Talking Points
- Beijing locked down to prevent a second wave of Covid-19 cases
- America continued to struggle with the rising toll of the first wave
- Dexamethasone proved to be an effective late-stage treatment
- Pyongyang bombed its own liaison office with South Korea
- China took blood samples from its 700m males for a DNA registry
- Rayshard Brooks' murderers were charged in Atlanta
- The US Supreme Court affirmed protections for DACA migrants
- African swine fever spread rapidly through Nigeria
- PG&E plead guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter
- The Premier League returned.
Deep Dive
On Monday two nuclear-armed Asian powers fought a bloody, and unusual pitched battle four kilometres above sea level. This week we'll cover the tectonic friction between India and China in order to gauge just how strong the aftershocks might be.
Bringing down the Roof of the World
There are territorial disputes and there are territorial disputes . With all due respect to Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, the future status of the Corisco Islands is unlikely to spark an international conflagration. Conversely, the contested border between India and China has got all the ingredients for just that. Both countries boast enormous standing armies and a nuclear arsenal. Both can claim that their power and status is waxing. Both are helmed by jingoistic men . And they share a poorly demarcated 3,500km border that runs through some of the least passable terrain on the planet. There is plenty of land to be squabbled over.
One such corner is Aksai Chin, a typically vertiginous part of the Western Himalayas that exists under fraught and overlapping claims . These claims are informed by divergent interpretations of the border, each evidenced by the works of long-dead cartographers. The 13-month-long Sino-Indian War of the early 60's concerned exactly this patch as both nations attempted to deny their opposing army access and freedom of movement. The result was a clearcut Chinese victory which redounded to Beijing's disputable sense of ownership over Aksai Chin (and left the vanquished distinctly aggrieved). Both nations have since routinely sent patrols in to construct outposts in the hazily delineated Line of Actual Control (LAC) .
Interestingly, both nations are adept at what we might term controlled aggression. Beijing's ludicrous claims (normative determinant aside) over the South China Sea led to weekly high seas collisions with Filipino or Vietnamese vessels. But these collisions are mostly free of fatalities. Similarly, India's reciprocal ordnance exchanges with Pakistan are imbued with the same performative aspect as the flag waving pantomime at the Wagah-Attari border crossing. In the same vein, both China and India agreed to remove all firearms and artillery from within 2km of the LAC to avoid casualties when opposing patrols came across one another. As such, any fighting is usually restricted to pushing and shoving . There had been a great deal of that in May, but on June 6 both nations announced that they would jointly deescalate tensions and withdraw some distance. However, w hat transpired in the Galwan Valley on Monday night was nothing short of a total loss of control.
The high road not taken
On Monday night, somewhere high up in the Galwan Valley, on a ridge jutting out over the eponymous river, a fight broke out. The fragments of information we do have come to us via the press office of the Indian Army – the Chinese have divulged little. What we know without question is that a large contingent of People's Liberation Army troops were encamped along the course of the Galwan River in contravention of a withdrawal agreement from a week earlier. Soldiers from the 16th Battalion of the Bihar Regiment happened upon the PLA high up on a dangerously narrow path. And in that sublime and forbidding landscape, far from the eyes of the world, men began to shout, and gesticulate, and then fight. The Indian army called up reinforcements – the Chinese brought steel rods and clubs . They fought late into the night, in sub-zero temperatures, perhaps 600 of them, in a fashion rarely seen since the invention of gunpowder.
When morning came, some 20 Indian bodies were retrieved from the valley below, having tumbled off the cliff, or been thrown off . Perhaps twice as many PLA soldiers lost their lives, though Beijing is loathe to make such losses public. In fact, as bellicose voices in the Indian media called for action, Chinese state media broadcasts curiously did not mention the incident. It's clear that both governments were treading carefully to not exacerbate the situation. It took Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi until Wednesday to comment on the pitched battle. His words were weighted, insisting that India "wants peace, but when provoked will give a fitting reply regardless of the situation". While India's diplomats have pulled their punches, some quarters of the media have called for boycotts of Chinese goods amid more drastic action (anti-Chinese sentiment rarely needs much prodding there).
Both sides have struck an agreement to deescalate, and late in the week China released 10 prisoners . We can only judge these agreements against the historical record, which does not inspire much confidence. It's been a fortnight since high-level talks between Beijing and New Delhi produced an almost identical set of promises. The damaged relations will worsen dramatically if both countries begin moving firearms and artillery into the contested zone. Unfortunately, during t he 2017 Doklam border standoff (down the other end of the Himalayas) New Delhi showed a willingness to send weapons to the front line. An arms buildup in Aksai Chin would not easily be reversed. And given the trajectories of these two muscular nations, it's in everyone's interest that the Galawan River does not become the Rubicon.
Worldlywise
Nature bites back
One boon of Covid-19 has been that nature got a well-deserved break from the onslaught of modern human life. Skies cleared, from Delhi to São Paulo. And we gawked at our screens as animals reclaimed their stomping grounds, from the beaches of Peru to the valleys of Yosemite National Park . For a moment, we suspected that this human-free utopia might be the new normal. What a prospect! It’s to this very prospect that we’d like to convey the onomatopoeia for the "wrong answer" game-show sound. Bow bow bowwww . If the coronavirus has indicated anything, it is that we still have so much work to do to save our little blue marble.
Perhaps this will nail down the urgency of climate change: environmental degradation is disastrous for human health. A host of recent studies have helped surface that reality from beneath the deluge of coronavirus coverage. One study revealed that over half of the global population is exposed to increasing air pollution, which already kills at least 4.2m people annually . And it is increasingly clear that foetuses are not immune to this pollution. A US-based study has revealed that pregnant women who are exposed to increased temperatures or pollution are more likely to have premature, underweight, or stillborn babies. This can have detrimental effects on cognitive development and immune capacity. What’s more (due to the US’ historic redlining and the “heat island” effect) this phenomenon disproportionately affects minorities, particularly African American women. These studies are proverbial canaries in the coal mine for what future generations will face as climate change worsens.
So too is a recent report from the WWF. This week the organisation shared a finding that human exploitation of nature, and the eradication of ecosystems, increases the occurrence of pandemics and infectious diseases . Meanwhile, fires above the Arctic circle and across Siberia are worsening, and Antarctica’s Weddell Sea has lost ice that amounts to twice the size of Spain in just the last five years. We best not turn our attention from this increasingly dire reality. As we continue to punish nature for our own means, it will surely have its way with us. Buckminster Fuller’s words have never been truer: the opposite of nature is impossible.
New Horizon (not Animal Crossing related)
The enormous ground-based telescope arrays around the world reveal extraordinary secrets hidden in the cosmos. In the past, they've uncovered an embarrassment of new worlds and stars littering our galaxy, witnessed the slow reverse-explosion of planets being born, and peered into deep time itself. But what they can't do is simple (and will come as no surprise to scientists or photographers): measure the distance between the kaleidoscope of stars before them. In order to measure the distance between objects, astronomers have needed to employ the parallax method. But while closing one eye, and then the other, works for an object in front of you, one needs significantly more distance between observation points when dealing with space.
Enter the New Horizons. Launched in 2006, this intrepid Nasa probe has spent the last 14 years having a gander at our solar system. It's now four light years or so (~7 billion kilometres) from Earth, somewhere out in the Kuiper Belt, and has turned its camera to the same stretch of space that ground-based telescopes are peering at. It has taken snaps of the stars Wolf 359 and Alpha Centauri , and beamed them back to us. The result? We now know the distance between them, which is the next big step in creating an accurate three dimensional map of the galaxy. Then we just need to build a raft durable enough to get there...
In other space news, Nasa this week discovered a baby neutron star (just a few centuries, rather than a few billion years old). It is one of those ludicrous phenomena where hyper-density means that one teaspoon of its matter would weigh 4 billion tons in Earth's gravity.
The Best of Times
An unambiguously good piece of news
On Monday the United States Supreme Court voted 6-3 to extend protections against sex discrimination to include millions of LGBTQI+ Americans . It is a welcome and novel interpretation of the Civil Rights Act. While the law does not apply to small businesses (with fewer than 15 employees) it is a huge leap forward and represents the largest expansion of LGBT+ rights in years.
She is risen! Hallelujah!
The statues of bygone slavetraders and mass murderers are increasingly finding themselves in rivers and bays adjacent to the plinths they once adorned. While those who topple them no doubt enjoy the brief but satisfying plonk as they enter the water, one fisherman in northern Spain has stumbled upon the distinct pleasure of doing the opposite. The angler in question found a 14th century statue of the Virgin Mary in the Sar River. Not a bad consolation prize for not getting any trout.
The Worst of Times
How is the Trump reelection campaign going?
They managed to use a Nazi symbol (an inverted red triangle with a black border) in Facebook advertisements! These were used to signify that the wearer was a political prisoner in German concentration camps during the Second World War.
Lights, camera, action movie
An Israeli company has developed the ability to record a conversation by hacking an analogue lightbulb in the room it is being held in. This is a terrifying piece of spyware : picking up tiny vibrations in the light bulb glass that makes the light almost imperceptibly flicker. These can be recorded and recreated using a telescope, an electro-optical sensor, and a laptop. But engineering feat aside, here's a suggestion: how about we not do this?
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"Oh, are you a nuclear power?"
– US President Donald Trump (allegedly) expressed surprise when a UK official mentioned their nuclear arsenal. It is just one of the many (alleged) presidential missteps outlined in the memoir of Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolton.
The numbers
79,500,000
- People forced to flee their homes in 2019. That is effectively the entire population of Germany, or Turkey, uprooted by conflict and persecution.
6,500
- African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950. The suspicious hanging deaths of two black Californian men has raised the spectre of lynchings once again.
The headline
"eBay security specialists 'sent critical bloggers cockroaches and pig foetus' in cyberstalking campaign, say prosecutors" – Evening Standard
The special mention
inkl's longtime publishing partner and friend Maria Ressa (of Rappler fame) was this week handed a seven year sentence for cyber-libel in the Philippines. It is not a failure of the judicial process, but an extrajudicial hit to silence one of President Rodrigo Duterte's most vocal critics. Rappler is the lone news organisation that has fearlessly covered the human toll of Duterte's drug war. One of the most distasteful habits in the media is that many societal issues only become newsworthy when they directly affect those creating the news. But in this case, we are comfortable saying that is not just objectively wrong, it's personal. You can support Rappler here .
A few choice long-reads
- The Economist on Amazon's irreplaceability
- Foreign Policy skewers the myth of green growth
- Businessweek signs America up for quotas
Tom Wharton
