Asia-Cast

Asia Cast for Thursday 9th July

In this Bulletin…

- Beijing’s Confucius Institutes exporting propaganda worldwide;
- Rio Tinto employees held in Shanghai; and
- Efforts by rights groups leads to Afghan law change.

But first, here’s our SOH focus on China

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Beijing has moved to revise China’s Statistics Law after a string of embarrassments surrounding figures that don’t add up, says The Epoch Times.

As China seeks to play an increasing role in the global arena, figures for key economic indicators published by the National Bureau of Statistics and other state offices have come under closer scrutiny.

As a result an increasing number of inconsistencies in data and statistics are being uncovered.

The International Energy Agency recently highlighted an unexplainable inconsistency between China’s declining oil and electricity consumption and the reported first quarter GDP growth of 6.1 per cent.

The contradiction casts doubt on whether China’s economy has recovered at the pace claimed by the authorities.

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The Confucius Institutes that Beijing has been establishing around the world have recently been criticised for exporting communist ideology in the name of language education, according to The Epoch Times.

The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda website openly states that overseas language schools are one of the three pillars of the party’s international propaganda effort.

Yao Zhe, a Chinese school teacher in southern California said almost all Chinese schools in the United States that teach simplified Chinese adopt materials from the Institutes.

These materials propagate Beijing’s ideology of patriotism for the Communist Party and China, autocratic culture, and nationalism.

Yao said it was a soft kind of cold war as students were being brainwashed without them, or their parents, knowing about it.

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One Australian and three Chinese employees at Rio Tinto’s Shanghai office are being held in China on suspicion of espionage and stealing state secrets, the Australian foreign minister said Wednesday.

The incident comes after Rio Tinto, the world’s second-largest mining company, broke away from a US$19.2 billion investment deal with state-owned Chinalco last month.

Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said that an Australian, Stern Hu, had been held along with three Chinese co-workers since Sunday. Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull said the matter was of very real concern and completely unacceptable.

A Rio Tinto spokesman described the charges as surprising, while someone from the Chinese regime’s  press office in Shanghai said they were aware of the story but could not confirm the arrest.

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You’re listening to Asia Cast on the SOH Radio Network

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And now for the rest of today’s Asia Cast

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Complaints from human-rights groups have led the Afghan government to change a planned law which critics had said legalised rape within marriage.

It has removed an article which said a woman had to make herself available for sex with her husband when he desired.

The legislation is aimed at the Shia minority which has its own sets of laws as part of efforts to preserve its identity in a mainly Sunni country.

President Hamid Karzai originally signed the law but ordered a review after widespread international criticism.

It had been criticised by US President Barack Obama, the UN and Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who said it went against the values of his troops.

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Illegally brewed toxic alcohol has killed at least two dozen people in India’s Gujarat state, police say.

An equal number of people are undergoing treatment in hospital. Some are reported to be critical.

Most of the dead are poor slum dwellers.

Deaths from illegally brewed alcohol are common in South Asia. Last year, about 150 people died from drinking tainted alcohol in the southern states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Illegally brewed alcohol is readily found across India and is popular because it is cheap, but it is often laced with chemicals and pesticides in an attempt to make it stronger.

The sale of alcohol is prohibited in Gujarat. It is the home state of India’s independence leader, Mohandas Gandhi, who was a strong advocate of prohibition.

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