Saudi Arabia and the Space Age

Withdrawing From Syria Leaves a Vacuum That Iran Will Fill

As Iran Sails West, the U.S. and Europe Close Ranks

A Weekly Political News Magazine

The Future of Democracy in South Asia

Issue 1730 - January 11/01/2019

Saudi Arabia and the Space Age A Dream Becomes Reality www.majalla.com

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1730 - January 11/01/2019

How the State Is Co-Opting Religion in China 26

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Revellers take part in the 'Canto a la Tierra' parade on January 2019 ,3, during the Blacks and Whites Carnival in Pasto, Colombia, the largest festivity in the southwestern region of the country.

More than 10,000 artists, craftsmen and revellers take part in the Black and White Carnival, which has its origins in a mix of Andean, Amazonian and Pacific cultural expressions. It is celebrated every year from January 2 to 6 in the city of Pasto and has been on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage since 2009. (Getty)

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A Palestinian horseman rides on the beach at sunset west of in Gaza city. (Getty)

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Saudi Arabia and the Space Age A Dream Becomes Reality

By Ahmed Taher Baku, Azerbaijan: In past centuries geo-political scientists agreed that if one wanted to control the world, one had to control the seas. Since the dawn of the 21st century, the new frontier of hegemony is space. Fulfilling such ambitions requires two prerequisites, namely efficiency in satellite manufacturing and extensive astronomical research. It is nevertheless necessary to gain a head start in both prerequisites since space exploration is a fast changing industry that needs an accelerated pace to meet its demands. Luckily, Saudi Arabia had its start since the mid1980s, when in 1985 it launched its first satellite called Arabsat1-A. The satellite was manufactured by the Arabsat organisation, which itself was founded in 1976. The goal of

It is for this reason that many have suggested that the state annually celebrates the 27th of December as National Saudi Space Day.

the satellite was transmitting satellite communications and live television throughout the Arab world. Even though the satellite’s primary target was the Middle East, it was able to provide 10s of millions of people living in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Central Asia with television and radio broadcasts and high definition TV channels. Saudi Arabia’s ambitions did not stop there, in the same year of Arabsat1-A’s launch Prince Sultan Bin Salman became the first Arab and Muslim astronaut to go to space when he joined a mission in the American space shuttle Discovery.

This marked a new era in Saudi scientific exploration as the Kingdom continued to have successive astronomical breakthroughs such as the foundation of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), which founded the The National Center for Remote Sensing Technology, an institute for space exploration. Later the Saudi government pledged a billion dollars in investment for its space services sector.

These developments ultimately lead to the establishment of the Saudi Space Agency, which was officially announced

by King Salman’s royal decree on December 2018 ,27.

Furthermore, when King Salman ordered a reshuffling of his cabinet, he exempted Prince Sultan Bin Salman from his position as head of the Tourism Agency so that he could serve as the first head of the Saudi Space Agency.

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Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signs first Saudi satellite at Lockheed Martin.

This decision reflects the Saudi vision for the future in which it aims to be a leader in all fronts be they scientific or non-scientific, moreover it is part of the Saudi Vision 2030 plan in which the state aims to transform itself into a modern and futuristic state both regionally and globally.

The aspects of Saudi Arabia’s space ambitions that comply with the Vision 2030 plan include:

First: The Saudi Space Agency - Goals and Advantages: On April 2016 ,25 King Salman bin Abdulaziz announced the Saudi Vision 2030 plan which aims to restructure the Saudi economy and develop its society. As such, this vision has included many ideas and theses which, in turn, have included countless specific projects, initiatives and implementation steps that have started to launch over the past months. During the last year or so, Saudi Arabia has been like a big workshop in which its engineers are fundamentally rebuilding the country’s economic structure and sectors from scratch following a detailed blueprint showing the Vision’s final goals. If Saudi Arabia wishes to fulfil its ambitions, then it is necessary that it also focuses

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Prince Sultan Bin Salman became the first Arab and Muslim astronaut to go to space when he joined a mission in the American space shuttle Discovery. on developing a space program which puts its efforts on the following strategic goals:

Localizing the space industry as to have it keep up with Vision 2030 Meeting different local demands Manufacturing and developing the latest Earth surveillance technologies Strengthening geographic information services Engaging the local commercial sector Promoting international cooperation in space exploration.

Aiming for security of and peace within space,

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establishing an international law of space through space exploration programs, moon exploration programs, space telecommunications programs and space technology programs.

Additionally, there are other goals that the space program strives for, namely: Saudi Arabia to play a role in the important international and regional space exploration missions.

Exploiting space systems provided by other organizations in the space exploration industry.

Enhancing the level of higher education in aerospace and

This marked a new era in Saudi scientific exploration as the Kingdom continued to have successive astronomical breakthroughs such as the foundation of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, which founded The National Center for Remote Sensing Technology, an institute for space exploration.

training programs in the Kingdom, developing resources and paying attention to the aerospace sector.

Promoting the spread and use of national air and space projects and services at the national level in the public sector, the industrial sector and the general public.

After achieving the above goals the Saudi space program will have a myriad of advantages which can be summarised through the following points: Advanced photovoltaic imaging systems High speed communication systems

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Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery Source.

Advanced lunar photography systems Processing and storing high-capacity data in space and transmitting it to earth stations via high-speed communications.

Second: The Futuristic Need for Satellites It goes without saying that with each passing day, satellites grow more important for modern life. For one thing, satellites have a latent function of giving a country a political and economic advantage, which are necessary to maintain during times of peace. Furthermore, satellites have improved international telecommunications thus making the world a small village. Satellites have also enabled topographic photography, longe range weather forecasts and have made land, sea and air navigation easier.

Satellites also play a huge role in modern military warfare as many states’ strategic national defence sectors make great use of them. One disadvantage satellites have is that they are susceptible to hacking, which is one of the reasons scientists are doing their best to prevent any malicious interference with satellites. It is this growing importance that led Saudi Arabia to build and launch 13 efficient and advanced satellites during the last decade. Moreover, Saudi Arabia has established a center for moon and near earth object exploration, a collaborative project with NASA and a space and aviation research center in collaboration with

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It is this growing importance that led Saudi Arabia to build and launch 13 efficient and advanced satellites during the last decade.

Stanford University. Saudi Arabia is not only committed to launching satellites, but also manufacturing them. For instance, both the SAT 5A and SAT 5B are made entirely in Saudi Arabia by Saudi Arabian engineers in the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology.

Third: Saudi Arabia’s Space Technology Treaties In recent years, Saudi Arabia has shown extensive commitments toward collaborative space exploration and technological advancements and has therefore signed a number of treaties and protocols highlighting that very commitment. Since joining in 2001, Saudi Arabia has been an important member of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which was set up by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has signed many conventions on outer space

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technologies and their rightful applications with big players in the space exploration field such as the United States, Russia, China, France and Germany as well as with other states. The most significant recent conventions that Saudi Arabia joined include: A bilateral cooperation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan in 2011. The aim was to exchange benefits and cooperation in the areas of space research, remote sensing, satellite communications, the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes, the use of space infrastructure, the manufacture of spacecraft and their components and the provisions and use of launch services.

A bilateral cooperation agreement between Saudi Arabia and China which was brokered by King Salman Bin Abdulaziz during his trip to China in March 2017 ,16.

This led to Saudi Arabia taking part in the Chinese space mission Chang’e4-, which was launched from Xichang on May 2018 ,20 and reached the moon where satellite images were taken using Saudi photography systems.

King Salman also signed an agreement during his Russia visit in October 2017, in which both countries agreed to deepen collaborative efforts in space exploration and the use of space for peaceful purposes. The agreement allowed Saudi participation in Russian space exploration in both manned and unmanned shuttles. The agreement also strengthened the Saudi Public Investment Fund's holdings in Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit by $ 1 billion as well as $ 480 million as an additional option in the future. These companies are supporting Saudi Arabia’s efforts to develop flight systems, low-cost satellite launch systems and space transport industries in the near future.

An agreement between Saudi Arabia and Ukraine in which both states committed to increase collaboration in space

Saudi Arabia has established a center for moon and near earth object exploration, a collaborative project with NASA and a space and aviation research center in collaboration with Stanford University.

research and use of outer space for peaceful purposes.

Fourth: Female Participation in the Saudi Space Program One of the commitments that Saudi Arabia strived for was increasing female participation in its space exploration and research efforts. Maged El Moshary, the head of the National Center of Satellite Manufacturing of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), noted that Saudi women play a large role in the satellite industry. For example, the National Center currently employs 35 women who work in several areas such as optics engineering, development of image processing systems and moon mission planning systems. It is worth noting that such efforts comply with Vision 2030 plans which emphasize an improvement of human resources, including greater participation of women in the development of Saudi economy and society. El Moshary also mentioned how establishing a female department within the Center helped give women the opportunity to take part in scientific breakthroughs and research. Moreover, KACST’s collaborations with reputable academic institutions such as Stanford gave both Saudi women and men the opportunity to take part in new and exciting scientific endeavors.

Fifth: The Important Role of the New Saudi Space Agency King Salman’s announcement on December 2018 ,27 of the establishment of the Saudi Space Agency marked a

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STS51-G Crew photo. (L-R)Daniel Brandenstein, John Creighton. Behind: Shannon Lucid, Steven Nagel, John Fabian, Sultan Salman Al-Saud, Patrick Baudry.

Saudi women play a large role in the satellite industry. For example, the National Center currently employs 35 women who work in several areas. new beginning of Saudi space exploration and innovation.

For one thing, there will now be a central organisation in which all the established industries will collaborate with, thus creating greater synchronization of Saudi space ambitions and research. The new agency will also contribute to diversifying the Saudi economy, improving the country’s technological and scientific efforts as well as making it both a regional and global leader in space exploration. It is for this reason that many have suggested that the state annually celebrates the 27th of December as National Saudi Space Day, just as the international community celebrates April 12, the day in which Vostok 1, the first manned space mission took place, as International Space Day.

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. (SPA)

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As Iran Sails West, the U.S. and Europe Close Ranks Tehran to Send Warships Close to US Waters as Tensions Between Them Escalate 14

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A senior U.S. commander opined that the presence of U.S. aircraft carriers in the Gulf had driven Tehran to draw up plans to approach U.S waters as a kind of deterrent measure. to “thwart Iranophobia plots” and “secure shipping lanes.” Fars news agency added that the vessels — which would be equipped with anti-ship and anti-aircraft guns as well as surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles and electronic warfare capacities — would likely dock in the waters of Venezuela, an Iranian ally.

In Washington on Monday, an outspoken opponent of the Iran nuclear deal joined the Trump administration as Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction at the National Security Council. Richard Goldberg had previously served in the Illinois governor’s office, as well as the Senate, where he negotiated several rounds of sanctions against Iran, before joining the Foundation of Defense of Democracies, a bastion of support for a tough line on Tehran.

Elsewhere in Washington, a legal event with potential bearing on Iranian financial matters began Tuesday. Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian was to testify in a federal court that he suffered acute psychological abuse while held hostage by the Iranian government on trumped-up charges — and that the government was motivated by a desire to gain advantages vis a vis the U.S. with respect to Iranian nuclear negotiations. His lawsuit, demanding millions of dollars in damages from Iran, is a further case made possible to the “terrorism exception” to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, enabling U.S. citizens to take foreign governments to court in the United States on charges of terrorism, torture, or hostage-taking. : Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iran, Javad Zarif (R) welcomes High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, Federica Mogherini (L), at foreign ministry building, in Tehran, Iran on April 2016 ,16.

(Getty)

By Joseph Braude* Iran sent new signals of military boldness this past week, while critics of the regime in the U.S. and Europe worked through their legal systems to pressure the Tehran leadership financially, with prospects for trans-Atlantic unity against the regime inching forward.

The U.S. Navy Times has reported that the Iranian navy intends to send warships to the Atlantic ocean as early as this spring.

A senior U.S. commander opined that the presence of U.S. aircraft carriers in the Gulf had driven Tehran to draw up plans to approach U.S. waters as a kind of deterrent measure. Statements

by Iranian officials seemed to imply as much. Tehran’s IRNA news agency has quoted Rear-Admiral Touraj Hassani, the deputy commander of the Iranian navy, as saying that the move aimed

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Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European Union came together to impose their first new sanctions on Iran since the signing of the Iranian nuclear accord in 2015. The move was prompted by evidence of further Iranian terror plots in targeting Iranian opposition activists in France and Denmark. Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen Tweeted, “Very encouraging that EU has just agreed on new targeted sanctions against Iran in response to hostile activities and plots. EU stands united — such actions are unacceptable and must have consequences.”

Reporting by the New York Times noted that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, had provided European authorities with the knowledge that enabled the plots to be disrupted. *Middle East specialist Joseph Braude is the author of Broadcasting Change: Arabic Media as a Catalyst for Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield). He is Advisor to the Al-Mesbar Center for Research and Studies and tweets @josephbraude

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Withdrawing From Syria Leaves a Vacuum That Iran Will Fill Shiite Militias Are in the Region to Stay 16

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Without a U.S. commitment to counter Iran in Syria, the network will prosper and grow, taking advantage of the power vacuum to extend Tehran’s influence throughout the region security advisor, John Bolton, seemingly reversed course again, announcing that U.S. forces would remain in Syria until ISIS was defeated and the Turks provided guarantees that they wouldn’t strike the Kurds.

The actor who perhaps benefits above all others from the administration’s back and forth on Syria is Iran. An American withdrawal would provide the Iranians with the operational space to expand their growing network of Shiite foreign fighters, who can be mobilized and moved throughout the Middle East. The recent announcements send Tehran the message that Washington will no longer be an obstacle in the way of these designs.

Indeed, according to Bolton, the administration’s preconditions for withdrawal have to do with the Kurds and ISIS: the national security advisor made no mention of the presence or expansion of Shiite militias trained and equipped by Iran.

IRAN IN THE GRAY ZONE

Pro-Iran militias on the Iraqi-Syrian border, November 2018.

(Reuters)

by Ariane M. Tabatabai, Colin P. Clarke One of President Trump’s final foreign policy decisions of 2018 was also among his most controversial: the withdrawal of the remaining 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. The order was an astonishing reversal of U.S. policy, and it raised concerns among Washington national security professionals that the Kurds—who have served as U.S. allies in the fight against ISIS—will suffer losses while the Assad regime, Russia, and Turkey gain. This weekend, the president’s national

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In the early days of the Islamic Republic, which marks its 40th anniversary in February, Iran’s clerical leaders often spoke about exporting their revolution beyond national borders. Although spreading revolutionary ideals is no longer among Iran’s core objectives, the Islamic Republic has nonetheless spent decades cultivating ties with groups—particularly Shiites—in countries it considers important to its security. These connections link Tehran to constituencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, among other places.

Starting with its cultivation of Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran has reaped immense benefits from waging proxy warfare and leveraging third-party combatants, including terrorists and

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militias. Working with non-state clients allows Tehran to deter its enemies, grow its strategic depth, and compensate for its conventional military inferiority by projecting power beyond its means. Importantly, these groups help extend Iran’s reach into so-called gray zones between peace and conflict, in countries such as Iraq and Syria, while also affording it a modicum of plausible deniability and minimizing the costs of intervention.

When the Syrian civil war started in 2011, Iran was determined to prop up its ally. But divisions in Damascus and Tehran militated against an overt and large Iranian presence in Syria. Many Iranians took issue with helping sustain a dictator whose mass atrocities and use of chemical weapons raised ethical questions and damaged their country’s reputation. The Assad regime, for its part, sought to give the country’s defense a homegrown veneer and to avoid the appearance of a weak central authority being rescued by foreigners. Instead of intervening directly, Tehran organized non-Iranian Shiite forces to fight on behalf of the Assad regime. To do this, Iran recruited heavily from Shiite populations in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. While Iran has long cultivated forces from Lebanon and Iraq, the introduction of Shiites from South Asia was new. These foreign fighter subgroups are embedded firmly within a broader network, but they have specific designations: the Fatemiyoun division consists of Afghans, and the Zeinabiyoun brigade of Pakistanis. To date, the Iranian regime has trained, equipped, and deployed several thousand such forces to Syria, going as far as

Starting with its cultivation of Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran has reaped immense benefits from waging proxy warfare and leveraging third-party combatants, including terrorists and militias.

recruiting child soldiers.

While the existence of Iran’s Shiite foreignfighter network is hardly newsworthy in itself, the U.S. withdrawal adds a new twist. Without a U.S. commitment to counter Iran in Syria, the network will prosper and grow, taking advantage of the power vacuum to extend Tehran’s influence throughout the region, long an Iranian objective that has been kept in check by the deployment of U.S. troops to Iraq from 2003 until 2011.

A significantly reduced American military footprint—Washington is expected to keep several hundred special operations forces in the country—will likely prompt further Israeli action in Syria, since Jerusalem can no longer depend on American military might to deter Iranian expansion. In turn, this could tempt Iran to use the fighters it has been cultivating as an external strike force.

THE NETWORK BEYOND SYRIA To recruit fighters to Syria, Iran doesn’t rely

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U.S. soldiers stand at attention during a visit of a U.S. delegation to the YPG-held northern Syrian city of Manbij, where the US has a military presence, on March 2018 ,22.

(Getty)

Now, with the war in Syria winding down, Tehran will look to replicate its success there in other theaters.

With the American withdrawal from Syria, and in the absence of any coherent U.S. policy to respond to actions in the region that fall short of conflict, Iran is likely to continue cultivating Shiite militias and redirecting them across the region. Some of the Fatemiyoun are already being redirected to Afghanistan, where, alongside Russia, Iran is supporting the Taliban to stymie ISIS’s offshoot in the country. This commitment shows Afghans that Iran is willing to act as a stabilizing force even as the United States considers cutting its troop numbers in half. And Afghanistan is just one of the four theaters in which Iran is involved: Iraq, Syria, and Yemen are the others.

solely on religion. It has reportedly promised to provide returning fighters and their families with Iranian residency, pay, health care, and education. Now, with the war in Syria winding down, Tehran will look to replicate its success there in other theaters. It can minimize the cost by using forces it has already recruited, trained, and equipped, and whose effectiveness has been enhanced by battlefield exposure in Syria.

There is a dearth of precise and accurate data on Tehran’s spending to support militias.

But at a time when the country has to tighten its belt to overcome economic sanctions, Iran’s cultivation of Shiite foreign fighters may be the most cost-effective way—even using the highest cost estimates—to pursue its regional agenda. As Iran scholar Afshon Ostovar put it, “Iran spends less—and perhaps far less—on defense than its nearest peer rivals in the region, even including its support for its clients in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.”

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President Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was undoubtedly intended to extricate the United States from the morass of the Middle East and afford Washington the flexibility to focus its resources on greatpower conflict—particularly with China and Russia, but perhaps also with Iran. However, by outsourcing the counter-ISIS mission to Turkey and essentially ceding Syria to the Assad regime and its powerful backers in Moscow and Tehran, the administration may be unintentionally signaling that it is unwilling to compete in critical geopolitical hotspots.

Such a message could embolden powerful states— including Iran—to expand their presence. Tehran is likely to step into the breach by continuing to build its network of Shiite foreign fighters and moving them around the region. If Iran’s leaders see this as a worthwhile strategy whose benefits outweigh its costs, the network could grow from a regional threat to a global one, ultimately creating more problems in the long term for the United States and its allies.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Future of Democracy in South Asia Why Citizens Must Stay Vigilant 20

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Ethnic and religious tensions are spiking. Politicians are trying to win votes by attacking independent institutions. And militaries still lurk in the background. and replace him with a former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Lawmakers and citizens protested; Sirisena dissolved Parliament, until the Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional; and Rajapaksa, rejected by Parliament, refused to step aside. The stalemate broke only in December, when Sirisena reinstated the deposed prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, in the face of concerted opposition from the judiciary and a majority of Parliament.

Until recently, Sri Lanka, one of Asia’s oldest democracies, seemed safe from this kind of instability.

The country’s bloody civil war ended in 2009, and its 2015 election seemed to signal a new phase of liberalization. But democracy’s gains were less secure than they appeared.

Supporters of Mahinda Rajapaksa attend a talk held by the Sri Lankan president during may day 2017.

(Getty Images)

By Paul Staniland* On November 2018 14, a fight broke out in the Sri Lankan Parliament. When the Speaker tried to call a vote, a group of MPs heckled him and rushed the podium. A rival faction tried to push the hecklers back. Men traded punches. One brandished a knife.

A lawmaker cut himself trying to steal the Speaker’s microphone and ended up in the hospital.

The chaos was the result of a constitutional crisis that erupted in October, when the country’s president, Maithripala Sirisena, tried to oust the prime minister

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Sri Lanka is far from unique in South Asia in this respect. By some measures, the region is more stable and democratic than it has been in decades. Violence and unrest have subsided. Militaries have left the streets and returned to their barracks. Major insurgencies have been contained. As a region, South Asia is experiencing economic growth at an average rate of nearly seven percent each year. Today Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Pakistan—countries governed by hardline military dictatorships in the recent past—are all, at least formally, democracies.

But this apparent calm masks major sources of disquiet.

Ethnic and religious tensions are spiking. Politicians are trying to win votes by attacking independent institutions. And militaries still lurk in the background.

South Asia’s experience shows that democracy does not seamlessly advance or uniformly retreat.

Empowerment in some areas can be accompanied by repression in others. Reforms can trigger new conflicts. Open political competition gives the people a voice, but that voice may be deeply illiberal. Orderly elections do not preclude political crises. South Asia’s

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trajectory shows just how important it is to seize opportunities to fortify liberal democracy when they present themselves and to confront potential dangers before they metastasize.

THE SOURCES OF THE CRISIS Sri Lanka’s crisis has its roots in Rajapaksa’s presidency, which turned particularly authoritarian in its second term. In 2009, Rajapaksa ended Sri Lanka’s -25year civil war by inflicting a bloody defeat on the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (also known as the Tamil Tigers). He was reelected by a landslide in 2010, and together with his family and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), he proceeded to centralize power, expand the reach of the presidency, and draw close to China. Media reports credibly linked Rajapaksa and his allies to corruption and human rights violations.

Sirisena had been a member of the SLFP, but in the 2015 presidential election, he unexpectedly defected from it in order to challenge Rajapaksa. With the support of the United National Party (UNP) and other opposition parties, Sirisena won a shock victory. After parliamentary elections later that year, UNP leader Wickremesinghe emerged as prime minister. This set up Sirisena and Wickremesinghe to pursue what they claimed would be an ambitious reform agenda aimed at curbing executive power and addressing the legacies of the civil war.

The government fulfilled some of this agenda, most notably limiting the powers of the presidency

These problems—ethnic and religious majoritarianism, attacks on independent institutions, and continued military influence—do not outweigh the many advantages of liberal democracy.

that Rajapaksa had expanded. But Sirisena and Wickremesinghe did not prove a cohesive team, reform stalled, and when local elections were held earlier this year, Rajapaksa’s party, relaunched as the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, dominated the results. With Rajapaksa resurgent, the relationship between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe deteriorated. On October 26, Sirisena dismissed Wickremesinghe and appointed Rajapaksa as the new prime minister.

Within three weeks, the Supreme Court suspended Sirisena’s dissolution of Parliament. Undeterred, Sirisena and Rajapaksa sought to cobble together a parliamentary majority to endorse Rajapaksa as prime minister. But despite concerted efforts to bribe and entice members of Parliament to defect, a majority stuck by Wickremesinghe, who refused to leave the prime minister’s residence. Citizens massed in the streets to support Wickremesinghe against the power grab.

The standoff lasted for more than six weeks. Rajapaksa was unable to form a majority in Parliament, so Sirisena called for elections for 2019 to try to forge a

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Supporters of Pakistani cricket star-turnedpolitician and head of the Pakistan Tehreek-eInsaf (PTI) Imran Khan (unseen) gather at his political campaign rally for the upcoming general election in Lahore on July 2018 ,18. (Getty Images)

ethnic and religious majoritarianism persists.

Majoritarian politics are often driven by a majorityminority complex: despite representing large majorities in their countries, politicians and activists argue that sinister transnational influences, long-term demographic changes, and the corruption and impurity of cosmopolitan elites undermine their groups’ power.

Like populists in the West, they claim that they alone can protect majority groups from these threats—even when those groups are objectively already dominant.

That strategy has proved an electoral winner. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has constructed a political machine that followed its decisive 2014 victory by dramatically expanding the number of states under its control. Although it fared poorly in the most recent state elections, in December, the BJP remains the favorite in the 2019 national elections. Hindu majoritarianism has become a remarkably powerful political project in India. Although there are still many Indians who do not subscribe to it, the quest to give Hindus favored status has advanced dramatically in recent years. As the political scientist Kanchan Chandra has noted, “The idea of India is being redefined to mean a Hindu polity.”

Even before the recent crisis, Sri Lanka’s long war with the Tamil Tigers had its roots in the rise of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, a strain of politics that remains new electoral majority. Finally, on December 13, the deeply influential in the island nation. The country’s Supreme Court ruled decisively against Sirisena, who two dominant Sinhalese parties have tried to outbid each then grudgingly recognized Wickremesinghe as prime other in appealing to Buddhist nationalism, limiting the minister. Although the immediate crisis has ended, Sri Lankan political system’s ability to accommodate it has revealed deep vulnerabilities in Sri Lanka’s the country’s Tamil and Muslim minorities. Sri Lanka’s 2015 election offered a chance to address such ethnic democracy that are unlikely to go away. tensions, but Sinhalese nationalists doggedly opposed these efforts, contributing to the gradual collapse of the ETHNO-NATIONALISM reformist agenda.

Submerged within Sri Lanka’s political crisis is the Perhaps the most dramatic South Asian case in which ethnic unrest that has plagued the country since the ethno-nationalism has set back genuine liberalization is 1950s. Rajapaksa represents a powerful strand of in Myanmar. De facto President Aung San Suu Kyi has Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalism that has played proven a bitter disappointment to many international a central role in promoting ethnic violence. He and his observers because of her failure to condemn the supporters played this card when attacking critics in the military’s brutal crackdown on the Muslim Rohingya most recent crisis. They argued that Wickremesinghe people. But Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance reflects represented foreign (mainly Western) influences and public sentiment. Many in Myanmar, even those who alien cultural values. This type of problem extends previously opposed the military, support hard-line antiwell beyond Sri Lanka: ethnic and religious tensions Rohingya policies. Myanmar’s 2020 general election will probably see both Aung San Suu Kyi’s National threaten other South Asian democracies, too.

Although elections are now routine across the League for Democracy and its main opposition, the subcontinent, and are often broadly free and fair, military-linked Union Solidarity and Development

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Party, appealing to heartland Bamar ethno-nationalism.

The rise of electoral democracy in Myanmar has allowed supporters of majoritarianism, from politicians to monks to social media users, to frame the Rohingya as subversive outsiders who need to be eliminated.

Even when ethnic and religious majoritarian movements lose elections, they continue to exert street power. Pakistan’s religious parties have largely proved electoral failures. But religious organizations can still tap into suspicion and bigotry against minority groups to mobilize their supporters. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has found this out the hard way. He took a firm stand in defense of the Pakistani Supreme Court’s acquittal of a Christian woman on blasphemy charges, then quickly backed down, at least symbolically, after days of protests by a religious movement called the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). Khan’s government has pushed back on the TLP in recent weeks, but the dangers and temptations of mobilizing exclusionary Sunni religious majoritarianism aimed at Shiites, Christians, Hindus, and, especially, Ahmadis (a Muslim group viewed by many in Pakistan as heretics and thus discriminated against) remains.

SUBVERTING DEMOCRACY Electoral democracy in South Asia coexists uneasily with independent political institutions, especially justice systems. Intense political competition can force politicians to pay attention to their constituents, ideally making them more responsive. But this competition also pushes them to politicize courts, bureaucracies, and law enforcement. Leading Sri Lankan politicians showed a remarkably flagrant disregard for the constitution during the crisis, offering a shifting array of dubious justifications for their actions. Sri Lanka’s judiciary has proven surprisingly robust, but it endured a stress test that never should have occurred in the first place.

In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League dispensed with procedural niceties in its quest to break its rivals ahead of the recent general election. The Awami League won overwhelmingly, but the campaign and election day itself were marred by lethal violence and allegations of serious electoral irregularities. The government has passed laws restricting free speech, arrested journalists and dissidents, and used police to target political rivals.

Ironically, the Awami League points to the threat of religious majoritarianism and intolerance as the reason for its destruction of the political institutions meant to protect rights and provide order: its actions are necessary, the party claims, in order to hold at bay majoritarian Islamist opposition parties such as the Bangladesh National Party and Jamaat-e-Islami.

In India, too, the government has locked horns with, and allegedly interfered in, important national institutions, seeking to shape them to the benefit of Modi’s party.

The Central Bureau of Investigation and Reserve Bank of India have experienced dramatic, highly public disputes and internal feuds. Such manipulation predates the BJP and has a long history in India. But even elite state institutions now confront what the political analyst Milan Vaishnav has called a “crisis of credibility” as the BJP seeks to hold the commanding heights of state power.

Several South Asian countries, however, suffer from the opposite problem: rather than elected politicians interfering with independent institutions, autonomous militaries can interfere in civilian politics. The military has a stake in political affairs above all in Pakistan and Myanmar, which have experienced long spells of military rule. Both militaries have formally withdrawn from direct control of national politics but continue to wield power.

Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, controls key security ministries and is guaranteed 25 percent of

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pro-demoracydemonstration-inColombo

majoritarianism, attacks on independent institutions, and continued military influence— do not outweigh the many advantages of liberal democracy. But South Asia’s experience shows that progress and backsliding can be difficult to distinguish.

The conflict between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe in Sri Lanka might never have come about if the two men had not passed important, badly needed reforms to the powers of the presidency after the 2015 election.

Those reforms proved destructive in the short term, but in the long run they are likely to strengthen Sri Lankan democracy. Myanmar’s opening up has unleashed a dangerous majoritarianism, but it has also contributed to a freer press, more open political competition, and new possibilities for civil society.

Myanmar may yet move—if only incrementally— toward fuller democracy. India’s elections remain highly competitive, and the BJP cannot rest easy in the face of a reenergized opposition. Even in Pakistan, under the shadow of military influence and religious the seats in parliament. Its brutal campaign against radicalism, democratic competition still holds out the the Rohingya people has garnered it new support possibility of a government that is more responsive to from many in the Bamar ethnic majority, who see its citizens. it waging a war to protect the country from Bengali Democracy is unambiguously in retreat from some intruders and meddling foreigners. The military countries, such as Hungary. That is not the situation has restricted press freedoms and continues to wage in South Asia. There the contradictory nature of grim counterinsurgency campaigns on Myanmar’s democracy’s advance shows, above all, the importance periphery, especially in the northeast. After fueling of vigilance. Those who defend liberal democracy Bamar nationalism, the army has proceeded to take must do so continually, pushing back against rightsadvantage of it by reframing itself as the protector of denying ideological projects, politicians who the nation, rather than a tyrannical former dictatorship. undermine institutions, and institutions that seek to In Pakistan, the military does not even need formal escape accountability. constitutional prerogatives to exert its influence. During The willingness to defend democracy proved the 2018 election, the military was widely believed to essential to resolving Sri Lanka’s constitutional have thrown its weight behind Imran Khan. After his crisis. Sirisena’s daring power play could very victory, the military mediated Khan’s negotiations with easily have succeeded. Two of the key dangers the TLP in the wake of the blasphemy verdict. The to democracy in South Asia were present: ethnoarmy continues to control a wide array of businesses nationalism and contempt for political institutions. that give it external influence and serve as a source Sirisena’s goal was to quickly establish facts of internal cohesion by providing retired military on the ground that could not be rolled back. But elites with comfortable positions. Most important, it is the concerted mobilization of individuals, civil believed to hold a veto on significant foreign policy society, and politicians has (so far) preserved the decisions, especially those concerning Afghanistan and constitutional order. That hard-fought success India that should be the prerogative of elected civilian stands as both an inspiration and a warning to democracy’s defenders elsewhere. leaders.

WARNING SIGNS These

problems—ethnic

and

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This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

PAUL STANILAND is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

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How the State Is Co-Opting Religion in China And What It Means for the Country’s Future 26

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Churches closed, crosses removed, mosques demolished, Muslims sent to internment camps—the list of stateorganized measures against religion in China has been growing.

This photo taken on September 2018 ,12 shows Jin Mingri, head pastor of the Zion church, posing in Beijing days after authorities shut down one of China's largest 'underground' Protestant churches. - A Chinese Protestant pastor is vowing to keep preaching to his flock despite the closure of his prominent underground church in Beijing. (Getty)

This picture taken on March 2018 ,2 shows an ethnic Hui Muslim man standing in front of Laohuasi Mosque after Friday prayers in Linxia, China's Gansu province. (Getty)

By Ian Johnson* The message reached me in early December via Signal, an encrypted messaging service that many Chinese use to bypass the closely monitored social media app WeChat. The day that many of us had feared was upon us: China’s best-known pastor, Wang Yi, and 100 of his followers had been detained. Their church of 500 members was closed—very likely forever.

In the two years since my last Foreign Affairs piece about religion in China (“China’s Great Awakening,” March/April 2017), such stories have become common. Churches closed, crosses removed, mosques demolished, Muslims sent to internment camps—the list of state-organized measures against religion in

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China has been growing. Seen against a backdrop of measures to limit nongovernmental organizations, tighten ideology, and lift term limits on President Xi Jinping, it’s easy to think that religion in China is being crushed by a strong state, diminishing in importance as a new powerful leader takes firm control of the country.

This view is tempting but wrong. China is not retreating to the era of high communism under Mao Zedong but lurching toward a messy future shared by many authoritarian states. Today’s China seeks not to marginalize competing groups and belief systems, the way Beijing did during the Mao era, but to co-opt them.

Indeed, the events of the past two years show that for the first time in a century and a half, religion is firmly ensconced in the center of China’s social and political life.

THE IMPERIAL MODEL If a Chinese past has found an echo in today’s events, it is that of the imperial era. A central characteristic of that period was that rulers tolerated a variety of beliefs but defined which were orthodox (zheng) and which heterodox (xie). This tradition underlies the state Xi inherits today, which has many religions,

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some of them even growing dynamically, but no religious freedom.

Today’s Chinese state, much like the imperial state, can be a generous benefactor, helping to rebuild temples, train new Buddhist and Taoist clergy, and set up international exchanges with the faithful in other countries. But toward those out of favor—today largely Christians and Muslims—the state can be harsh, setting up reeducation camps, demolishing mosques and churches, and persecuting leaders. To get an idea of the state’s wrath, consider the fate not only of Wang Yi, a Christian pastor, but also of his wife, Jiang Rong. Both have been charged with “inciting to subvert state power,” a crime that carries up to 15 years in jail.

Why has the state re-involved itself in religious life? The answer is the government’s realization that Chinese society is adrift, cynical, and bereft of values. Many countries, including the United States, share this lack of values, with large chunks of the population feeling that a lack of solidarity and shared beliefs has left many behind.

In China’s case, the contemporary malaise is compounded by events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the country was invaded and almost carved up by foreign powers.

In response, the country’s elites of that era turned on traditional religions, seeing them as superstitious, backward beliefs that were holding back the country’s modernization. Starting in the late nineteenth century, about 100 years of autocultural genocide destroyed around 90 percent of China’s religious infrastructure: temples, monasteries, ceremonial gateways, and ancestral shrines.

Beijing, for example, went from an estimated 900 temples in the nineteenth century to about a half dozen by the early 1980s.

During this period, the state under Mao made a short-lived effort to instill communism as a new system of values—even as a religion—but the attempt failed after a few decades of misrule.

The reform era, which began 40 years ago this past December, struck a new deal between state and society: citizens could make money through newly permitted capitalist-style reforms and be accorded substantial freedom in their personal life (provided they stayed out of politics, of course). The credo of this era was

The state’s attitude toward folk religion—and its similar largesse toward Buddhism and Taoism— contrasts strongly with its attitude toward China’s two other main religious groups, Christianity and Islam. The government mistrusts these two religions primarily because of their foreign ties

“To get rich is glorious,” which wonderfully captured the go-go prosperity of the time but proved to be a meager scaffolding to hold a country together.

During this period, the state tried to fill the vacuum by recycling Maoist-era heroes, but most people shut these efforts out like so much background noise. Essentially, the party abdicated: it was too weak to prevent an upsurge of religiosity from filling the void. The number of churches, mosques, and temples boomed, while unofficial groups such as Falun Gong and innumerable small sects and splinter groups proliferated.

A TWO-PRONGED APPROACH Reforms haven’t made just the Chinese people richer but the state as well. Flush with cash, it has rebuilt its apparatus of control, hiring armies of censors, police, and informants. And it has also poured resources into devising a new, more credible ideology.

Part of this project is a renewed emphasis on communist values.

But that is just one component of a hybrid ideology that also involves plowing resources into traditional religions.

The Chinese government has rehabilitated folk religion—an amorphous belief system that involves deified historical figures, ancestor worship, and traditional virtues of righteousness and honesty—from “feudal superstition” to “traditional culture” and subsidized it lavishly through programs to uphold “intangible cultural heritage.” This allows the state to support a huge variety of quasi-religious practices while claiming that it is simply backing culture.

The state’s attitude toward folk religion—and its similar largesse toward Buddhism and Taoism—contrasts strongly with its attitude toward China’s two other main religious groups, Christianity and Islam. The government mistrusts these two religions primarily because of their foreign ties. (This parallels

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Kyrgyz men hold portraits of their relatives as they attend a press conference in Bishkek on November 2018 ,29. - Citizens of ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan who fear relatives are being held in notorious 're-education camps' in China's Xinjiang region appealed on November 2018 ,29 to the country's China-dependent government for help in freeing them. (Getty)

a similar crackdown on nongovernmental organizations, which now are largely banned from receiving foreign money.).

The state’s fear of outside influences underpins new religious regulations announced in 2016, implemented in 2017, but only truly enforced in 2018. Although all religions, including Buddhism and Taoism, are admonished to avoid foreign ties, the measures are aimed mainly at Christianity and Islam.

The strains are especially clear with Christianity. Several aspects of Protestantism particularly concern Beijing, among them the faith’s speedy growth, from one million followers in 1949 to at least 60 million today; its popularity among the white-collar, educated elite that the country needs for its modernization; and the fact that probably two-thirds of Protestants worship in unregistered (also called “underground” or “house”) churches— in other words, churches outside government control.

In an effort to reassert authority over these groups, the government has removed crosses from the tops of churches in one region, while demolishing churches in several other areas—essentially a shot across the bow to urge them to register with the government.

The government has tried a different tactic with Catholics: diplomacy. Last year, it struck a deal with the Vatican, giving the pope some sort of veto power over future bishop nominees provided Rome recognized all of the current bishops appointed

by Beijing. China has about ten million Catholics, half of whom worship in underground churches; in theory, the deal has made underground churches superfluous because Rome has now legitimized the churches run by the state.

Whether China’s Catholics will find this arrangement acceptable remains to be seen, but the deal shows Beijing’s determination to eliminate religious groups outside its control. For the Vatican, the stakes may be much higher, as the deal could become a litmus test for the reforms of Pope Francis and a way of attacking him. Already, the pope’s conservative critics are saying the deal

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shows a lack of backbone, lumping it in with his handling of the church’s sex scandals and slightly more liberal approach toward homosexuality. The government’s attitude toward Islam has been even more problematic. Ten of China’s 55 non-Chinese minority groups, primarily the Hui and Uighurs in the country’s northwest and far west, are Muslim. Here, the issue isn’t just control but the forced assimilation of these peoples.

Officially, the state is pursuing a war on terrorism in its far western province of Xinjiang. Although the problem of violence there is real, all independent observers agree that the main cause of unrest is the heavy hand of the state, which for decades has pursued a policy of resource extraction and resettlement in order to increase the population of ethnic Chinese.

The resulting downward spiral of repression and violence has culminated in a recent campaign of repression aimed at the very practice of Islam. State authorities have forced Xinjiang stores to sell alcohol and tobacco, for example, and forbidden students from fasting during Ramadan. The repression seems to be spreading beyond Xinjiang to Hui communities in other parts of China, where authorities are tearing down Islamic domes, removing Arabic-language signs, and silencing the outdoor call to prayer.

Most shocking has been the return of something that indeed has echoes from the Mao era: reeducation camps. At first, the notion of such camps seemed like an unbelievable rumor, but the state has confirmed their existence, justifying them as needed to control extremism. In them, Muslims are essentially secularized by force, forbidden from anything seen as too religious.

A RETURN TO PRAGMATISM? Until now, if one thought of large Asian countries where the mixing of religion and politics has caused strife and violence, India, Indonesia, or Pakistan might come to mind. In the future, this list could include China.

This need not happen. If the state steps back and takes a deep breath, it could avoid the conflicts that its current policies seem bound to create. One has only to think of the years of protest caused by the crackdown on Falun Gong to get an idea of how banning even one sect can become a messy, protracted affair.

House churches have also been equally stubborn—just banning the Shouwang Church in Beijing in 2009 resulted in years of protests. And the inevitable backlash against such misguided policies as forcing Muslims to each pork and drink alcohol is scarcely imaginable.

Up until now, I’ve always believed in the pragmatism of China’s reform-era leadership, despite the brutality of many measures taken during that period. Yet China is no longer in the reform era.

Instead, it is entering a new period, one that may make observers look back fondly on the relatively light touch of the country’s past leaders.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com. * IAN JOHNSON lives in China, where he writes for The New York Timesand The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

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The Real History of Intellectual Piracy What China Can Learn From America

By B. Zorina Khan* Whether an economy thrives depends in large part on how it treats ideas, knowledge, and innovation.

It was by democratizing technology markets that the United States came to dominate the global economy in the twentieth century. Now China has drawn up ambitious plans to become the world economic leader of the twenty-first century. Its strategies for doing so are controversial. The government restricts foreign firms from operating in China, Chinese companies pirate foreign copyrights, and many blatantly engage in industrial espionage to appropriate the trade secrets of their foreign competitors. China’s defenders invoke history to justify these violations of international norms. Today’s developed countries, they claim, were no better during their own rise to power.

The history of technology transfer in developed

countries certainly provides ample examples of intellectual piracy, including early industrial espionage of which China itself was the victim. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans made continual efforts to steal technical knowhow from China and to acquire the trade secrets of such Chinese innovations as paper, porcelain, and textiles. The British botanical buccaneer Robert Fortune boosted the global tea trade by smuggling specimens of the Chinese tea plant to India in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Yet China’s defenders fail to consider all the evidence. Although copyright protections in the early United States were weak, U.S. patent institutions have always been the strongest in the world in enforcing the rights of inventors. And unlike European patent and innovation systems, which assumed that useful ideas came primarily from elites, the U.S. system was a democratic

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Richard Yu Chengdong, chief executive of Huawei's consumer business group, introduces the Huawei Mate 20 series smartphones during the annual launch event at Shanghai Oriental Sports Center on October 2018 ,26 in Shanghai, China.

(Getty)

one. China would benefit from heeding that lesson: control by centralized bureaucrats will never match the results of open competition and spontaneous coordination in the market.

PATENT PROGRESS In early modern Europe, conventional wisdom held that only elites, with their access to specialized knowledge, could produce meaningful technological advances. European centralized arrangements deliberately made it difficult for ordinary people to benefit from innovations.

Patents were granted not as incentives for creativity but, rather, as a source of revenue for the government. Arbitrary awards of prizes, made

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by the state and elite institutions such as the Royal Society of Arts in London, failed to encourage useful inventions at appropriate prices, and frequently facilitated bias and corruption more than anything else. Cultural creativity, too, was regarded as the province of elites, so copyrights were much more strongly protected than patents.

The United States rejected that approach. The U.S. Constitution was the first national constitution to include an intellectual property clause. It gave Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.�

This strong endorsement of property rights, accompanied by decentralized markets in ideas,

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reflected a revolution in thinking about the sources of creativity and economic progress.

The founders had obtained early copies of Adam Smith’s works and concluded that central planners, who lack the incentives and information to allocate resources where they will prove most beneficial, could not replace markets. They also realized that elite groups, such as the committees who bestowed innovation prizes, were likely to disagree with the mass market over what was valuable.

This was the most striking advance made by the U.S. system. American institutions were designed to ensure open access, so that incentives and rewards were based on success in the marketplace rather than on class, patronage, or privilege.

As the American commissioner to the London Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 declared, “We showed the results of pure democracy upon the industry of men.”

That approach to intellectual property propelled the United States to global economic leadership.

Market oriented policies encouraged a diverse population of American inventors to generate more useful ideas and greater economic returns than Europe’s elite-driven system. Historical research shows that when markets expanded, the prospect of profit led to a remarkable surge in creativity by people from every background. Inventors of humble origins benefitted disproportionately from the security that property rights offered.

They succeeded not by the favor or decrees of administrators but because their creations satisfied the ultimate judges: consumers.

It was by democratizing technology markets that the United States came to dominate the global economy in the twentieth century.

In direct contrast to the innovative patent system, the nineteenth-century U.S. copyright regime was one of the world’s weakest. At that time, the United States had little incentive to create strong copyright laws because American cultural goods were not competitive overseas. As one English commentator noted, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play?” Throughout the century, the United States was reviled as a flagrant copyright pirate. When Charles Dickens gave a lecture tour in America, fans of his novels flocked to hear him.

He earned more from his lectures than from any of his works in the United Kingdom. The topic of many of his talks? How immoral American “brigands” were for infringing on his copyrights.

Weak copyrights were not all bad. They produced measurable benefits for society overall. They made it easier to access knowledge, promoted learning and education, and allowed artists to create derivative works. Authors were not unduly harmed because, like modern singers who make more from concert performances than from music sales, they obtained returns from alternative

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The Chinese attitude toward intellectual property rights today is as frankly utilitarian as the U.S. attitude was in the nineteenth century.

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma speaks during the 'Belt and Road: Hong Kong - In' Forum cum the inauguration of the Belt and Road Cross-Professional Advancement Programme at Central Government Complex on December 2018 ,12 in Hong Kong, China. (Getty)

film industry. Back when the market for domestic films was not well developed in China, there was little incentive to offer copyright protection for movies. In recent years, however, Chinesemade films have become more profitable and the industry has begun to worry about piracy.

In 2017, China enacted a new law that imposes stiff penalties on those who infringe copyrights in films.

Chinese bureaucrats have drawn up a list of policies that correlate with technological prowess, and are busy directing immense resources to boost each category. Investments in education, science and technology, universities, and institutions that protect intellectual property have all surged. As sources. Strict copyright enforcement, Americans a result, China is now among the global leaders acknowledged, would have also required a by almost every quantitative measure of science tradeoff with the principle of free speech. and technology research inputs. The number of A century later, the United States was producing scientists and engineers in China jumped from cultural goods worth protecting and so, in 1890, 1.2 million in 1982 to 3.2 million in 2010. That it began recognizing international copyrights. year alone, Chinese universities granted some 1.1 Even then, U.S. copyright rules were among million undergraduate degrees in those subjects. the weakest in the world, balancing the rights of Chinese citizens make up the largest group of authors against those of the public. The United foreign students in U.S. doctoral programs, States failed to qualify for membership in the and Chinese scholars are second only to their international Berne Convention for copyrights American counterparts in numbers of scientific until 1988. This combination of strong patent papers published. Influential businesspeople protections and weak copyrights promoted and elite scientists have even funded a Chinese ideas and innovation and accorded well with the version of the Nobel Prizes. objectives of a market oriented democracy.

Patent applications in China have grown exponentially over the last decade, and ShenzhenTHE CHINA MODEL based corporations such as Huawei and ZTE top the list for international patents. This dramatic China offers a fascinating case study of a rise is largely the result of concerted efforts by centralized administrative system that is the state. It offers an array of incentives for those attempting to create a top-down market for ideas. who file patents. Patentees in China improve their The Chinese attitude toward intellectual property chances of receiving academic tenure, scarce rights today is as frankly utilitarian as the U.S. residence permits in attractive locations, and attitude was in the nineteenth century. Take the cash bonuses. Firms leverage their inflated patent

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portfolios to acquire government benefits that range from large credits and subsidies to profitable state contracts. This has led to a heavy emphasis on the number of patents filed, which has meant that domestic patents in China are generally of lower (but improving) quality than comparable foreign patents.

Scientific research in China suffers from a similar problem. Researchers in a flourishing publications black market engage in questionable practices to manipulate measures of research quality, such as the number of citations. Perhaps inevitably, state bureaucrats fail to appreciate that quantity does not necessarily imply quality. These manipulative practices create widespread distortions and misallocate resources and research talent.

HOW TO COPY RIGHT The Chinese example thus highlights the costs of centralizing innovation, which can easily incentivize inefficiency and corruption rather than technological progress. Those who defend current Chinese top-down strategy are right that it mimics the nineteenth-century European belief in central direction and the importance of elites.

And copyright enforcement in China, just as in English history, is linked to censorship and state efforts to control free expression. But this cherrypicking from history misses crucial differences between the democratic American experience and the authoritarian Chinese strategies. It is just those differences that explain the United States’ economic dominance over the last century.

China’s experience has lessons for the West, too. Even in the United States, many academics and policymakers often assume that “ordinary” people have little to contribute to technological discovery, which should be left to highly specialized engineers, computer scientists, or quantum physicists. This claim confuses technical value with commercial value and underestimates the importance of risk-taking. As Thomas Jefferson noted, a technically minor invention can be “infinitely more valuable than the greatest which can be used only for great objects. For these interest the few alone, the former the many.”

Many of the founders of the world’s most valuable companies—including Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Travis Kalanick, and Mark Zuckerberg—never attended college or dropped out before graduation. The legendary Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma had not written a line of code before founding Alibaba. Bureaucrats are unlikely to identify such seemingly unqualified people who have the potential to make vast and disruptive contributions.

Global economic leadership requires promoting productivity, efficiency, and the standard of living per person. Despite China’s high rate of economic growth, Chinese productivity figures and GDP per capita remain significantly below those of the United States. Joseph Story, the U.S.

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In this picture taken on July 2018 ,12, a woman walks past a poster of the film 'Dying to Survive' at a bus stop in Beijing.

(Getty)

Supreme Court Justice who shaped many of the early U.S. intellectual property rules, urged an audience in 1829 to “Ask yourselves, what would be the result of one hundred thousand minds ... urged on by the daily motives of interest, to acquire new skill, or invent new improvements.� Especially in a country of more than one billion people, economic progress depends on private initiative and a market that rewards individual entrepreneurship and innovation. China has benefitted from removing constraints on its markets. But until it realizes that decentralization is a prerequisite for selfsustaining growth, China will fail to overtake the United States.

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Bureaucrats are unlikely to identify such seemingly unqualified people who have the potential to make vast and disruptive contributions.

ForeignAffairs.com. *B. ZORINA KHAN is Professor of Economics at Bowdoin College and the author of the forthcoming book Inventing Ideas: Patents and Innovation Prizes in the Knowledge Economy.

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Around the world, miles of rock are missing Could ‘Snowball Earth’ be the culprit?

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Today, however, researchers have come to accept the outlandish notion that, a few times in its 4.6 billion-year history, the planet froze over and became a “Snowball Earth.” like pages in a book, and he recognized that the boundary represented a missing chapter in Earth’s geological history. Later, researchers realized it was more like an entire lost volume, spanning roughly one-fifth of Earth’s existence, and that a similar gap existed in many places around the world.

“There must have been some sort of special event in Earth’s history that led to widespread erosion,” said Steve Marshak, a geologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies what has come to be known as the Great Unconformity.

New research suggests it was something special indeed. Scientists propose that several freak episodes of global glaciation scoured away miles of continental crust, obliterating a billion years of geologic history in the process.

The idea was first proposed back in 1973 by a geologist named William White, but no one took him seriously, said C. Brenhin Keller of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, who led the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Formation of Earth, Five billion years ago. (Getty Images)

By Julia Rosen* When the famed explorer John Wesley Powell bumped, splashed and thrashed his way down the Colorado River in 1869, he discovered one of the most striking geologic features on Earth. Not the Grand Canyon — although that too is a marvel — but a conspicuous boundary between the sunset-colored sediments of the upper walls and the dark, jagged rocks below them.

Powell had learned to read the layers of desert rocks

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“It’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence,” Keller said.

Today, however, researchers have come to accept the outlandish notion that, a few times in its 4.6 billionyear history, the planet froze over and became a “Snowball Earth.” Now Keller and his colleagues hope to convince their peers that the glaciers that crawled across the continents between 720 million and 580 million years ago were responsible for the Great Unconformity.

Since there are so few rocks from that period, the researchers had to look for other kinds of clues to figure out what happened. They reasoned that

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the missing layers probably went through the full geologic spin cycle: They would have been broken down into sediment and washed out to sea, then deposited on the ocean floor and recycled into the mantle during subduction before finally melting into the magma that feeds volcanoes.

If so, a record of this activity should hide in tiny time capsules called zircons. These indestructible crystals grow in magma, and they contain the elements oxygen and hafnium. Oceanic and continental crust have distinct signatures of these elements. Therefore, a huge spike in the amount of recycled continental material should have left a clear chemical signal in zircons that formed at that time — and it did.

Keller’s team found stark variations in the oxygen and hafnium in zircons, consistent with the continents losing an average of 2 to 3 vertical miles of rock.

“We are talking about an absolutely a huge amount of crust being eroded,” he said. “In which case, we should have noticed it missing — and we have.”

The zircons also show that the amount of rock getting recycled ramped up just as Snowball Earth set in, suggesting the two events were connected. If so, this explanation solves the long-standing riddle of why erosion increased so dramatically in so many places at the same time.

Usually, rocks start to break down in a particular region when a mountain range gets muscled into existence by plate tectonics. But it’s hard to imagine that happening simultaneously on all the continents, Keller said. “Glaciation” — during Snowball Earth, at least — “would apply everywhere.”

ship rides higher in the water.

“It’s a really cool and provocative idea,” said Galen Halverson, a geologist at McGill University in Montreal who was not involved in the work.

Halverson said the researchers have clearly uncovered evidence that something wacky happened at that time in Earth’s history. However, he said other scientists may quibble over whether it really corresponds to the Great Unconformity and whether global glaciation was to blame.

For instance, it’s not clear that the ice sheets of Snowball Earth could have eaten away so much crust. “If we look at the actual geological record that we have of these glaciations, the sedimentation rates appear to be very, very slow,” he said.

Marshak agrees that there could be a connection between Snowball Earth and the Great Unconformity but said questions remain about the order of events.

He and several colleagues published a study last year suggesting that widespread erosion — caused by the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia — triggered chemical reactions that drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide, cooling the planet and plunging it into a Snowball Earth state.

Researchers will have to nail down the timing of erosion and glaciation to see which came first, Marshak said. And, he added, it’s possible that both ideas are correct and multiple forces conspired to create this strange moment in Earth history.

“It doesn’t mean that it has to be one or the other,” he said.

What’s clear is that two unusual events occurred around the same time, and a third soon followed: the evolution of complex life, which exploded roughly The researchers offer other data to support their 540 million years ago. hypothesis. They point to the dearth of meteor craters dating back before 700 million years, Around the world, scientists have n suggesting these dents got Brillo-ed out in the oticed that the rocks above the Great Unconformity making of the Great Unconformity. The researchers contain obvious fossils, like trilobites and also highlight the close agreement between their brachiopods, while those below do not. Many early results and records of ancient sea levels, which researchers figured those older fossils had just would have changed as the continents lost rock and disappeared with the lost rocks, but now scientists bobbed higher in the mantle, the way an unloaded know that no such creatures existed back then. That

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Researchers have come to accept the outlandish notion that, a few times in its -4.6billion-year history, the planet froze over and became a "Snowball Earth."

(TNS)

may be more than a coincidence.

The Great Unconformity may have set the stage for this transition by providing vast shallow seas where marine life could flourish. And Snowball Earth appears to have bulldozed loads of critical nutrients into the ocean that nourished the diversification of life.

“It’s just really mixing up the pot in terms of what is possible and what is available,” Keller said.

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It also goes to show that the planet doesn’t always change slowly and gradually, Marshak said. “There are punctuation points in Earth’s history where things change in new directions,” he said.

And from that capriciousness came the world — and perhaps life — as we know it.

Originally published in the LA Times Julia Rosen is a science reporter for the Los Angeles Times writing from Portland, Ore.

Does Your Face Need a Workout?

Facial Exercises Are Being Touted as a Way to Reverse Signs of Aging Harvard Health It used to be that women’s magazines only gave fitness advice for your body. But today when you open the pages of many publications, you’ll see advice on exercising not only your body, but your face, too. Articles tout strengthening exercises for the facial muscles — and even face yoga — as a way to slim and tone facial structures and help fight signs of aging.

Sounds great. But is it true? Should your workouts extend above the neck as well as below? And will those exercises really do anything for those wrinkles, sagging jowls, or double chin?

“The first thing to know is that there really aren’t any good, rigorous, scientific studies that verify claims that face workouts are effective,” says Suzanne Olbricht, an associate professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School. And at first glance, at least some of the claims appear a little dubious, she says. In one article, for example, accompanying photographs show a woman who claims to have benefited from facial exercises.

In this case, the changes to her appearance show improvements to the surface of her skin — mostly to her skin texture — which would be unlikely to result from exercising the underlying muscle,

Face exercises might also help improve muscle tone in the face and could theoretically help with gravity-related fat loss or redistribution on the face

says Dr. Olbricht. Changes like this would be expected if she’d undergone a cosmetic treatment that targeted the surface of the skin, such as microneedling or a chemical peel, but would be unlikely to result from face workouts.

However, while a dose of skepticism is definitely warranted when it comes to some claims, this doesn’t mean you should completely discount the idea of exercising your face, she says. At least in theory, it’s possible that facial exercises could produce some benefits. Among them: Reducing the appearance of thick scars. Face exercises, including stretching and movement, can be used to loosen up and lessen the appearance of a tight scar. “Massage and exercises that stretch the skin affected by scarring can make a thick scar become thinner and more pliable,” says Dr. Olbricht.

This is a clear instance where facial exercises are recommended and likely to be effective.

Fighting gravity. Face exercises might also help improve muscle tone in the face and could theoretically help with gravity-related fat loss or redistribution on the face, says Dr. Olbricht.

Building muscle in the face could potentially help keep fat — which might otherwise slide down with the pull of gravity — where it belongs. But now for the bad news: if exercise is able to produce an effect, any changes would likely be very subtle and far less than could be accomplished by other cosmetic methods, such as dermal fillers, she says.

“Truthfully, it’s hard to say whether face exercises are useful or not,” says Dr. Olbricht.

But if you’re interested in giving it a shot, there’s really no drawback to trying. It’s not dangerous, and it won’t produce any ill results. “While I’m not convinced,” she says, “there seems to be little downside.”

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From Kanye to Taylor: What to Watch For in Pop Music in 2019 42

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But for the most part Bieber spent the year “just living life,” as his frequent producer Diplo put it to me not long ago. would release an album (or two), we didn’t know that the K-pop group would become the first of its kind to top the Billboard 200 (and then do it again a few months later).

Plenty more is sure to go down in pop music without warning in 2019, at least if we’re lucky.

But as we set off into the new year, there are also things we can safely look forward to — and some big questions that should be answered in the next 12 months. Here are a few to keep in mind.

WILL KANYE WEST CONTINUE HIS BROMANCE WITH DONALD TRUMP? Looks like yes. After pledging in October to distance himself from politics — “My eyes are now wide open and now realize I’ve been used to spread messages I don’t believe in,” he tweeted — the rapper re-embraced the president this week.

“Trump all day,” he wrote on Twitter, before adding that “from now on” he plans to perform while wearing his Trump hat, which he said represents the idea that “people can’t tell me what to do because I’m black.”

How this will impact his music remains to be seen. West has said he’s at work on a new album, possibly titled “Yandhi,” that was due to be released in September before being bumped to November and again to an unspecified date.

BACKSTREET MIGHT ACTUALLY BE BACK AJ McClean, Brian Littrell, Howie Dorough, Kevin Richardson and Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys speak onstage during the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall on August ,20 2018 in New York City.

(Getty Images)

By Mikael Wood* On this date in 2018, we didn’t know that Kanye West would visit the White House or that Beyoncé would blow up Coachella. We didn’t know about Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize or Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.”

And though we might’ve suspected that BTS

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It’s been years since the Backstreet Boys mattered — which isn’t to say that the veteran boy band hasn’t been out there trying, as anyone who’s seen the group’s recent awards-show appearances (or its painfully eager Las Vegas gig) can attest.

But with their latest single, the throbbing and sensual “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” the Backstreets have raised hopes for “DNA,” the

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act’s comeback album due Jan. 25. Set to feature songs written by Shawn Mendes and Ryan Tedder, as well as folks who’ve worked with Charli XCX and J Balvin, “DNA” promises more than shameless nostalgia at a moment when BTS has raised the bar for boys of any age.

SAY IT AIN’T SO Speaking of nostalgia, Weezer last year returned to the upper reaches of the pop charts (and spawned a viral “Saturday Night Live” sketch) with its stunt cover of Toto’s indelible ’80s hit “Africa.”

Now the long-running L.A. alt-rock combo is using that renewed attention to unleash an experiment it’s been threatening forever: a self-titled effort, due March 1, known as the Black Album, which frontman Rivers Cuomo was saying as far back as 2016 would represent a striking about-face from its crunchy guitar-pop sound.

Judging by a couple of synthed-up advance tracks, including one called “Zombie Bastards,” Weezer has followed through on that idea, and not because Cuomo is confident his audience will like it.

Indeed, if that “SNL” sketch made anything clear, it’s that the Black Album is precisely the kind of record most Weezer diehards don’t want from this band — as good a reason as any I can think of to listen up.

It’s reasonable to think that Swift will work faster this time, either to avoid bogging down or simply to keep up with an industry that’s accelerated immeasurably over her decade-plus in the biz.

WHITHER JUSTIN BIEBER? Thanks to his breathlessly documented relationship with Hailey Baldwin — that’s Mrs. Bieber, if you please — the one-time teen-pop idol was seen more than he was heard in 2018.

True, there was “No Brainer,” his appropriately by-the-numbers reunion with DJ Khaled, Chance the Rapper and Quavo (with whom he hit No. 1 in 2017 with “I’m the One”).

But for the most part Bieber spent the year “just living life,” as his frequent producer Diplo put it to me not long ago. “Michael Jackson was a guy that never had a life, really, and then tried to live it when he was older,” Diplo said. “Justin, maybe he’s self-aware enough so that he’s like, ‘I’m a

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Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin visiting the London Eye on September 2018 ,18 in London, England.

(Getty Images)

human being and I love a person — let me do that for a minute.’”

That said, the singer’s long-awaited follow-up to 2015’s “Purpose” may be on the way. Diplo said he’s been trading songs with Bieber for what he reckons is shaping up as “a Christian album.”

TAYLOR MIGHT BE SWIFT The three years Taylor Swift put into 2017’s “Reputation” represented the longest stretch of time she’d ever taken to make a record — and then the thing went on to earn lukewarm reviews and no major nominations at next month’s Grammy Awards.

So although she’s said nothing about when

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we should expect her next album, perhaps it’s reasonable to think that Swift will work faster this time, either to avoid bogging down or simply to keep up with an industry that’s accelerated immeasurably over her decade-plus in the biz.

Also: Releasing her “Reputation” Netflix special on New Year’s Eve felt an awful lot like a chapterending move from this most story-minded of pop stars.

Originally published in the LA Times Mikael Wood writes about pop music in all its everquickening splendor. Prior to joining the Los Angeles Times in 2012, he was a freelance contributor to Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Spin and the Village Voice.