Former Japanese PM Taro Aso calls for show of strength in Taiwan Strait

By Jon Herskovitz

FORMER Japanese Prime Minister

Taro Aso said a show of strength was needed to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait, pushing a hawkish position likely to displease China.

Like-minded countries need to communicate so they can deter anyone from disturbing the peace in the region, Aso, a senior member of the ruling party, said in a speech in Taiwan on Tuesday.

T he comment was likely aimed at China, which sees democratically run Taiwan as part of its territory that must be united, by force if necessary.

Aso has previously said an invasion of Taiwan by China could be seen as an existential threat to Tokyo. His comments have added to a drumbeat of concern from Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party about Beijing’s intentions toward the island of 23 million people.

During a visit to Taiwan in 2021, Aso said Japan and the US would have to defend the island together in the event of a major problem. The comments were criticized by Beijing as being “extremely wrong and dangerous.”

Taiwan will likely be a focus when current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida meets President Joe Biden at a summit in the US later this month, along with South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol, who has also staked a hawkish position on Taiwan. Biden has also sought the help of Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea to use their strength as major makers of semiconductors to cooperate in establishing supply chains that are less reliant on China.

Japan has sought to avoid alienating China, its biggest trading partner, while maintaining its alliance with the US amid tensions between the world’s two largest economies over topics including the origins of Covid-19, human rights and trade.

Aso has a history of making controversial remarks, including suggesting in 2013 that Japan learn from the Nazis. He later withdrew the comment. In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, he explained Japan’s relatively low death rate from the disease by saying its people were of a different cultural level. With assistance from Sing Yee Ong/Bloomberg

Belarus begins military drills near its border with Poland and Lithuania as tensions rise

TALLINN, Estonia—Belarus began military exercises Monday near its border with Poland and Lithuania, a move coming with tensions already heightened with the two Nato members over Russia-linked Wagner mercenaries moving to Belarus after their shortlived mutiny in Russia.

Both Poland and Lithuania have increased border security since thousands of Wagner fighters arrived in Russian-allied Belarus under a deal that ended their armed rebellion in late June and allowed them and their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to avoid criminal charges.

Leaders of the two Nato nations have said they are braced for provocations from Moscow and Minsk in a sensitive area where both countries border Belarus as well as the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. They commented early in August after two Belarusian helicopters flew briefly at low altitude into Polish air space.

Belarusian authorities denied their helicopters entered Poland.

The Belarusian Defense Ministry said the drills that began Monday are based whether more of those events would happen as a result of burning fossil fuels, so the team synthesized research on a wide range of topics including atmosphere and weather patterns, sea ice, land ice and ice shelves and marine and land biology.

The study found climate change extremes are getting worse in a place that once seemed slightly shielded from global warming’s wildness. The continent “is not a static giant frozen in time,” they said, but instead feels climate change’s wrath and extremes “sporadically and unpredictably.”

Anna Hogg, a co-author on the paper and professor at the University of Leeds, said that their work illustrates complex and connected changes between the ice, ocean and air. “Once you’ve made a big change, it can then be really hard to sort of turn that around,” she said. And it’s a change with links to human activity. “This is indeed a strong signature of climate change,” Helen Fricker, a professor of geophysics with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved with the study, said in an e-mail. “It’s not good.”

Siegert and Hogg’s team looked at several factors including heat waves, loss of sea ice, collapse of ice shelves and impacts on biodiversity. Siegert described last year’s heat wave in Antarctica, which brought research station thermometers to a whopping 38 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal temperatures.

Hogg said that sea ice is at an all time low, a major cause for concern: In the Antarctic, the July average for sea ice extent fell below previous low set in 2022. And ice shelves, which can be the size of several large buildings, are also under threat as they melt and eventually collapse.

Sea ice and ice shelves work like a cork in a bottle, holding back glaciers that would otherwise rush into the ocean. When they disappear, glaciers flow many times faster. What’s more, the disappearance of large swaths of ice accelerates warming like swapping a white T-shirt for a black one on a hot summer day—replace ice with land or water, and suddenly the earth is absorbing the sun’s rays rather than reflecting them.

The topic of extremes “is with us more frequently and will be with us even more frequently in the future,” said Peter Schlosser, vice president and vice provost

China’s rare Russia rebuke doesn’t mean Xi Jinping is ditching Putin

By Bloomberg News

CHINA last week unleashed some of its strongest criticism against Russia since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Yet any suggestion that Xi Jinping is shifting his view on the war amounts to wishful thinking.

The rare admonition took place on Friday over an incident involving Chinese citizens—including a popular video blogger—who were denied entry from Kazakhstan into Russia at a border checkpoint. Video footage widely circulated on Chinese social media platforms over the weekend showed Russian border officials going through suitcases, with one of the travelers saying he felt like he was being treated as a criminal.

“Russia’s brutal and excessive law-enforcement activities in this incident have seriously violated the legitimate rights and interests of the Chinese citizens,” the Chinese Embassy in Moscow said in a post on the social media platform WeChat.

Wang Huiyao, founder of the Center for China and Globalization research group based in Beijing.

“China needs to maintain good relations with Russia,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they’re in favor of everything Russia does.”

Xi, who signed up to a “no limits” friendship with Putin shortly before his invasion, has sought to portray China as a neutral broker on Ukraine, releasing a 12-point blueprint for bringing peace that included calls to respect sovereignty, facilitate grain exports and halt all hostilities. While the roadmap has been widely panned by the US and its allies, it has bought Xi credibility among the so-called Global South and won China a seat at Ukraine talks hosted by Saudi Arabia over the weekend.

‘Unpredictability’

on experiences from “the special military operation”—the term Russia uses for its war in Ukraine. It said that includes the “use of drones as well as the close interaction of tank and motorized rifle units with units of other branches of the armed forces.”

The war games were taking place in the Grodno region of Belarus, near the socalled Suwalki Gap—a sparsely populated stretch of land running 96 kilometers (60 miles) along the Polish-Lithuanian border.

It links the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia with the rest of the Nato alliance and separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, a heavily militarized Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea that has no land connection to Russia.

Military analysts in the West have long viewed the Suwalki Gap as a potential flashpoint area in any confrontation between Russia and Nato. They worry that Russia might try to seize the gap and cut off the three Baltic states from Poland and other Nato nations. AP

Yet while the language was unusually harsh, it hardly signals a broader shift from Beijing. Since Russia’s invasion, China has repeatedly sought to create some space with Moscow on issues such as the use of nuclear weapons and attacks on civilians, even as Xi consistently backs Putin’s reasons for going to war—not least because Beijing sees the US and its allies strengthening ties with Taiwan.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reaffirmed the nations are “good partners” in a phone call Monday with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, according to a statement from the ministry in Beijing, which made no mention of the border incident. China would take an “independent” stance on Ukraine, Wang added.

The border incident shows the world that relations between China and Russia are more layered and nuanced than understood by many in the West, according to Henry

CHINA sent a delegation led by veteran diplomat Li Hui to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to join more than 40 countries including the US and European nations—but not Russia. While the discussions brought little in the way of concrete steps to stop the war or reverse Russia’s territorial gains, they showed Xi’s success in countering US efforts to isolate Beijing due to its relationship with Russia.

Still, China has several reasons to be irked with Putin, including his move to end a deal that allowed grain exports through the Black Sea, leading to food supply problems that also impact China. And that’s only part of the problem, according to Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“The main issue remains the unpredictability of the long-term nature of the conflict,” he said. “The war destabilizes the world, and this is bad from Beijing’s perspective as much as they might like the distracting effect it has toward the West’s focus on China.”

China has also made some economic overtures to Ukraine, al - of the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University not involved with the research. Systems like Antarctica are extreme by nature, but that doesn’t mean they’re not vulnerable, he added— they’re highly susceptible to small changes. “I’m not an alarmist, but what we see is alarming,” said Waleed Abdalati, an environmental researcher at the University of Colorado not involved with the study. He said that extreme events are one thing, but when superimposed on a trend—a trend of global warming that heightens those extreme events—that’s a cause for concern. “We can handle events,” he added, “but we can’t handle a steady increase of those destructive events.” though not to a degree that comes anywhere close to its trade ties with Russia.

That’s something climate scientists say we’ll need to prepare for, by continuing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while introducing adaptation measures for sea level rise and extreme weather around the world.

“We’ve been saying this for 30 years,” said Ted Scambos, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado whose paper from 2000 was cited in Siegert and Hogg’s article. “I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed. I wish we were taking action faster.” Seth Borenstein contributed from Washington, D.C.

Beijing is getting from the US and its allies.

Last month, China’s deputy commerce minister met with Ukraine’s deputy economy minister in Beijing, pledging to import more products from Ukraine and develop mutually beneficial economic and trade cooperation with the country, according to a Chinese readout from the meeting. China’s exports to Ukraine totaled nearly $233 million in June, down from a high of $1.2 billion from January last year.

By contrast, China’s exports to Russia reached a new historical monthly high of 69 billion yuan ($9.6 billion) in June. Its crude imports from Russia rose 8.2 percent month-on-month to a record 10.50 million tons in June, according to customs data.

Military exercises

CHINA and Russia are also deepening military cooperation.

Over the weekend, both countries sent 11 navy patrol ships near Alaska, according to a Wall Street Journal report, the seventh bilateral military exercise between the two nuclear-armed nations this year. It also set a new milestone in cooperation, marking the highest number of joint military exercises in the past two decades between the neighbors, according to data compiled by the US National Defense University and Bloomberg News.

“Moscow and Beijing have tried to put a lid on the slow-boil friction between the two powers in order to focus on areas where their interests converge,” said Theresa Fallon, director of the Brusselsbased Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies.

At the same time, Xi isn’t afraid to hit back at Russia—particularly if its actions could pose a threat to his domestic standing or make him look weak. The border incident showed that many social-media users in China remain skeptical that Russia is worth all the grief

A hashtag on China’s response to the incident saw nearly 50 million views on the Twitter-like Weibo platform, at one point ranking among the top 10 most searched topics. Videos posted by social media accounts run by party-backed outlets such as Beijing Youth Daily primarily focused on the mistreatment of the travelers, echoing parts of the embassy statement that such behavior isn’t in line with China and Russia’s “current friendly situation” and “the trend of increasingly close exchanges between people.”

Online outrage

SOME of the most upvoted comments on Weibo questioned whether the travelers had failed to give a bribe, while others cautioned against having deep diplomatic relations with Moscow.

“It goes without saying that one cannot have a deep friendship with Russia,” said Weibo user “Wall-E_22,” in a post that received almost 1,000 likes.

Russia is looking into the matter to avoid similar issues in the future, Tass reported Saturday, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter. The incident won’t harm relations between Russia and China, the state news wire said, adding that Western media is using the issue to try and undermine ties between the countries.

While the relationship with Russia is “too important for China to throw Vladimir Putin under the bus,” Xi must also show his people that he will stand up for their interests, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

“The strongly worded statement is not a signal to the Russian authorities themselves, but rather a reaction and signal to Chinese domestic online public to say that Xi Jinping’s government and MOFA is vigorous in protecting the rights of Chinese regardless of who the violators are,” Gabuev said, referring to China’s Foreign Ministry. “Be it enemies like the West or friends like Russia.”

Surging food prices spark global concern

The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for July reflected the impact of the termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative and new trade restrictions on rice. FAO released last Friday its food price index, which track monthly changes in the international prices of globally traded commodities. The index averaged 123.9 points in July, up 1.3 percent from the previous month, but 11.8 percent below the level seen a year ago, or five months after Russia attacked Ukraine.

FAO said the month-on-month increase in the index was driven by a sharp jump in vegetable oil prices, which rose by an average of 12.1 percent from June after seven months of consecutive decline. Also, international sunflower oil prices rebounded by more than 15 percent in July, mainly due to the uncertainties caused by the decision of the Russian Federation to end the Black Sea Grain Initiative. World prices for palm, soy and rapeseed oils also went up on concerns over output prospects in producing countries. (See, “Global food commodity prices up in July–FAO,” in the BusinessMirror, August 7, 2023)

While cereal price index fell slightly as a result of the increase in seasonal supplies of maize from Argentina and Brazil and higherthan-anticipated corn output in the United States, FAO said international wheat prices went up by 1.6 percent in July. For the first time in nine months, wheat prices registered an increase due to uncertainty over exports from Ukraine as well as continued dry conditions in North America.

What’s more concerning is the all rice price index, which rose by nearly 20 percent in July, the highest since September 2011. India’s decision to prohibit the exports of non-parboiled Indica exerted more pressure on rice prices. While the Philippines does not import huge volumes of the staple from India, the ban could make rice from other sources more expensive and cause domestic retail prices to go up. (See, “Rice price hike may dampen momentum to tame inflation,” in the BusinessMirror, August 4, 2023)

These are developments that the Philippines would have to deal with a few weeks before the start of the so-called “ber” months, when consumer prices usually rise because of the spike in demand. The country is well known for having the longest Christmas celebration as it usually starts on September 1. Around this time, Filipinos are usually more sanguine and are more willing to part with their cash, particularly during the last two months of the year, when most employees receive their bonuses and 13th month pay.

Unfortunately, unscrupulous traders usually take advantage of the optimism of consumers during the holidays. And it is possible that they will use international trade developments to justify their decision to significantly raise the prices of goods.

Not so long ago, urban residents had to shell out as much as P700 for a kilogram of red onions. Officials of the Department of Agriculture had vowed that consumers would never see those prices again. (See, “DA: Repeat of ’22 onion price spikes unlikely,” in the BusinessMirror, May 22, 2023) It would do well for government officials to shield consumers from hoarders and profiteers.

Since

Ambassador Antonio L. Cabangon Chua Founder