy prospects for growth. Research shows that older
workers tend to be less mentally agile, and therefore less productive.
Shrinking populations could be even worse for growth, which economists
believe requires the constant generation of new ideas. Charles Jones of
Stanford University has modelled what happens in a world where there are
ever fewer people to dream up innovations. The total stock of ideas, he
finds, will grow more and more slowly. Economic growth will come to halt;
living standards will stall.
What is less clear is whether interest rates will be low enough to keep a lid
on debt-to-GDP ratios. Perhaps the neutral rate, which incentivises an equal
amount of savings as investment in an economy, will track economic
growth, as many expect. A proliferation of old folk means more people
saving for retirement. And a paucity of investments from young
entrepreneurs means that these savers will have little choice but to accept
lower rates. Yet Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics and
Manoj Pradhan of Talking Head Macroeconomics, a research firm, disagree
that this is the most likely outcome. They think a spending spree by grey
consumers, fuelled by government handouts to the old, could drive up the
neutral rate of interest. Because governments would then struggle to repay
even their existing debts, they will resort to inflating them away.
Over the hill
There are steps Western governments could take to soften the blow.
Credible monetary policy, which reassures investors that central bankers
will quash spending binges prompted by ageing populations, would help. If
governments were to rein in deficits in anticipation of future danger, that
would make an even bigger difference. Pensions will have to be cut back as
public finances adjust to longer lifespans. The IMF reckons that rich-world
governments will need to raise the retirement age by five years by the end
of the century, even as increases in life expectancy slow.
These reforms would be unpopular now. Who wants to be the politician to
inform millions of retired bureaucrats, soldiers and teachers that their
pensions are being slashed in order to look after future generations? But in
years to come, when the grey vote carries even more sway, they will
become just about impossible—making it all the more important for
politicians to act sooner rather than later. Although assessing the impact of
shrinking populations can sometimes feel like peering into a distant future,
the threat is already playing on the mind of leaders such as Emmanuel
Macron, France’s president. Last year he risked his position by proposing
reform of the country’s pension system, and faced protests that were
widespread even by French standards. Other politicians will have taken
note. ■
Read more from Free exchange, our column on economics:

Diego Maradona offers central bankers enduring lessons (May 16th)
Could America and its allies club together to weaken the dollar? (May 9th)
Working from home and the US-Europe divide (May 1st)
economics/2024/05/23/shrinking-populations-mean-a-poorer-more-fractious-world

Science & technology

A new age of sail begins
Easy breezy :: By harnessing wind power, high-tech sails can help cut marine pollution
The AirFish is a fast ferry that will fly above the waves
Marine technology :: It takes inspiration from the “Caspian Sea Monster”
A promising non-invasive technique can help paralysed

limbs move
Charging ahead :: All that’s needed is electricity and exercise
It is dangerously easy to hack the world’s phones

Cyber security :: A system at the heart of global telecommunications is woefully insecure

Easy breezy
A new age of sail begins

By harnessing wind power, high-tech sails can help cut marine pollution
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IN 1926 AN unusual vessel arrived in New York after crossing the Atlantic.
This was a converted sailing ship renamed Baden-Baden. Its two masts had
been torn down and a pair of 15-metre-high revolving cylinders were
mounted on its deck instead. Known as Flettner rotors, after Anton Flettner,
their German inventor, the rotors worked like sails. Not only were they
extremely efficient, allowing the vessel to consume less than half the fuel
an oil-powered ship of a similar size would use, they also let the craft tack
closer to an oncoming wind than its original canvas rigging allowed. The
rotors were hailed as a great achievement at the time (praised by Albert
Einstein, among others) before cheap oil caused interest to wane.
More recently, the cost of oil has been rising—and not just financially.
Ships, which transport more than 80% of the world’s goods, account for
some 3% of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions, a similar fraction to
aviation. Ports are, therefore, imposing emission limits on marine craft. The
International Maritime Organisation has set targets to reduce emissions to
net-zero by “around” 2050. The imprecision arises because at present there
is no easy way of getting there.
A return to sail has been heralded before as a way to cut pollution. It has
led, in recent years, to renewed interest in Flettner rotors as well as other
wind technologies, including rigid sails, giant kites and tall structures called
suction sails. Yet the marine industry, like many of its vessels, can take a
long time to change course. After a period in which progress was limited to
fanciful sketches and small-scale trials, shipowners are now starting to
place orders to retrofit existing cargo ships and build wind-assisted vessels.
A new age of sail may be in the offing.
Wind is particularly suitable as a form of auxiliary power for larger deep-

sea vessels. Battery technology cannot at present power much beyond small
craft operating on short routes. And though alternative fuels made via green
processes, such as biofuels, hydrogen and ammonia, have the necessary
oomph, little infrastructure exists to make and distribute them. Initially, at
least, they will be expensive. Hence, even for ships that use alternative
fuels, harnessing the wind will help reduce costs and emissions further.
Blast from the past
Flettner rotors remain an attractive solution. As the wind flows around the
revolving cylinders, the rotation creates an area of high air pressure on one
side and lower pressure on the other. Thanks to a phenomenon known as the
Magnus effect (which also helps spinning balls curve), this pressure
differential creates a force at right angles to the wind direction. On a
horizontal aircraft wing, it generates lift. On a vertical rotor, it helps push a
ship forward. The rotors can be turned at different speeds and in different
directions allowing them to be “trimmed” to the prevailing wind conditions.
All this is done automatically, so no additional crew are needed.
Among the companies supplying modern-day Flettner rotors is Norsepower,
a firm based in Finland. Earlier this year it won what it says is the biggest
ever wind-propulsion deal, with an order to fit six 35-metre rotors to each
of three new cargo ships being built for Louis Dreyfus Armateurs, a French
shipping owner. The vessels will be chartered to Airbus, a European
aerospace group. Each will carry enough partially constructed aircraft,
made up of fuselages, wings and tails, to be assembled into six A320
airliners at Airbus’s factories in America.
Norsepower’s Flettner rotors
Norsepower has already fitted eight ships with rotors and has a backlog of
orders worth €30m ($32m). The ships in service show a reduction in fuel
consumption, and thus a similar drop in emissions, of between 5% and
25%, says Tuomas Riski, the firm’s outgoing CEO. Each rotor costs around
€1m, which he says can be repaid in fuel savings over three to ten years.
While roughly similar savings are promised by other auxiliary wind-

powered systems, exact comparisons are difficult because much depends on
factors including wind conditions and the type of ship, as well as its speed
and course. If companies wanted to rethink their logistics, Mr Riski reckons
captains could idle their engines most of the time. Rather than sticking to
set schedules, voyages could be planned along routes with the most
favourable winds, much as they used to be in the age of sail. This might
mean non-perishable goods take a bit longer to arrive, but shippers would
be rewarded with a much lower carbon footprint.
Getting a second wind
Other old ideas are being revived. In 1985 another unusual craft sailed into
New York. This was the Alcyone, a research vessel built by Jacques-Yves
Cousteau, a French oceanographer and film-maker. It was fitted with a pair
of suction sails: tall cylinders fitted with electric fans to draw air into
perforated strips down their sides. These suck the airflow closer to that side,
reducing drag and creating up to seven times more force than a
conventional sail, according to bound4blue, a company based in Cantabria,
northern Spain, which produces a modern version it calls eSAILS.
Founded in 2014 by three aerospace engineers, bound4blue counts Bertrand

Charrier, who helped Cousteau develop the Alcyone, among its advisers.
The firm has already installed a number of eSAILS, including three 22-
metre versions retrofitted to the Ville de Bordeaux, a roll-on-roll-off
transport ship also chartered to Airbus. The company has five other
installations in progress, including a chemical tanker. Again, fuel savings
depend on the type of vessel being powered and on the details of how it is
operated. The company is having third-party evaluations done to establish
typical performance figures.
The Ville de Bordeaux
The eSAILS could be used on almost any large marine vessel, says Dana
Camps, the firm’s head of marketing, although they might have to be
modified for some ships. As the deck of a container ship, for example, is
usually piled high with boxes, which need regular handling, any auxiliary
wind-power system needs to avoid getting in the way. Helpfully, rotors and
suction sails can be fitted with lowering mechanisms, which are also useful
when passing under low bridges. Similarly unobtrusive systems could also
be installed on cruise liners, which now resemble giant floating apartment
blocks, but the payback period would be longer because they spend a
greater proportion of their time with their passengers relaxing in ports.
Some large vessels continue to hoist sails, albeit of the rigid variety used on
modern racing yachts. These, too, work like vertical aircraft wings. One
ship fitted with rigid sails is Pyxis Ocean, a bulk carrier owned by the
Mitsubishi Corporation. The five-year-old vessel was retrofitted in China
with two 37.5-metre-high sails called WindWings, designed by BAR
Technologies, a marine-engineering firm based in Portsmouth on Britain’s
south coast.
The Pyxis Ocean has been chartered by Cargill, a giant foods group, to
carry grain. After six months at sea the WindWings have cut fuel
consumption by about 15%, although the company reckons three sails could
cut average fuel use by 30% or more. Oceanbird, a Swedish company, is
installing six giant wing sails on the Orcelle Wind, a new vehicle-carrier
with a capacity for some 7,000 cars, due to enter service in 2027. Oceanbird
reckons the sails could deliver 50-60% lower emissions compared with
conventional vehicle-carriers.
Retrofitting WindWings
Another option is to tow ships along with giant kite sails, similar to the
parafoil kites used by kiteboarders. In February Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, a
big Japanese shipowner also known as K Line, acquired a French startup
called Airseas, which has been developing a kite sail it calls Seawing. These
can be launched and retrieved automatically from a ship’s bow, minimising
their on-deck footprint. Airseas tested a Seawing last year on a K Line cargo
ship. They are expected to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by some 20%,
says K Line.
With some 50,000 large cargo vessels of various sorts plying the high seas,
each with an average life expectancy of 30 years or so, it is going to take
some time for the shipping industry to clean up its act. But clean it up it
must. If their vessels continue to belch fumes then shipowners will soon
find themselves unable to operate within many ports. Though the number of
vessels returning to wind power remains small for now, this technology
clearly has the wind in its sails. ■
Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science coverage,

sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. For more
coverage of climate change, sign up for the Climate Issue, our fortnightly
subscriber-only newsletter, or visit our climate-change hub.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2024/05/21/a-new-age-of-sail-begins

Marine technology
The AirFish is a fast ferry that will

fly above the waves
It takes inspiration from the “Caspian Sea Monster”
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IN THE 1960s, during the height of the cold war, American spy satellites
spotted an unusual stubby-winged craft at a Soviet naval base on the
Caspian sea. Was it a boat, was it a plane? Dubbed the “Caspian Sea
Monster”, it turned out to be a heavily armed naval craft some 100 metres
long designed to attack submarines and aircraft carriers.
The Ekranoplans, as they were called, relied on an aerodynamic effect

called wing-in-ground (WIG) to avoid radar by flying just above the surface
of the water. This phenomenon exploits an area of higher pressure created
between the lower surface of the wing and the ground, reducing drag and
giving the wing more lift. (It also explains why some planes coming in to
land appear to their pilots to “float” along when just above the runway.)
While various military WIG craft have appeared over the years, they remain
a rarity. That may change as a range of smaller versions, called AirFish, are
launched as high-speed ferries.
The AirFish are being built by ST Engineering AirX, part of a big

Singaporean technology group. Eurasia Mobility Solutions, a Turkish
company, has placed a preliminary order for ten, along with options for ten
more. These versions are the AirFish 8, which carry two crew and eight
passengers, and will be used to transport tourists between Mediterranean
coastal resorts. As they do not require a runway or a port, the AirFish can
operate directly from a small dock or even a beach. They are capable of
cruising at 70 knots (130kph), although they can dash at up to 120 knots.
As to whether these unusual craft count as boats or planes, marine

authorities have concluded they are a type of boat, says Leon Tan, AirX’s
general manager. The company is now seeking certification for passenger
use. The AirFish 8 will also be less expensive to build and operate than the
seaplanes and helicopters it will compete with. For one thing, the AirFish 8
will use a V8 car engine, which is more fuel-efficient and cheaper to run
than an aircraft engine. Such an engine can also be converted to a hybrid-
electric system.
AirFish of different sizes are possible. The company already has a two-
seater version, even if Mr Tan thinks that would be a niche market. Once
the technology becomes more familiar, though, he reckons larger AirFish
carrying a couple of dozen passengers are likely to be built. Giants the size
of the Ekranoplans, however, would probably be monstrously
uneconomical. ■

sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
technology/2024/05/22/the-airfish-is-a-fast-ferry-that-will-fly-above-the-waves

Charging ahead
A promising non-invasive
technique can help paralysed limbs
move
All that’s needed is electricity and exercise
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
FOURTEEN YEARS ago, Melanie Reid, a journalist, fell off a horse and
broke her neck. The injury to her spinal cord left her paralysed, limiting the
function of her four limbs and torso—a condition known as tetraplegia. For
years her left hand was incapable of either sensation or motion. Now,
however, Ms Reid can not only move that hand; she can also, as she puts it,
practise the “right to put my hair in a ponytail”.
Ms Reid’s remarkable—if incomplete—recovery required neither surgery
nor medication, but, rather, exercise and electricity. She was one of 60
patients from test sites across three countries to receive a novel form of
non-invasive spinal-cord stimulation, known as ARCEX, pioneered by
Grégoire Courtine of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and
colleagues. The results of the trial were published in Nature Medicine on
May 20th.
Muscles in the human body move when electrical signals reach them from
the brain via the spinal cord. In the case of reflexive movements, the signal
comes directly from the spinal cord, bypassing the brain altogether. If the
nerves in the spinal cord are damaged, the internal electrical circuit is
broken and paralysis can result.
It is well established that applying electricity to the remaining nerves can

boost the signal from the brain and cause paralysed limbs to move.
Researchers therefore would place surgical implants directly on the spinal
cord, as this yielded the best results. But several studies in recent years have
shown that non-invasive techniques work just as well, if not better. If
electricity is pulsed through electrodes placed on the skin, some muscle
function can be restored without the need for incisions, needles or
hospitalisation. Dr Courtine’s latest study is the largest and most robust so
far to demonstrate this technique.
Physical rehabilitation remains the primary form of treatment for

tetraplegia, to strengthen and maintain existing function. For patients whose
ability to handle objects and experience sensation is severely impaired, this
may involve passive stretching of muscles. For those who retain at least
some movement and feeling, which was true for most participants in Dr
Courtine’s study, exercises involve targeted weight and resistance training.
These exercises may help patients perform basic tasks, but only marginally
affect sensation and muscle control. To test how effective their electrical
intervention was compared with exercise alone, Dr Courtine’s team first
asked all participants to undergo two months of physical rehabilitation.
Then they underwent an additional two months of rehabilitation
supplemented by electrical stimulation with the ARCEX device.
Researchers placed two electrodes on the back of a patient’s neck—above
and below the site of injury—and two more by the collarbone or hipbone to
close the circuit. A current was then applied. Patients then carried on with
their existing exercise regimen, completing tasks to improve movement and
grip strength.
Positively buzzing
In the two months of rehabilitation alone, the functional abilities of patients

initially increased, then flattened off. With electrical stimulation, 72% of
participants meaningfully improved their performance on tests of strength
and function. Even after the stimulation was turned off, 90% of the
participants experienced improvements in at least one of these areas.
Importantly, none reported any serious adverse effects.
Why such long-lasting benefits arise is not entirely clear. Previous research
suggests that stimulation may strengthen existing connections between
nerve cells, and encourage new ones to grow.
Such successful studies increase the likelihood of stimulation devices

making their way to the clinic. Dr Courtine, for example, says that he is in
discussion with America’s Food and Drug Administration for approval of
ARCEX, and hopes to commercialise it by the end of the year. Though it is
unclear whether those with the most severe injuries will benefit, any step
forward is good news for patients. “There are no miracles” in recovery from
spinal-cord injury, says Ms Reid. “But tiny gains can be life-changing.” ■

technology/2024/05/20/a-promising-non-invasive-technique-can-help-paralysed-limbs-
move

Cyber security
It is dangerously easy to hack the

world’s phones
A system at the heart of global telecommunications is woefully insecure
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
FOR YEARS experts have warned that a technology at the centre of global
communications is dangerously exposed. Now there is more evidence that it
has been used to snoop on people in America.
Kevin Briggs, an official at America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure

Security Agency, told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a
regulator, earlier this year that there had been “numerous incidents of
successful, unauthorised attempts” not only to steal location data and
monitor voice and text messages in America, but also to deliver spyware
(software that can take over a phone) and influence voters from abroad via
text messages. The comments were first reported by 404 Media, a
technology news website. America’s big mobile operators have erected
better defences in recent years. But much of the world remains vulnerable.
The hacks were related to an obscure protocol known as Signalling System

7 (SS7) as well as a newer one called Diameter. Developed in the 1970s to
allow telecoms firms to exchange data to set up and manage calls,
nowadays SS7 has more users than the internet. Security was not a big issue
when SS7 was first introduced because only a few fixed-line operators
could get access to the system. That changed in the mobile age. SS7 became
crucial for a wide range of tasks, including roaming. According to the US
Department of Homeland Security, SS7 is a particular risk because there are
“tens of thousands of entry points worldwide, many of which are controlled
by states that support terrorism or espionage”.
Security experts have known for more than 15 years that the protocol was
vulnerable in several ways. In 2008 Tobias Engel, a security researcher,
showed that SS7 could be used to identify a user’s location. In 2014
German researchers went further, demonstrating that it could also be
exploited to listen to calls or record and store voice and text data. Attackers
could forward data to themselves or, if they were close to the phone, hoover
it up and tell the system to give them the decryption key. Surveillance
companies and spy agencies had known about the issue for a lot longer.
Many were taking advantage of it.
In April 2014 Russian hackers exploited SS7 to locate and spy on Ukrainian
political figures. In 2017 a German telecoms firm acknowledged that
attackers had stolen money from customers by intercepting SMS
authentication codes sent from banks. In 2018 an Israeli surveillance
company used a mobile operator in the Channel Islands, a British territory,
to get access to SS7 and thus users around the world.
That route is thought to have been used to track an Emirati princess who
was abducted and returned to the United Arab Emirates in 2018. And in
2022 Cathal McDaid of ENEA, a Swedish telecoms and cyber-security
company, assessed that Russian hackers had long been tracking and
eavesdropping on Russian dissidents based abroad by the same means.
Beginning in 2014 Chinese hackers stole huge amounts of data from the
Office of Personnel Management, the government agency that manages
America’s federal civil service. The most sensitive data were security-
clearance records, which contain highly personal details. But phone
numbers were also stolen. According to semi-redacted slides published by
the US Department of Homeland Security, American officials noticed “SS7
anomalous traffic” that summer which they believed was related to the
breach.
On my main phone
Mr Briggs’s comments to the FCC bring the scope of the SS7 problem into
sharper focus. “Overall”, he said, the incidents he reported were “just the tip
of the proverbial iceberg of SS7- and Diameter-based location and
monitoring exploits that have been used successfully.” American mobile
operators are sensibly stripping out SS7 from their networks, but, to varying
degrees, all still have roaming connections with the rest of the world, where
the protocol remains ubiquitous. Moreover, although the newer Diameter
protocol is an improvement in several respects, it nonetheless “has many of
the same vulnerabilities” as SS7, argues Mr McDaid, “and is worse in some
ways.”
One reason that telecoms firms have neglected to address the issue is that
most attackers have political rather than commercial motives. Surveillance
tends to be focused on a very small number of high-value targets. “The
attackers generally don’t aim to damage the workings of the mobile
network,” notes Mr McDaid. Because the impact is on the individual rather
than the company, he says, “Sometimes, the incentives to put in protection
are not fully aligned.” Mobile operators need to monitor their networks,
update software and conduct regular “penetration tests”, drills in which they
subject their own networks to simulated attack, he says.
Phone users can protect themselves against SS7-based eavesdropping (but

not location tracking) by using end-to-end encrypted apps such as
WhatsApp, Signal or iMessage. But these, too, can be circumvented by
spyware that takes over a device, recording keystrokes and the screen. In
April Apple warned users in 92 countries that they had been targeted by a
“mercenary spyware attack”. On May 1st Amnesty International published
a report showing how “a murky ecosystem of surveillance suppliers,
brokers and resellers” from Israel, Greece, Singapore and Malaysia had put
powerful spyware into the hands of several state agencies in Indonesia.
That, too, is the tip of an iceberg. ■

technology/2024/05/17/it-is-dangerously-easy-to-hack-the-worlds-phones

Culture
Meet the man causing cracks in the antiquities trade
The art cop :: Matthew Bogdanos employs unorthodox tactics to repatriate stolen art and
antiquities
What if calling someone stupid was a crime?

A modern Orwellian tale :: Lionel Shriver imagines cancel culture going to even greater
extremes
Jürgen Klopp’s masterclass in how to win—and lose

Back Story :: Two gestures capture the Liverpool manager’s method: the fist pump and the hug
The hit series “Bridgerton” has set off a string-quartet

boom
The “Bridgerton” effect :: It is a surprising example of how popular culture can shape
consumer habits
Spices have their own riveting, piquant history

The spice of life :: How spycraft and cartography flourished in their wake
The controversial cult of the host club in Japan

Heavenly hosts :: Why women pay men in make-up to flatter them

The art cop
Meet the man causing cracks in the

antiquities trade
Matthew Bogdanos employs unorthodox tactics to repatriate stolen art and
antiquities
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | New York
MUSEUMS USED to make the news for big acquisitions. Today, however,
you are just as likely to read a headline about art being given up to the
authorities or back to its country of origin. New York, capital of the global
art market, has become a hub for restitution efforts. In the past month 38
antiquities were returned to China, 27 to Cambodia, ten to Egypt and three
to Indonesia. All were stolen, according to state law in New York. Behind
these repatriations was the office of the Manhattan district attorney (DA),
and specifically its Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU), led by Matthew
Bogdanos.
If New York is filled with art dealers, Mr Bogdanos (pictured) is the un-
dealer. Since its creation in 2017, the ATU estimates it has recovered 5,776
objects worth an estimated $456m (see chart). “We don’t approach you
unless we’ve got you covered six ways from Sunday,” says Mr Bogdanos.
With his tough-guy rhetoric, Mr Bogdanos can sound like a cross between
Indiana Jones and Robin Hood, though his work has also earned him
detractors. “He’s bullying people into returning things with the threat of
jail,” says a lawyer and antiquities expert. Still, many are watching Mr
Bogdanos to see whom he will take on next and how his tactics might
inspire other authorities abroad.
Usually when the ATU moves to seize a work, and the museum or collector
holding it sees the evidence, little or no resistance is offered. That makes
recent news more interesting: two institutions are publicly challenging Mr
Bogdanos’s efforts to seize works in their collections. Since September the
Art Institute of Chicago has been battling the ATU in the New York
Supreme Court to hold onto a drawing by an Austrian painter, Egon Schiele,
which Mr Bogdanos claims was looted in the Holocaust but the Art Institute
says was not stolen.
In October 2023 the Cleveland Museum of Art sued the DA’s office to
prevent it from seizing the centrepiece of its classical galleries, a Roman
bronze worth $20m. The DA alleges it was looted from Turkey, before it
was sold in New York in 1986. Both Cleveland and Chicago may challenge
the DA’s jurisdiction in their states and question Mr Bogdanos’s tactics.
He certainly cuts an unusual figure in the art world. A retired marine

colonel and amateur boxer with degrees in law and classics and a fondness
for quoting Shakespeare and Cicero, Mr Bogdanos spearheaded efforts to
fight looting while deployed to Iraq in 2003-06. When not prosecuting
murders (one of his duties as an assistant DA), he has focused on art
trafficking since 2011.
New York is an ideal beachhead for assailing art crime. Mr Bogdanos

claims that he has jurisdiction over any case involving objects connected to
Manhattan’s many museums, galleries, auction houses and private
collectors—whether sold, exhibited or even purchased with a wire transfer
originating there.
The ATU is not the largest art-crime fighter in the world; that distinction
probably goes to Italy’s Carabinieri Art Squad, which has a staff of several
hundred, compared with the ATU’s 19. What makes the ATU unique is that
it is led by a prosecutor, not law-enforcement officials. That means Mr
Bogdanos can push cases along with prosecutorial powers, including search
warrants on warehouses and servers, from which his team has gathered five
terabytes of data on smugglers. (A single terabyte could hold around 1,000
copies of the “Encyclopedia Britannica”.) America’s FBI and Department
of Homeland Security also track down stolen art.
Mr Bogdanos is surfing an international wave of interest in the origins of

museums’ collections. Concern about Nazi-looted art has been long-
running, but public pressure has recently expanded to include colonial
conquests, too. In 2017 Emmanuel Macron, the president of France,
declared his desire for “the temporary or definitive restitution of African
heritage to Africa”. In Britain the Charities Act of 2022 authorised trustees
of national museums to seek repatriation on “moral” grounds, though in
February its arts and heritage agency announced that the government would
seek to block international transfers of ownership.
In America’s normally chummy art market, Mr Bogdanos has ruffled

feathers. “We walked into a world where everything was done in hushed
tones and the more money you had the more you were able to negotiate,” he
says. Even lawyers and judges were at first sceptical of applying law
typically used to go after stolen cars and crooked pawnbrokers to pursue
Cambodian statues hacked out of temples.
Mr Bogdanos follows leads, but he also pursues trafficking networks: 95%

of the objects the ATU has seized went through the hands of just 12 people.
And 95% of those objects pass through one or more of just five countries—
Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates—
where they might be exhibited in a regional museum before being sold to a
straw-man buyer through an auction house or dealer. “Provenance” (art-
speak for who owned something and when) is sometimes invented.
“Germany has an entire industry devoted to creating false provenance,”
says Mr Bogdanos.
Some of the ATU’s targets are blatantly criminal and knowingly deal in
“blood antiquities” and looted objects. But others are just buyers whose
paperwork does not check out. Standards for provenance have changed: a
certificate and a handshake might once have counted as due diligence in the
notoriously freewheeling art market.
Mr Bogdanos has had success invoking national cultural-property laws,

which say that any antiquity is the property of the government where it
originated if it was not exported with official permission after a certain date.
In Turkey the cutoff is 1906; in Italy and Egypt it is 1909 and 1983,
respectively. As a result, the ATU has pursued objects held in collections for
decades, even if they were bought long ago in good faith.
Some think Mr Bogdanos is overzealous. “He’s used a sledgehammer to

crack a nut,” says Joanna van der Lande of the Antiquities Dealers’
Association, a British trade group, who adds that “he’s destroyed the New
York market” by creating “massive uncertainty” among collectors and
dealers. The antiquities trade, worth a few hundred million dollars of the
$65bn art market, has visibly shrunk: there are only two storefront galleries
left in Manhattan. In 2016 Sotheby’s moved its antiquities sales to London,
which, Mr Bogdanos points out, is beyond his jurisdiction.
Museums are on high alert and are paying more attention to provenance. In
March the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on which Mr Bogdanos has
executed 19 search warrants, hired a head of provenance research to lead a
team of 11 people who will search their collection of 1.5m objects for stolen
items. They have their work cut out: the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists claims to have tallied more than 1,000 holdings of
the Met previously owned by individuals indicted or convicted of crimes.
(The Met says that figure does not match its own internal calculations.)
Whatever happens in the Cleveland and Chicago cases, Mr Bogdanos is on

a tear. There is no shortage of potential investigations, as wars allow
antiquities to be stolen in the Middle East and Ukraine. It will be a long
time until questionable provenance becomes ancient history. ■
For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies,
sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/05/23/meet-the-man-causing-cracks-in-the-
antiquities-trade

A modern Orwellian tale
What if calling someone stupid was

a crime?
Lionel Shriver imagines cancel culture going to even greater extremes
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
Mania. By Lionel Shriver. Harper; 288 pages; $30. Borough Press; £22
ARE YOU hateful enough to use the S-word? You know the one: stupid. It
has been banned in schools, its use and synonyms (dumb, slow) considered
“slurs” worthy of expulsion. Even its antonyms are grounds for book bans
and boycotts: only a “cerebral supremacist” would have the gall to buy
Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend”. Instead, those wanting to be
politically correct display copies of “The Calumny of IQ: Why
Discrimination Against ‘D— People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight”
on their coffee tables.
Welcome to the America of Lionel Shriver’s “Mania”. The novel opens
with the narrator’s son, Darwin, being sent home from school because he
called a classmate’s T-shirt “stupid”. “I don’t understand the rules
anymore!” he complains to his mother. “Can anything be stupid, or is
everything intelligent now?”
Transformed by ideological extremism (everyone is smart and anyone who

feels differently is a bigot), America is both the novel’s setting and subject.
The New York Times has dropped the crossword puzzle, because its clues
made people feel bad when they could not guess the word. Universities
have open admissions; spelling bees and IQ tests are banned. Most students
care less about learning than studying their instructors’ behaviour for slip-
ups. Professors must treat all students as equal and deem all answers
correct.
Pearson Converse, the narrator, is a literature professor in Pennsylvania and

is hauled before the “dean of cognitive equality” for teaching Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot”. It was a cheeky act of resistance—and a
futile one. She ends up having to apologise to keep her job.
As in George Orwell’s “1984”, spies are everywhere, but in “Mania” there

are no telescreens. Instead children report their parents for forcing extra
tutoring or pushing them to be ambitious. Every school has a “mental-parity
champion”, who can call in child-protective services at the slightest hint of
intellectual “abuse”. Pearson discovers this after her daughter, Lucy, who is
wilfully resistant to learning to read but smart enough to game the system,
turns her in. Orwell’s Winston Smith was tortured into compliance by the
Ministry of Love; Pearson has to complete a Cerebral Acceptance and
Semantic Sensitivity course to avoid losing Lucy to foster care.
As a writer, Ms Shriver is merciless and funny; as a thinker she is

contrarian. She has been described as a “pro-Brexit, anti-woke, #MeToo-
sceptical Democrat” and does not shy away from fraught subjects. Her best-
known novel, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), is told from the
perspective of a mother whose son has gone on a mass-shooting rampage at
his school.
Some may feel they have heard too much about “cancel culture” to seek out
a work of fiction that tackles it so squarely. But the novel’s themes—of
society’s quick pivots when it comes to socially acceptable beliefs, and how
close friendships can be poisoned by the culture wars—feel like a welcome
distraction, given their slightly (but not unbelievably) absurd elements. As
Pearson observes, “I suppose none of this was funny, really; still, I couldn’t
help but laugh.” ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/05/17/what-if-calling-someone-stupid-was-a-
crime

Back Story
Jürgen Klopp’s masterclass in how

to win—and lose
Two gestures capture the Liverpool manager’s method: the fist pump and
the hug
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
AN OBVIOUS WAY to recount Jürgen Klopp’s time as manager of

Liverpool, one of the grandest clubs in the world’s most popular sport, is in
titles and accolades. Between his first match in 2015 and his last on May
19th, he won seven major trophies. But a neater encapsulation of the
German coach’s impact lies in a pair of gestures. Together they form a
pictographic guide to management in football and beyond—and even to a
philosophy of life.
The first gesture is an alpha-male expression of triumph. After big wins at
Anfield, Liverpool’s home ground, Mr Klopp skipped over to the Kop, a
grandstand which, even at a club followed more fervently than most, is
known for its passionate supporters. To adoring roars, he punched the air
once, twice, three times. Then he thumped the Liverpool badge on his chest.
The fist pump was both a party and a promise. We did it—and we’ll do it
again.
Mr Klopp’s other signature move—a bear hug—befitted commiseration as

much as celebration. He hugged his players whether they won or not. He
hugged them whether they performed well or badly (or didn’t get onto the
pitch at all). Often he hugged the opposition, generally after beating them.
It helped that he is extremely tall, so enveloped his footballers as a father

might his sons. His less rudimentary qualities include a superstar charisma,
usually on show in media appearances and, joyously, when Liverpool
scored. He sprinted up the touchline to embrace his team, spectacles flying,
teeth beaming in a 1,000-watt smile. La Gazzetta dello Sport, an Italian
paper, called him “Liverpool’s fifth Beatle”.
Beneath the exuberance is a tactical mastermind. Mr Klopp’s style of

football combined innovation with a kind of mad energy. In his Liverpool
teams the full-backs, notionally defenders, were the most creative players.
He mostly forswore fielding an old-school striker, instead relying on darting
wingers for goals. Often players join megaclubs like Liverpool and quail.
Under his tutelage, stars became better and unknowns became stars.
However long the odds, he insisted there was a way to win. And win
Liverpool did, sometimes in adversity. They came back from 3-0 down
against Lionel Messi’s Barcelona en route to clinching the Champions
League, Europe’s biggest prize. Amid an injury blight, a team made up
largely of juniors claimed a domestic cup. In 2020 Liverpool secured their
first English league title for 30 years. After special victories, manager and
players joined the fans in singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, the emotive
club anthem which, as Mr Klopp noted, is “a little bit like a prayer”.
Yet it wasn’t all fist pumps and trophies. Most football teams never win
anything. Mr Klopp’s won a lot (as his previous sides did in Germany); but
they also fell short in agonising circumstances. Powered by petrodollars,
Manchester City twice pipped him to the English Premier League title on
the season’s last day. Twice his men were beaten by Real Madrid in the
Champions League final, the first time after Mo Salah, his top scorer, was
fouled out of the game and his goalie was elbowed in the head.
As online footage attests, within hours of that disappointment Mr Klopp

was defiantly singing about bouncing back. He knows how much football
matters—and how little. “Somebody said that football is a matter of life and
death,” another feted Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly, famously remarked.
“It’s more important than that.” In Mr Klopp’s formulation it is “the most
important of the least important things”: enrapturing, but only a game, and
meant to be fun.
That is a wise perspective on football, and on failure. “If we can do it,

wonderful,” Mr Klopp told his players before that ineffable match with
Barcelona. “If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.” Assuring people that
defeat is okay can empower them to take risks, thus making them likelier to
succeed. But Mr Klopp also knows that failure is not shameful but
inevitable, and can even be glorious. As Samuel Beckett once put it: “Try
again. Fail again. Fail better.”
The fist pump and the hug—the one-two embodies the methods of a coach
who leaves an outsize impression on English culture. More than that, it
captures a deep purpose of sport. Yes, it can teach you how to win: the
tenacity required, and the teamwork, and the luck. But, given that most
people are not world champions, on or off the pitch, the corollary of that
lesson may be more useful. As much as winning, sport teaches you how to
lose, and carry on. ■
Read more from Back Story, our column on culture:

The trial of Donald Trump, considered as courtroom drama (May 10th)
Fed up with Biden v Trump II? Some succour from fictional rematches (Apr
29th)
Salman Rushdie’s gripping take on being stabbed (April 16th)
Also: How the Back Story column got its name.

https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/05/17/jurgen-klopps-masterclass-in-how-to-
win-and-lose

The “Bridgerton” effect
The hit series “Bridgerton” has set

off a string-quartet boom
It is a surprising example of how popular culture can shape consumer
habits
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
PITBULL DOES not make the kind of music you would describe as
romantic. Listeners are unlikely to swoon when they hear the American
rapper’s lyrics, such as “I’m the plumber tonight / I’ll check yo’ pipes.” And
yet when a couple start kissing in a horse-drawn carriage in the new season
of “Bridgerton”—which debuted on Netflix on May 16th—they do so to a
cover of Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” played by a string quartet. Remove
the braggadocio lyrics, add staccato violins and a song can go from gross to
engrossing.
With vibrant costumes and focus on the marriage market, “Bridgerton”
positions itself as a modern period drama. Viewers have spent almost 1bn
hours watching the first season, and nearly 800m with the second,
according to Netflix. The series has sent internet searches for corsets and
wisteria soaring. It has also made string quartets more fashionable than they
have been in centuries.
The soundtrack sets the tone for the show’s blend of old and new
sensibilities. It is full of classical crossovers, with string renditions of songs
by Ariana Grande, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift. Vitamin String Quartet
(VSQ), who perform many of the show’s tracks, saw a surge in popularity
after “Bridgerton” arrived in 2020. Before the show’s premiere, total
fortnightly streams amounted to 3.8m, but they jumped 350% after it.
Interest has stayed high, says Leo Flynn, the group’s brand manager: some
of their most popular songs have more than 20m streams apiece. VSQ
recently announced plans for a tour of more than 40 cities across America.
According to a survey by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London,

people are more interested in going to events that merge classical music and
pop than almost any other kind of orchestral concert. (They ranked second
in 2023, up from sixth in 2018.) Fever, an entertainment-booking platform,
has been organising string-quartet concerts by candlelight since 2019. It
now holds events in more than 150 cities worldwide, many of them with
pop music, and they have been attended by 3m people.
Just as such reinterpretations provide the backdrop to courtships in

“Bridgerton”, they are popular choices for weddings, too. Betrothed couples
have long booked string quartets, but many now forgo Bach for Beyoncé.
Lucy Gijsbers, the founder of London Strings, a quartet for hire, says that
around 40% of clients “specifically request ‘Bridgerton’-style music” as
something “both classy and up-to-date”.
The show is not the first pop-culture sensation to influence fans’

preferences. “The Queen’s Gambit”, a mini-series released in 2020, made
chess cool for a time. Fans of the “Top Gun” films in 1986 and 2022 felt the
need for speed—and the need to buy a pair of Ray-Ban aviators.
“Challengers”, a new romance drama about professional athletes, has
popularised a #TennisCoreAesthetic, which includes short pleated skirts and
sleeveless sweaters.
Some music purists may sniff, but modern tunes help to demystify a
rarefied art form and bring in younger audiences. If “Bridgerton” continues
to hit a high note, it might just have a harmonious effect on the classical-
music sector as a whole. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/05/20/the-hit-series-bridgerton-has-set-off-
a-string-quartet-boom

The spice of life
Spices have their own riveting,

piquant history
How spycraft and cartography flourished in their wake
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
Spice. By Roger Crowley. Yale University Press; 320 pages; $25 and £20
THEY LOOKED humble enough. One observer compared clove plants to

laurel shrubs, while nutmeg, he noticed, grew on something resembling the
pear tree. Despite their common appearance, in the 16th century these
spices were special—and not just because, by a fluke of evolution, they
grew only on a handful of islands in the Malay Archipelago, which came to
be known as the Spice Islands. As Roger Crowley, a British maritime
historian, explains in an engaging new look at seasoning’s long ago seasons,
nutmeg and cloves would have effects far beyond the kitchen, kindling
revolutions from mapmaking to spycraft.
For centuries many were in doubt about the spices’ origins. Marco Polo, the
famed Venetian explorer, thought cloves came from China and nutmeg from
Java. Mr Crowley begins his story in 1511, when the Portuguese began
muscling into the South-East Asian spice trade. Eager for profit, their
Spanish and English competitors soon joined them. In 1553 a trio of ships
left London on a journey to reach the Spice Islands via Russia and the
Arctic. Their voyage ended in disaster, but their fervour is not hard to
understand.
Light and long-lasting, aromatics could fetch markups of 1,000% by the

time they reached European markets. That made them more precious than
their weight in gold, and the ports that unloaded them soon shimmered, too.
“You are no city”, wrote Fernando de Herrera, Seville’s poet laureate, “you
are a universe.”
Just as the ancient Egyptians carved reliefs of spice fleets on their tombs,
and the Romans valued them as portals to the gods, these explorers fell for
spices’ allure. “The scent of the clove is said to be the most fragrant in the
world,” claimed Garcia de Orta, a Portuguese botanist, adding that it
smelled as sweet as “forests of flowers”. Others marvelled at how spices
interacted with the wider ecosystem. Encountering the bright green nutmeg
trees, Portuguese sailors delighted in the “multitude of parrots and various
other birds” that swooped and spread their seeds.
With cloves came conflict. In the war for spices, Portuguese and Spanish
explorers killed locals, and each other, with gusto. Soon enough naval
expeditions and the spices and other goods that inspired them would draw a
“maritime belt” around the planet, Mr Crowley explains.
But competition for spices also fired up human ingenuity. Wherever they
went, sailors kept scrupulous logs, detailing narrows and shoals for future
adventurers. As more information became available in Europe—Portuguese
captains were, among other things, expected to record latitudes—
cartography became more common. In 1548 an Italian mapmaker produced
the first pocket atlas. Spain and Portugal each held a master map of the
world, constantly updated and jealously guarded from rivals.
That battle for intelligence helped to hone nations’ spycraft. Ca’Masser, a

Venetian agent posing as a merchant, learned a lot by loitering on the
waterfront in Lisbon. “I have seen the sailing charts of the route to India,”
he reported back in code. Mr Crowley describes the 16th century as a
“golden age” of cryptography.
Ultimately the Portuguese monopoly on spices was upended by a Dutch

spy, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who worked as secretary for the bishop of
Goa in the 1580s and copied his charts, maps and navigational secrets. They
formed the basis of a book, “Itinerario”, which helped “launch the Dutch
assault on the spice trade” and “dismantle the Portuguese empire” in the
Spice Islands. Not bad for a secretary. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/05/22/spices-have-their-own-riveting-piquant-
history

Heavenly hosts
The controversial cult of the host

club in Japan
Why women pay men in make-up to flatter them
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午 | Tokyo
IN KABUKICHO, A red-light district in Tokyo, four young men surround

your female correspondent. Hiragi Saren, a 25-year-old with bleached hair,
a black tank top and a silver necklace, sits closest. He chatters warmly and
glances seductively, his pink eyeshadow glimmering under the chandeliers.
His three assistants keep filling your correspondent’s shochu glass and
shower her with compliments about her appearance. She doubts their
sincerity, but is strangely pleased. After an hour and a half, the bill is
¥30,000 ($200).
Host clubs are booming in Japan. Some 21,000 hosts—well-dressed young
men, often wearing make-up like K-pop stars—work at 900 such
establishments. They pamper and flatter their female clients. Sex is not part
of the bargain but could happen, somewhere else. Clients usually seek
psychological rather than physical intimacy and a break from reality. Hosts
refer to them as hime (princess), and never ask how old they are or what
they do for a living.
To understand the cult of the host, start with two statistics. More than 60%
of Japanese women in their late 20s are unmarried, double the rate in the
mid-1980s. A recent survey found that more than a third of unmarried adults
aged 20-49 had never dated. Many single women visit host clubs because
they are lonely. They get a thrill from meeting “the kind of men they don’t
meet in everyday life”, Mr Hiragi says.
The first host club opened in the mid-1960s, mostly serving as a dance hall
for rich matrons and widows. Early hosts described themselves as “male
geishas”, says Hojo Yuichi, who runs Ai Honten, the oldest active host club.
At first, the clubs were seen as a fringe, sleazy business. But that stigma has
faded.
Successful hosts are now celebrities. In the 2000s they started appearing on
TV shows. Today many have a big social-media following. Billboards and
trucks display pictures of the highest earners. Hosts feature as characters in
manga and anime, too. They have become “an archetype within Japanese
popular culture”, says Thomas Baudinette, an anthropologist at Macquarie
University. Mr Hiragi moved to Tokyo from a rural area with dreams of
becoming a famous host. “I wanted to be part of a world that’s glamorous,”
he says.
Glamorous, yet controversial. Feminist groups accuse host clubs of

exploitation: overcharging for drinks and manipulating clients into racking
up huge tabs. Hosts praise those who spend the most, calling them “ace”.
Some customers end up in debt after paying millions of yen for a single
visit. Takahashi Ichika, a client, recalls that her favourite host would ignore
her and fiddle with his phone when she refused to order champagne. “I
would spend more money because I didn’t want him to dislike me. I wanted
his attention,” she says.
Some women go to extraordinary lengths to feed their host habit. A survey
last year showed that among women arrested for selling sex around Okubo
Park, a popular pickup spot, over 40% were trying to earn enough money to
go to host clubs. Politicians have started discussing ways to regulate the
industry, for example by cracking down on opaque pricing. Host-club
owners hope to pre-empt this with better self-regulation.
Some see a link between the cult of the host and obsessive fan culture. In a
survey in 2023, 72% of Japanese women in their 20s said they indulged in
oshikatsu (avidly supporting a celebrity, for example by buying several
copies of each new hit). The objects of their adoration were often pop idols.
But some are switching their allegiance to hosts, to whom they can get
much closer. Ms Takahashi says she used to spend a lot on boy bands, but
when concerts stopped during covid, she started to splurge on hosts instead.
Many other Japanese businesses, such as cuddle cafés, offer intimate

services, usually to men. Mr Baudinette worries, though, that for many
Japanese people, “Intimacy can only be accessed through commoditised
forms.”
Yamada Kurumi, a client, works at a brothel to earn enough money to visit

the clubs, which she does about once a week. She had boyfriends in the past
but finds hosts more exciting. She is unsure whether to seek an office job
after graduating from college or to carry on with sex work, which pays
better. “A lot of people start losing touch with friends once they get
addicted to host clubs,” says Ms Yamada. “My host is already part of my
everyday life…If I get a normal job, I probably won’t be able to see him
any more. That scares me.” ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/05/21/the-controversial-cult-of-the-host-
club-in-japan

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets
Indicators ::

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and

markets
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/economic-and-
financial-indicators/2024/05/23/economic-data-commodities-and-markets


What does it mean to recognise Palestinian statehood?
Ireland, Norway and Spain will be the latest to do so

What does it mean to recognise

Palestinian statehood?
Ireland, Norway and Spain will be the latest to do so
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
IT IS A step to “bring peace to the Middle East”, according to Simon

Harris, Ireland’s prime minister. On May 22nd his country, along with
Norway and Spain, said that it would formally recognise Palestine as a
state. Israel recalled its ambassadors from all three countries in response; its
foreign minister condemned the trio’s decision as a “distorted step” and said
it was evidence, in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th,
that “terrorism pays”. Ireland, Norway and Spain are joining the majority of
countries: almost three-quarters of members of the UN recognise Palestine.
What exactly does that mean—and who are the holdouts?
There are no binding rules about when one country should recognise
another, but international law provides some guidelines. The Montevideo
Convention on the rights and duties of states, signed by 20 countries in
North and South America in 1933, sets out four criteria: a state should have
a permanent population; a government; defined borders; and the capacity to
enter into relations with other states. But many places recognised as states
do not meet those requirements—for instance those with two governments,
such as Libya. (Recognising a state usually implies recognising its
government, but in such cases countries may choose to endorse whichever
government that they consider legitimate.) Some states emerge after
national movements declare independence and seek international
recognition.
In 1988 Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation
(PLO), declared Palestine a state, with borders based on the land controlled
by Arab countries on the eve of the Six Day War of 1967: before that
conflict, Egypt controlled Gaza and Jordan held the West Bank and East
Jerusalem; during the fighting, Israel took control of those territories. By
the end of 1988 roughly half of UN members had recognised Palestine.
Today that figure stands at 140; on May 28th Ireland, Norway and Spain
will formally join the club.
That will be particularly notable because most other Western countries do

not recognise Palestine. America, Britain, France and Germany all support a
two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, but say that they would only
recognise a Palestinian state that is agreed to by the two sides. Israel rejects
all unilateral moves. Officially, it says that Palestine must negotiate its final
status directly with Israel, but Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister,
has repeatedly ruled out a two-state solution.
Because many countries still do not recognise Palestinian statehood, the UN

itself has given it only partial recognition. In 1974 the PLO became an
observer entity at the UN. In 2012 the UN General Assembly upgraded
Palestine’s status to a non-member observer state, putting it on par with the
Holy See. To be admitted as a full member it needs the approval of the UN
Security Council—of which America, Britain and France have permanent
seats, with veto power. In April Algeria, which currently holds a seat on the
council, brought the matter to a vote: 12 of the 15 members, including
France, supported UN recognition of Palestine, but America vetoed it
(Britain and Switzerland abstained). Linda Thomas-Greenfield, America’s
ambassador to the UN, argued that the Palestinians do not have full control
of “what is supposed to be their state” because Hamas runs “a significant
portion” of it.
For Palestinians, the benefits of recognition are mainly symbolic, although

there are practical implications: Palestine can open embassies in countries
that have recognised its statehood. But its people will not enjoy the full
benefits and freedoms of statehood until Israel accepts it. The last direct
talks collapsed in 2014; a resumption looks impossible in present
circumstances. But they are much needed. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-economist-
explains/2024/05/22/what-does-it-mean-to-recognise-palestinian-statehood

| Main menu | Previous section |
Obituary
Ebrahim Raisi was obsessed with the security of the people
Morality and butchery :: The hardline president of Iran died in a helicopter crash on May 19th,
aged 63
| Main menu | Previous section |

Morality and butchery
Ebrahim Raisi was obsessed with

the security of the people
The hardline president of Iran died in a helicopter crash on May 19th, aged
63
5月 23, 2024, 09:56 上午
AS THE HELICOPTER rose through the misting clouds, Ebrahim Raisi

stared sombrely out of the window. The view, of the rugged mountains of
north-west Iran, should have been magnificent. Today, there was not so
much to see. And in any case he was not given to smiling. It did not suit the
black turban he wore, a token of his descent from the Prophet, or his usual
black clerical robes, or his thin glasses. He preferred to appear as what he
was, an unbending expert on sharia law, for whom chopping off the hands
of thieves was “one of our greatest honours”.
Yet he had done an unusual amount of smiling that day, as he inaugurated,
with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, the giant Qiz Qalasi dam on the
Aras river. It marked a rapprochement between their countries. They had
had their ups and downs, but today he had called Mr Aliyev a brother and a
friend. Their co-operation, he said, would make their enemies despair.
Enemies inevitably preyed on his mind. They began with America, a

country he loathed beyond any other except the false Zionist regime of
Israel. But Israel, especially after the Hamas attacks of October 7th, could
be made to disappear. America was the immovable Great Satan whose
sanctions weighed Iran down, cramping its oil exports, tyrannising its
innocent people and scuppering his attempts to improve the economy. He
had often talked of restoring the nuclear deal of 2015 which Donald Trump
had rescinded. But he did not mean it much. When he appeared on “60
Minutes” in 2022, infuriatingly interviewed by Lesley Stahl with her hastily
thrown-on headscarf and pitiful expression, he said he could not talk to the
Americans. There was no trust. A meeting with Biden would be pointless.
He did not deny that Iran was enriching uranium to a very high grade, but
that was for industrial use, agriculture, medicine. A nuclear weapon?
Baseless. It had no place in their doctrine.
Alongside the foreign demons lurked enemies of the state: anyone opposed
to the revolution of 1979, when the Shah was toppled and Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini established his theocracy. He had been swept up in it as
a young student at the seminary, where he was taught for a while by
Khomeini’s brother and the supreme leader’s successor, Ali Khamenei.
Thanks to Khamenei he got his first prosecutor’s job at the age of 20, and at
25 was deputy prosecutor in Tehran. It was there in 1988 that thousands of
enemies of the state were massacred by a “Death Committee” that re-tried
leftists in the jails and, if they would not recant, hanged them from cranes
by the half-dozen. Westerners said he was on that committee; they called
him the Butcher of Tehran. He repeatedly denied it. But he was sure it had
been the right thing to do. Khomeini had decreed a fatwa against those
miscreants for waging war on God. And when a prosecutor defended the
security of the people, he should be praised.
Disorder appalled him. Acts of chaos were unacceptable. In 2009 he
enthusiastically backed a clamp-down on the Green Movement, which was
rioting against a disputed election. Hundreds were arrested to uproot this
sedition. In 2022 it was the women’s turn, objecting to his hijab and chastity
law with displays of what amounted to nudity and indecency. So, when they
objected, he made the law tighter. For showing any part of the body higher
than the ankles or forearms, or lower than the neck, they would now get not
five years in prison, but ten. He sometimes admitted that women had
talents, and rights, too; at home he had two daughters, and his wife, Jamileh
Alamolhoda, taught at a university. But in public she knew her place.
Sitting beside him, swathed in black, she would say “We want women to
remain women! Why should we be like men?”
National morality he could police as hard as he liked. Other powers were

more limited. Khamenei had the final word on everything. Foreign policy
was mostly made by commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps, despite the fact that at meetings with them they would sit meekly
cross-legged at his feet. It was also made by those invaluable proxy groups
—Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen—which, in
his view, safeguarded a region where Israel was the disrupter.
His own brief was to run the country, and he did so as a jurist, since all his
previous jobs—prosecutor-general, attorney-general, head of the judiciary
—had to do with the law. When he first ran for president in 2017, it
surprised people. He knew nothing of economics, indeed had little standard
education; after a few years of school, it was into the seminary in Qom. The
Koran, and sharia, were his first recourse: his idea of rooting out graft and
corruption was to prosecute his foes with big, showy trials. He had entered
politics because it was his revolutionary and religious responsibility to do
so. If Westerners carped on about human rights, he retorted that these meant
security. Freedom was not included.
He did not win, that first time. He got only 38%. In 2021 he changed his
tactics, touring the country to talk to the poor. His closeness to Khamenei
and the juduciary also paid off; 600 rival candidates, some of them even
conservatives, were reduced to a handful by the clerical authorities. He won
a landslide then, and fellow conservatives controlled every branch of power.
Rumours had been swirling that he was first in line for supreme leader. Yet
it was never proclaimed. Besides, though he stated otherwise, he was not an
ayatollah, or sign of God. He was merely a hojat-ol-eslam, or authority on
Islam. When Khamenei declared him president, he mentioned this fact. He
also called him popular; but that wholesale rejection of candidates had not
gone down well. Turnout in 2021 had been Iran’s lowest-ever.
There was much to ponder on that flight home. The foreign minister, sitting
opposite, was fidgety; others dozed. But the president stared out of the
window, unsmiling, as the fog closed in. ■
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2024/05/22/ebrahim-raisi-was-obsessed-with-the-
security-of-the-people

The Economist May 25, 2024

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Economist May 25, 2024

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

[5月 24, 2024]

The world this week

The world this week

| Next section | Main menu |

The world this week

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, and its foreign minister, Hossein

The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor announced that he was

South Africa’s Constitutional Court barred Jacob Zuma, a former

Rwanda is to deploy another 2,500 soldiers to Mozambique, bolstering its

Congo said it had thwarted an amateurish putsch attempt by about 50

The Infected Blood Inquiry, an investigation into Britain’s “worst treatment

Police in Britain investigated the unexplained death of a man who had

Nine people were arrested in Poland for allegedly helping Russian

Emmanuel Macron visited New Caledonia amid an outbreak of violence

To Lam became the new president of Vietnam. Mr Lam, until recently a

Luis Abinader easily won another term in the Dominican Republic’s

And don’t come back

The world this week

Around a third of Boeing’s shareholders voted against the pay package

A 73-year-old man died and dozens of passengers were injured on a

A court in St Petersburg froze assets belonging to Commerzbank, Deutsche

Shareholders in Shell overwhelmingly backed the company’s new climate

America’s Justice Department readied its long-expected antitrust lawsuit

This isn’t just any strategy

Walmart’s share price continued to climb after it reported bumper quarterly

Klaus Schwab is to retire as head of the World Economic Forum, which

| Section menu | Main menu |

The world this week

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-

This week’s covers

| Section menu | Main menu |

Rishi Sunak’s election call makes no sense, but is good

The war-crimes case against the leaders of Israel and

Hacking phones is too easy. Time to make it harder

How to save South Africa

What India’s clout in white-collar work means for the

| Next section | Main menu | Previous section |

Cash for kids

Why paying women to have more

Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly

Many pro-natalist policies come with effects that are valuable in

One common assumption is that falling fertility rates stem from

Some politicians may seize on this to aim baby-boosting policies at very

Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia, may

Older, but wiser

| Section menu | Main menu |

July 4th celebration

Rishi Sunak’s election call makes

AN OLD AXIOM of British politics is that the Conservative Party is

Whether this decision is an act of political genius or lunacy—and The

Electoral considerations have warped the government’s priorities. Mr

It also brings forward the prospect of a period of political stability. The

| Section menu | Main menu |

The war-crimes case against the

THE GAZA WAR is a diplomatic disaster for Israel, a military quagmire

Mr Khan has stretched procedure by requesting charges against the two

| Section menu | Main menu |

Hacking phones is too easy. Time to

IN THE MID-1960S enterprising hackers realised that if they blew a

In March the FCC announced that it was at last exploring

Underlying all this is a collective-action problem. If only a handful of firms

| Section menu | Main menu |

30 years after apartheid