WHAT THE WORLD IS READING

The Economist cover story ‘China, The New Colonialists’ reveals startling statistics: China gobbles up more than half of the world’s pork...

The Economist cover story ‘China, The New Colonialists’ reveals startling statistics: China gobbles up more than half of the world’s pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium.” It spend 35 times as much on crude oil as it did in 1999. This is causing “a grim pollution angle…leading to unprecedented protests, 60,000 in 2006 alone”.

‘Fire on top of the world’ an eyewitness account by The Economist’s correspondent, “the only foreign journalist with official permission to be in Lhasa when the violence erupted,” says ethnic hatred targeted Chinese establishments: “Immigrants have been flocking into Lhasa (and) there is big resentment too over sharp increases in the prices of food and consumer goods from China…”

Newsweek’s China-watcher Melinda Lui sees parallels in ‘Locking Down Tibet’, between the current protests and those in 1989, when such violence last erupted, not least “Chinese authorities’ habit of overreacting (which) threatens to keep making things worse”. With panicky Chinese authorities cracking down everywhere else, Lui asks: “if they have to lock down the entire country in order to hold a protest-free Olympics, will Chinese authorities declare success?”

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Newsweek sees the possible electoral defeat of the pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian on March 22 as a turning point for Taiwan. His Democratic Progressive Party is likely to lose to the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou, the Hong Kong born candidate who promises “to open Taiwan’s economy to the giant next door and to take a more moderate tone with Beijing”. Newsweek says Ma’s victory represents a victory for China’s President Hu who has been courting Taiwan and “cool off one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints”.

The Economist’s ‘The no colour revolution’ celebrates the electoral setback for Malaysia’s ruling party, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). Winning opposition parties, including Ibrahim Anwar’s multi-ethnic liberal reformers, campaigned for a ‘colour-blind’ nation: “the result may herald new thinking about the institutionalised racism of the pro-Malay affirmative-action policies”

Time and Newsweek check out the Democrat presidential candidates’ credentials for answering the 3 am emergency phone call and find them 50:50. While Clinton played a small but valuable role in Bosnia, Macedonia and Northern Ireland, Obama, Newsweek says “has shown sophistication on foreign policy” in the Senate.

Time offers ‘10 Ideas That Are Changing the World’. It foresees world population stabilising at 8 billion by 2050 through voluntary sterilisation, the end of extreme poverty by 2025 and global goodwill warming. There’s also mandatory health schemes by employers, self-reliance without customer services, movies without motion picture heroes (George Clooney, where are you?) and reverse radicalism which reclaims extremists.

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The Economist says the My Lai massacre by American troops in Vietnam, 40 years on, lingers as a reminder of an occupational hazard facing foreign troops. The New Yorker, online, prints ‘Karl Hoecker’s Album’. Hoecker was adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz from May 1944, to January 1945, when Jews were disposed of at the rate of 1,32,000 a month. The photographs project the orderariness of evil: Hoecker enjoying a laugh with female recruits, eating blueberries (yes, blueberries) and petting his German sheperd, Favorit.

In The New Republic’s ‘Ballad of a Dead Man’, French writer and philosopher Bernard Henry-Levi, recalls his meeting with the mass murderer — Iván Ríos, recently executed by his own security chief and bodyguard in Colombia. Rios’ Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has killed and kidnapped hundreds.

Levi finds something lethal but seductive about the learned young Marxist: “I can still see him, his emaciated silhouette, his coiffed hair, his impeccably maintained beard, speaking like a teacher,” as he justified targeted kidnappings and the trafficking of cocaine. “Rarely in my life have I come up against rationality gone so mad.”