Se hur "Torn-passningen" kan förändra fotbollsvärlden

Målvakten Lamin Sarr ser fram emot en rafflade slutspurt i Ettan södra med Lunds BK som har vittring på superettan. Det är lite skillnad mot för några år sedan när han var med och räddade kvar lokalkonkurrenten Torns IF. – Det är alltid kul att spela för någonting, säger han.

De båda målvakterna fick en svettig kväll när Lunds BK och Torns IF spelade derby i sommarsolen. Den ene räddade friläge efter friläge – den andre hade fullt sjå att reda ut medspelarnas dåliga bakåtpassningar. Så någonstans var det ganska salomoniskt att matchen slutade 2–2.

Ettan fotbolls ordförande Johan Englund gav en offentlig ursäkt till Torns IF för hoten han uttalade mot klubben tidigare i år. Ursäkten kom under intresseföreningens årsmöte. – Därmed känner vi att det nu är utagerat, säger Torns kassör Christian Erliksson som medverkade på mötet.

Ettanklubben Torns IF ifrågasätter miljonrullningen i intresseföreningen Ettan fotboll. Det som skulle generera miljoner i intäkter leder istället till att skånska klubbar förlorar över 100 000 kronor varje år, anser man. – Vi vill lyfta frågan och förhoppningsvis få relevanta svar, säger Torns kassör Christian Eriksson.

När Donald Trump var USA:s president införde han högre importskatter än någon annan president gjort på nästan ett århundrade. Hans protektionistiska hållning har spätt på inflationen och gjort USA fattigare. Inte heller har den gynnat landets exportörer, skriver The Economist. Skulle Trump bli president igen skulle det enligt tidningen innebära en protektionistisk mardröm, med upp till en tre gånger så hög genomsnittlig amerikansk importskatt. Höjda importskatter skulle inte bara skada konsumenter och de flesta producenter. De skulle också påverka USA:s relationer med andra länder och riskera att förstöra det globala handelssystemet, anser tidningen. Sequels are always worse than the original By The Economist October 31st, Washington DC Sequels are never as good as the original. And when the original was terrible, there is even more reason to dread the next episode. So it is with “Tariff Man Part Two”. In the White House, Donald Trump put more new tariffs on American imports than any president in nearly a century. His philosophy was simple: “I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so.” Mr Trump’s protectionism made America poorer, did little to help exporters and fed the inflation still raging. If he wins the Republican presidential nomination (a likely outcome) and goes on to win the election (too close to call), he has vowed to ramp up things. He is mulling an across-the-board levy of perhaps 10% on all products entering America. In one fell swoop, his plans would more than triple the average American tariff. The direct costs would be bad enough, with the tariffs functioning as a tax on consumers and hurting most producers. Yet they would also tear at America’s ties with its allies and threaten to wreck the global trade system. To get a sense of the impact, look back. On January 23rd 2018, a year after Mr Trump was sworn in, he got started with tariffs, hitting washing machines and solar panels. A couple of months later he went after aluminium and steel. A few months after that, it was Chinese goods. By 2021 American duties were worth 3% of the country’s total import value, double the level when Mr Trump took office. Tariffs on Chinese imports rose from 3% to 19%, calculates Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think-tank. Mr Trump’s first aim was to slim the trade deficit. He thought tariffs would bludgeon other countries into submission, leading them to rejig policies to America’s advantage. Memorably, he declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But instead of shrinking, the deficit widened. Instead of buckling, China tripled its tariffs on America. Many allies retaliated, too. The consequences were dismal. Industries that were protected by tariffs reaped benefits, enjoying greater market share and fatter profits. Most others suffered. America’s International Trade Commission (usitc), a bipartisan agency, found that industries downstream from tariff-coddled producers faced higher input prices and lower profitability. The Peterson Institute estimated that steel users in effect paid an extra $650,000 per job created in the steel industry. Studies have calculated that almost all the costs have been borne by Americans, rather than foreign producers. The usitc found a near one-to-one increase in the price of American imports in the wake of tariffs on China. Mr Trump’s first aim was to slim the trade deficit. He thought tariffs would bludgeon other countries into submission, leading them to rejig policies to America’s advantage. Memorably, he declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But instead of shrinking, the deficit widened. Instead of buckling, China tripled its tariffs on America. Many allies retaliated, too. The consequences were dismal. Industries that were protected by tariffs reaped benefits, enjoying greater market share and fatter profits. Most others suffered. America’s International Trade Commission (usitc), a bipartisan agency, found that industries downstream from tariff-coddled producers faced higher input prices and lower profitability. The Peterson Institute estimated that steel users in effect paid an extra $650,000 per job created in the steel industry. Studies have calculated that almost all the costs have been borne by Americans, rather than foreign producers. The usitc found a near one-to-one increase in the price of American imports in the wake of tariffs on China. Mr Trump did unquestionably succeed in one respect. He helped remake politics. According to a recent survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a think-tank, 66% of Americans think the government should place restrictions on imported foreign goods to protect jobs at home, up from 60% in 2018. On the campaign trail in 2019 Joe Biden criticised tariffs as a costly policy. In power he has rolled them back only a little. The array of levies on China remains intact. Whatever the merits of lifting tariffs, the White House appears fearful of blowback from looking soft on China. At the same time, Mr Biden has concocted an enormous industrial policy, fuelled by more than $1trn in subsidies for electric vehicles, offshore wind, semiconductors and the like. It is a more thoughtful and deliberate approach than Mr Trump’s, but it still looks likely to fail to bring about a manufacturing renaissance, is very expensive and, in lavishing subsidies on American factories, discriminates against other countries. It is, in short, rather Trumpist. How much worse could things get? If Mr Trump wins the presidential election in 2024, the world may discover that the answer is: “Rather a lot.” In August Mr Trump was interviewed on Fox Business, a television channel, by Larry Kudlow, his former economic adviser and a long-time media personality. Mr Trump put forward two ideas. First, all foreign firms selling to America would face a 10% levy. Second, if any country placed a high tariff on anything American, he would hit back with exactly the same tariff. “Call it retribution,” said Mr Trump. “Reciprocity,” interjected Mr Kudlow, using the politer label. The lineage of these ideas can be traced back to thinkers who crafted policy during Mr Trump’s presidency, and who are working on new, more detailed plans. Robert Lighthizer, United States Trade Representative under Mr Trump, recently laid out his vision in a book, “No Trade is Free”. One of his ideas is the universal tariff on all imports, to be used as a lever to bring America’s trade flows into balance, so that the country no longer runs a big deficit. Mr Lighthizer would not limit the tariff to 10%. Rather, he writes, America should impose the levy “at a progressively higher rate year after year until we achieve balance”. Project 2025, a coalition of conservative groups, published a book earlier this year with blueprints for almost every facet of government during a second Trump administration. In the trade chapter, Peter Navarro, another economic adviser to Mr Trump, bemoaned the fact that countries like China and India have higher levies on America’s goods than America does on theirs, arguing that this has led to “systematic exploitation of American farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, and workers”. In principle, reciprocity could be achieved in two ways—either by persuading other countries to lower tariffs or by America raising its own. Mr Navarro leaves no doubt as to his preference. If Mr Trump has his way, other countries will probably respond by slapping their own tariffs on America. The spread of universal tariffs would be akin to a giant tax on cross-border transactions, making international commerce less attractive. Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s hopes of shrinking the trade deficit would run headlong into the economic forces that actually determine the balance of exchanges between countries. In America’s case the crucial factor is the country’s low saving rate, which is almost certain to continue as a result of persistently high consumer spending and widening government deficits. Mr Trump has pointed to one ostensible virtue of his tariffs: they generate income. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, estimates that a 10% tariff may bring in up to $2.5trn in extra revenue during its first decade of implementation, which could be used to reduce America’s budget deficit. But this money could also be brought in by other methods. Raising tariffs simply means picking them as a tax over others such as, say, a higher income or inheritance tax. Every tax has pros (eg, generating public revenue or discouraging bad behaviour) and cons (eg, hurting growth or imposing costs on individuals). The cons of tariffs are big. Ahmad Lashkaripour of Indiana University estimates that a global tariff war would shrink American gdp by about 1%. Most countries would suffer falls closer to 3%. The drag on smaller, trade-reliant economies would be greater still. Tariffs are also regressive since they hurt those on lower incomes twice. They tax more of their spending, by raising the price of consumer goods, and more of their earnings, since many work in industries, such as construction, that face higher material costs. If the bulk of the tariff bill is passed on to American consumers, as occurred with the first round of Mr Trump’s tariffs, a 10% duty would cost each American household about $2,000 per year. The toll from universal tariffs would go beyond their economic impact. International commerce, and the system that enables it, built after the second world war, allows countries to challenge each other’s policies at the World Trade Organisation (wto). But the wto’s role in dispute settlement has been disabled since 2019, when the Trump administration blocked appointments to its appellate body, preventing the institution from making binding rulings. The result is that countries which object to Mr Trump’s tariffs would lack a suitable way to confront them. “The system would fall apart in a much greater way than it did even during his first term,” says Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College. Mr Biden has not been a model free-trader. His industrial policy is built on lavish subsidies that, by incentivising investment in America, are unfair to other countries. Yet even if somewhat hamfisted, he has worked to cobble together supply chains and trade networks that bring America and its allies closer together. This is part of an attempt, still in its infancy, to lessen dependence on China. Mr Trump’s tariffs would reverse Mr Biden’s progress. It would no longer be America and (occasionally reluctant) friends versus China—it would be America versus the world. “Trump would view it as a badge of honour if other countries were upset. He’d say, ‘See, I’m fighting for you and we’re sticking it to them’,” predicts Mr Irwin. Mr Trump would lack outright authority to implement a universal tariff. The constitution gives Congress the power to regulate commerce; the president can intervene only by using special justifications. Mr Trump previously drew on two statutes: section 232 of trade law allows the president to restrict imports in order to protect national security (the dubious basis for tariffs on steel and aluminium); section 301 allows a president to impose tariffs against a country with discriminatory trade behaviour (the more reasonable basis for actions against China). But both require time-consuming investigations, which would cut against the desire of Mr Trump and his advisers for rapid executive actions. Another option would be to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Mr Trump used in 2020 to order the removal of TikTok and WeChat, Chinese social-media goliaths, from American app stores. In this scenario Mr Trump would declare a national emergency and then announce a universal tariff as the response. “It is less clear exactly what national emergency would be declared,” says Jennifer Hillman, a former general counsel with the us Trade Representative. “Perhaps that the trade deficit is threatening American competitiveness? Or that the size of the trade deficit is unsustainable?” Few economists would endorse such thinking. Far from being a weakness, appetite for imports comes from America’s strength. The country has run deficits for the past half-century, a period of economic dominance. More crucially, legal experts would also take a dim view of a declaration. “Trump would be bending the law in a direction that it was never intended to apply,” says Alan Wolff, a veteran of trade law. “There would be court challenges, and they might well be successful.” Reciprocal tariffs might seem tidier, but even an attempt to impose tit-for-tat duties would get messy. Mr Navarro loves to point out that American tariffs on cars are just 2.5%, whereas the European Union charges 10%. What he omits is that America has long placed a 25% tariff on imports of pick-up trucks, not to mention hefty duties on some imports of lumber and some foods. Any line-by-line examination of tariffs would turn up scores of examples where American levies are higher than those of other countries. Indeed, a guiding principle of the wto is that countries can negotiate across different product categories to set tariffs that protect politically sensitive sectors, so long as they keep tariffs down overall. Letting countries hammer out unique tariff regimes is a core part of diplomacy. Pure reciprocity would descend into absurdity. Politically, Mr Trump would also face opposition. Despite his embrace of protectionism, many in the Republican Party are less committed. Consider Project 2025, the coalition drawing up policy plans for Mr Trump’s second term. It is quite clear in all of its positions—except for that on trade. Its chapter on trade is split in two: Mr Navarro’s plea for tariffs is set against a free-trade argument by Kent Lassman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank. Mr Lassman lays out what he dubs a “conservative vision for trade”, calling for tariff cuts to reduce consumer prices, as well as more ambitious trade deals. Mr Trump’s domestic opponents would receive support from abroad. A trade official with an American ally says that his government is braced for tariffs at the start of a new Trump administration, and that he and his colleagues have a damage-limitation playbook, honed during Mr Trump’s four years in office. They would work with firms and politicians in Republican districts that enjoy the benefits of trade—from Iowa’s corn-growers to Tennessee’s car industry—and try to persuade Mr Trump to carve out exceptions. Yet both legal challenges and lobbying would take months, if not longer, to play out. In the meantime, the global trade system would be plunged into uncertainty. Other governments would slap retaliatory tariffs on America. Mr Biden’s work to repair ties with America’s allies would be torn apart. As firms try to assess the risks, they could well turn more cautious in their investment, which would weigh on economic growth. Companies with border-straddling operations would face pressure to retrench. Smaller countries that are dependent on trade would be vulnerable. One of the lessons of Mr Trump’s first stint in the White House is that he can cause great damage with the stroke of a pen, and that the damage is not easily reversed. Most of his tariffs are still on the books. The wto remains neutered. The America-first ethos that he preached, once a fringe preference, is now a force in the political mainstream. The consequences of a second Trump presidency for global trade would be grave and enduring. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Kontraktet mellan det kinesiska styret och befolkningen har de senaste åren varit tydligt: ekonomiska möjligheter och ”välstånd åt alla”, i utbyte mot kraftiga begränsningar i den politiska friheten. Men med en tillväxt som inte tar fart som den ska och en inrikespolitik som skakat en rad sektorer i grundvalarna, har kontraktet blivit allt otydligare. Det skriver Financial Times. – I grund och botten är det en fråga om tillit, säger Kinaexperten George Magnus till tidningen. A once optimistic society now worries about the future as Xi Jinping’s promise of ‘common prosperity’ starts to fade By Sun Yu and Joe Leahy in Beijing

Financial Times, 2 November 2023 In Yuxinzhuang village, a warren of narrow streets on Beijing’s outskirts known for its vibrant community of migrant workers, Zhou wolfs down noodles in a tiny Muslim restaurant. The 30-year-old father of one has a job setting up shell companies with fake cash flow for struggling small business owners, who then use them to raise new loans to pay off their previous creditors. But even this dubious line of business, which should thrive in a downturn, is suffering from China’s economic slowdown. Last month, Zhou’s income fell to a fraction of last year’s levels. Zhou, who did not want to give his full name, now plans to return to his family farm in the poorer central province of Henan and sell organic eggs. “I don’t know who to blame for the economic downturn but all I know is that this year the economy is really bad,” he says. “Lay-offs everywhere.” As China’s economic growth slows, stories such as Zhou’s abound. The country’s 296mn migrant workers are facing slowing wage growth, its new university graduates are struggling to find jobs, the urban middle class has lost money in a policy-induced property meltdown and the rich are reeling from Beijing’s crackdowns on the internet, finance and health sectors. National security regulations are worrying foreign companies, many of which have stopped investing. Only those working in some areas of the government or sectors deemed strategic, such as semiconductors, are being spared. Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong who embarked on an unprecedented third term in March, claims everything is going to plan. The country is marching towards “national rejuvenation” and “high-quality development” as the party’s “common prosperity” policy reduces inequality. But beneath the triumphant rhetoric, many observers wonder whether policymaking is adrift. The Communist party used to allow its people abundant economic opportunity in exchange for heavy restrictions on their political freedom. Now the so-called social contract is no longer clear. In the place of growth and opportunity are vague promises of security and “a better life”. But with about 600mn people struggling to get by on less than $140 a month, will that be enough? A once optimistic society now worries about the future. “The old contract was a pretty simple one which is: ‘We’ll stay out of politics, we won’t express sensitive opinions, provided we can expect to be prosperous in the future’,” says George Magnus, author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy, and a research associate at the University of Oxford’s China Centre.  That “has been undermined and not just by the fact that China’s old development model is not really working anymore but also by the government’s own culpability for not addressing the issues,” he says. “Fundamentally, it’s an issue of trust.” After securing his second term as party secretary at the 19th party congress in 2017, Xi signalled a “new deal” for China, according to a paper at the time by Evan Feigenbaum, of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.  Chinese Marxists think in terms of contradictions — the dialectical opposition of different forces or influences, Feigenbaum wrote. During the reform and opening up period that followed the end of the Mao era, the party concentrated on economic growth, or resolving the “contradiction” between the people’s “ever-growing material” needs and the country’s “backward social production”, according to an account of Xi’s comments at the congress in state media. But Xi declared China was facing a new challenge. After decades of rapid growth, he said the “principle contradiction” was “between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life”. These “needs”, he said, included “demands for democracy, rule of law, fairness and justice, security, and a better environment”.  Security was the keyword, analysts say. When Xi became party leader in 2012, the organisation was concerned that the growing private sector was empowering entrepreneurs and eclipsing the apparatchiks. In 2013, the party circulated an internal memo, Document Number Nine, attacking western constitutional democracy and other ideas, such as universal human rights and ardently pro-market “neoliberalism”. In the ensuing years, Xi has rooted out dissent and enforced party discipline through endless anti-corruption campaigns while pursuing a more assertive foreign policy, alienating large trading partners such as the US.  “The so-called anti-corruption campaign is just . . . an instrument [the Communist party] wants to use to purge everyone who is not loyal,” says Xu Chenggang, senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. This tightening of control is pervasive, from limits on the publication of economic data and investigations of foreign consultancies under data and anti-espionage laws, to the detention of a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the sinicisation of religion and culture, analysts say. “Security is a requisite for development. That’s been a pretty clear part of the social contract under Xi Jinping,” says Drew Thompson, a China expert at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. But it was in 2021, as the economy was recovering from the first shock of the onset of Covid-19, that Xi launched one of his most decisive campaigns yet to meet the people’s aspirations for a “better life” — what he called “common prosperity”.  Beijing cracked down on the internet empire of billionaire Jack Ma, leading him to largely disappear from public, and the country’s other important internet groups, shutting down overnight the whole industry of online tutoring and restricting online gaming for children. In a speech on common prosperity at the party’s central committee for financial and economic affairs in August 2021, Xi expounded on the policy’s deeper aims. Cadres must “resolutely oppose the unlimited sprawl of capital” and “uphold the dominant role of the public sector”, he said, while also somehow mobilising “the zeal of entrepreneurs”.  Tellingly, this was not a call for a European-style social welfare state. The party was pursuing its long-term strategic objectives of building China “into a great modern socialist country”, he said, but it must not “fall into the trap of ‘welfarism’ that encourages laziness”. The result of the top-down attempt to re-engineer society was disastrous for investment sentiment, especially when it coincided with increasing geopolitical tensions with the US, Beijing’s zero-Covid policy and the “three red lines” — a scheme to force deleveraging in the over-indebted property sector. China’s tech stocks listed in the US have fallen 70 per cent between February 2021 and today. While some of that is due to external factors, domestic policy has not helped. In June, the youth unemployment rates hit 21.3 per cent before the government stopped releasing the figures, a likely byproduct of the shrinking of the internet sector that was a big employer of young graduates. Official data for average primary market housing prices shows them drifting lower in September. “The tragedy of Xi Jinping’s economic policy is he has identified some problems China needs to fix but has gone about it the wrong way,” says Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Back in Yuxinzhuang village, a woman surveys the destruction outside her small grocery shop. The flats across the road are being torn down because they were constructed years ago on former village land without the correct zoning, she says.  Some migrant worker residents suspect the real purpose is to drive them out of Beijing. The capital is one of China’s “first tier” cities, where most migrant workers do not have the money or qualifications to qualify for hukou, the household registration stamp that would give them full access to public services such as health and education. “It’s had a huge impact on us,” says the woman, who is from eastern Shandong province, of the demolitions. Sales have plunged as people leave the area, she adds. For most economists, the structural challenges facing China’s economy have been apparent for more than a decade — especially its reliance on debt-fuelled investment in infrastructure and property and the relatively low share of domestic consumption in gross domestic product. With property no longer a driver, many are wondering what will replace it. An electric vehicle boom is one bright spot. But high-end manufacturing, though favoured by Beijing, will not generate enough jobs.  Even as total debt — household, corporate and government — hit 281.5 per cent of GDP in the second quarter, according to calculations by Bloomberg, productivity advances have slowed and the demographic outlook has worsened, with the population officially declining for the first time last year. The government has set a target for growth in GDP this year of 5 per cent, its lowest in decades. The IMF estimates this could fall below 4 per cent in the years to come. Economists point to a list of reforms that could turn the situation around. Bert Hofman, a former Beijing-based country director for China at the World Bank, in a blog post titled “Diminishing Expectations” lists sweeping fiscal, financial, retirement age and pension, state-owned enterprise and hukou reforms. “None of these reforms are easy, and each one cuts into the interest of some groups in society . . . but the package as a whole should increase the pie for all,” he says. Others say if the government is serious about really implementing “common prosperity”, it would have ended hukou, which they say has turned rural and migrant workers into “second-class” citizens. While there has been some reform of the system, abolishing it could increase urbanisation, revive property demand and increase people’s average incomes, analysts say. Hofman writes that about 65 per cent of the population lives in urban areas but about 20 percentage points of this are migrant workers. About 25 per cent of the labour force still works in agriculture. “It gives the lie to common prosperity,” John Burns, an honorary professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong, says of hukou. “Rural people have paid the price for all this prosperity in the cities.” China’s average annual pension per head for urban residents was Rmb50,763 ($6,936) in 2021, about 22 times the rural equivalent, while civil servants received Rmb77,804. The average annual healthcare disbursements for urban residents in 2021 totalled Rmb4,166, about 4.4 times the rural equivalent. But today’s economic malaise reaches beyond the rural and urban poor. Upper-middle-class people talk of losing millions of renminbi in property and failed wealth management plans, while the wealthy elites complain about a lack of investment opportunities and increasing government interference. One mining company owner in southern Guangdong province says local authorities kept borrowing money from him with no intention of paying it back, giving him cheap land instead. This had little value given the property crisis so he ended up investing his money in a chicken farm out of reach of the officials. “There has been a lot of talk about the government supporting the private sector,” he says. “In reality we are under pressure to bail out cash-strapped local governments.” In the rural eastern province of Anhui, a woman mourning China’s former premier Li Keqiang, who died suddenly on Friday, captures the complexity of people’s feelings about China’s leaders. The government’s focus on security — Beijing has constructed one of the world’s most extensive surveillance states — has meant far less crime in her local area, says the woman. “Thanks to the surveillance system, I can now hop on a public bus without worrying about being pickpocketed,” she says, after placing flowers at Li’s ancestral home in Jiuzi village.  But she, like many of the mourners, betrays a yearning for a leadership more sympathetic to her daily struggles. Many saw that in Li, who until March was Xi’s number-two official, saying he spoke out for the poor.  “He was a great premier,” she says, choking with emotion. Unlike Xi and many other senior leaders, Li grew up in a modest neighbourhood, where traditional Anhui beef noodle shops still ply their trade.  Seen as a pro-market reformer who was supported by former president Hu Jintao, Li was once believed to be a contender for the presidency but the party chose Xi, who took it in a more austere direction. “Some senior leaders wanted to build a strong nation at the expense of ordinary people’s wealth and opportunities,” says a second mourner at Li’s former childhood home in the nearby provincial capital of Hefei. “Premier Li wanted to make ordinary people rich first and then create a strong nation.” Some political scientists argue that the party’s emphasis on social issues and common prosperity rather than growth has been a power play aimed at rolling back the private sector, which grew too powerful under previous presidents, providing 80 per cent of China’s employment. Stanford’s Xu says common prosperity created a convenient platform to blame entrepreneurs for the troubles of the poor while undermining their influence. The problem was that it got mixed in with a slowdown brought on by the zero-Covid policy and property woes. “If we put all of this together, now the Chinese economy is in deep trouble,” Xu says. Most analysts argue the government has temporarily softened its crackdown on the private sector as it tries to stabilise the economy.  Many economists are now looking to the third plenum, an important party meeting that occurs one year after a new leadership takes office and which is expected to be held before the end of this year, for signs of the government’s broader plans for the economy, though few are optimistic on the prospect for deeper reforms.  “The fact that there is maybe this sense of drift or lack of confidence in the future, I think, is a corrosive phenomenon that we’re not used to seeing in China and, politically, I should think that the government ought to be worried about it,” says Oxford’s Magnus. Few think that growing frustration with the economy will imminently lead to social unrest, however. Thompson points out that it took the “grossest violations of civil liberties” during China’s extended Covid lockdowns to spark the so-called “white paper protests” in November 2022, when people in many cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, held blank sheets of paper symbolising everything they could not say.  But more likely is a loss of China’s former optimism that will be challenging to reignite or, says Xu, a slow slide into passive cynicism. The second Li mourner, in Hefei, who works for a real estate company and soon expects to lose his job, speaks to the uncertainty being felt in communities across China: “We just don’t know what tomorrow will bring.” Data visualisation by Keith Fray. ©The Financial Times Limited 2023. All Rights Reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

Minst 1 300 människor miste livet och 1 700 skadades i förra veckans kraftiga jordskalv i norra Afghanistan. Bland de omkomna finns Noor Ahmads fru och fem döttrar. Hans femårige son, Sardar, har ännu inte hittats. Mitt i sorgen lever hoppet om att han ska hittas vid liv. – Jag ber bara till Gud, säger Noor till The New York Times. Sardar är en av flera hundra människor som fortfarande saknas efter skalven. Och här finns inga fingeravtryck eller DNA-tester som kan hjälpa familjerna att lokalisera sina nära och kära. ”De är i stort sett på egen hand”, skriver tidningens utsända. Over a week since a major earthquake decimated his village in northwest Afghanistan, Noor Ahmad is on a harrowing hunt to find his 5-year-old. By Christina Goldbaum and Yaqoob Akbary October 15, 2023 SEYA AAB, Afghanistan — Noor Ahmad didn’t know where else to look. For days after a powerful earthquake leveled his village in Afghanistan, he scoured the district for his family. He dug under the rubble that was once their home. He combed through the trauma rooms in the regional hospital. He searched every body bag at the morgue, twice. He found his wife and his five young daughters — all crushed to death. But his 5-year-old son, Sardar, was nowhere to be found. Now, lying by a makeshift tent outside what was once his home, Ahmad, 40, was torn between the incomprehensible pain of losing his family and the tiny spark of hope that somewhere, somehow, his son might still be alive. “I am just begging with God,” he said. Sardar is one of hundreds of people who remain missing a week after the first in a series of devastating earthquakes that rocked northwestern Afghanistan, creating an agonizing limbo for families desperate for answers and yearning to find a way forward. The temblors — the deadliest in Afghanistan in decades — killed roughly 1,300 people and injured 1,700 more, most of whom lived in only a few villages tucked in a stretch of desert along the Iran border. What were once clusters of mud-brick homes nestled between hillsides have been transformed into heaps of dust, makeshift tents and freshly dug graves. Like Ahmad, many men in these villages had been in Iran, working as day laborers, when the quakes struck. Rushing back home, they found that their families and neighbors scattered. Some remained in the area to dig through the rubble, while the injured were rushed to hospitals and clinics. Others were seeking refuge in relatives’ homes nearby. It took days for many of the men to be reunited with their families. But more than a week since the first quake, Ahmad and scores of others were still desperately searching. Here, there are no fingerprints and DNA tests to help families find their missing loved ones. Instead, they are largely on their own. For many, the inability to answer a question so basic as whether their loved ones were alive or dead has only amplified the sense of powerlessness they felt when the earth shook violently beneath them. “It’s worse for those people than if they knew their relatives are dead,” said Freshta Yaqoobi, managing director of the Organization for Sustainable Aid in Afghanistan, an aid group helping families affected by the quakes. “If you don’t know the fate of your loved ones, it feels like you’re dying every second, you have a wound that can’t heal.” Ahmad has spent his entire life in Seya Aab village. He went to primary school nearby and then started going to Iran for work when he was 16, or, as he put it, “Before I even had a beard.” He joined dozens of men from the village for two or three months at a time, collecting and then selling scrap metal on the outskirts of Tehran, he said. He earned around $200 a month. When he was 18, he married his wife, Fatima, whom he had known since childhood. She was his rock, able to soothe Ahmad when he was stressed about money or aching with the pain from an old injury from a car crash. “Whenever I was not feeling relaxed, she would come up and massage my shoulders,” he said. “In the past 22 years, she never complained. Not once.” He hated leaving her and their children, but there was no work in the village or the surrounding area. Going to Iran allowed him to ensure they had just enough to eat and to go to the hospital if necessary, he said. Every time he returned home, he was met with sheer joy. Farahnaz and Shukria, his two most rambunctious daughters, jumped all over him, smothering him in kisses. His 65-year-old mother always circled him three times, inspecting his lean frame to make sure he had not lost any weight. “I would say, ‘You’re my mother; I should be the one checking on you,’” Ahmad said. It was a tiring but stable life. Then, just over a week ago, on the outskirts of Tehran, he received a call from another man from Seya Aab who told him a major earthquake had hit the village. He rushed to find a car to take him back across the border to Afghanistan. He called Fatima dozens of times. She did not pick up. Ahmad arrived at the village in the late afternoon the next day, as the sun hung low over the hilltops. The village was no more. He started frantically digging near where his home had stood. He called his neighbors to get an excavator to help him. He asked everyone: Where was Fatima? Where were his children? He got only blank stares in response. After hours of digging, he thought perhaps they had been rescued and set off for the nearest hospital in Herat City. There, he went room to room, checking the intensive care unit, the children’s ward and the maternity wing. Then, with a pit deep in his stomach, he went to the morgue. And there he found Farahnaz, 14. Her face was pristine, almost as if she was sleeping, but the life had left her auburn eyes — the ones he always thought looked like his own. “I started kissing her. I thought, thank God, at least she didn’t suffer,” Ahmad said. Next, he found 6-year-old Shukria. Then 12-year-old Shahnaz. He didn’t recognize her battered face until his cousin pointed out her two front teeth, which hung longer than the rest. After Shahnaz, came Zhina, 10. His wife. His mother. And his youngest, 9-month-old Amina, her life so short that he had barely gotten to know her. The grief was more than overwhelming. Standing in that morgue, it felt as if his world had ended. Then he remembered: Sardar, his son. The skinny, 5-year-old boy who was always doted upon by his older sisters. Ahmad inspected the bodies again. He ran back through the hospital. He asked his surviving neighbors to dig further into the ground where his home stood and check nearby clinics. His mind turned to questions that now consume him. Had Sardar somehow survived? Was he sitting under the fluorescent white lights of a different hospital, wondering where his father was? Had someone taken his body mistakenly, thinking it was their own young boy, and buried him in another village somewhere? Or had he, unclaimed by anyone, been thrown into a mass grave? Nearly a week since he first visited the morgue, Ahmad is still searching for answers. Until he finds Sardar, he said, he will be stuck in this state of suspension, as if caught himself between the living and the dead. “I don’t know if my son is alive or dead,” he said. “I don’t know my future. I don’t know anything at all.” © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

Anti-drönarradarsystem som stör navigationsappar, brist på lyxbilar från västerländska märken, försenade flyg, stängda butiker och höga matpriser. Rysslands krig i Ukraina har blivit ett slags bakgrundsljud i Moskva utan alltför stor påverkan. Samtidigt är det ständigt närvarande i människors dagliga liv. Det skriver The New York Times. 79-åriga pensionären Nina säger att hon sällan längre har råd att köpa rött kött eller en hel fisk, och att det i huvudsak beror på kriget. – Varför startade de det överhuvudtaget? Det är en sådan börda på landet och människorna, på allt. Och människor försvinner, speciellt männen, säger hon. Muscovites go about their daily lives with little major disruption. But the war’s effects are evident — in the stores, at the movies and in the increasingly repressive environment. By Valerie Hopkins September 16, 2023 MOSCOW — Metro trains are running smoothly in Moscow, as usual, but getting around the city center by car has become more complicated, and annoying, because anti-drone radar interferes with navigation apps. There are well-off Muscovites ready to buy Western luxury cars, but there are not enough available. And while a local election for mayor took place as it normally would this month, many of the city’s residents decided not to vote, with the result seemingly predetermined (a landslide win by the incumbent). Almost 19 months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Muscovites are experiencing dual realities: The war has faded into background noise, causing few major disruptions, and yet it remains ever-present in their daily lives. This month, Moscow is aflutter in red, white and blue flags for the annual celebration of the Russian capital’s birthday, No. 876. Its leaders marked the occasion with a monthlong exhibition that ended Sept. 10. Featuring the country’s largest hologram, it showcased the city of 13 million people as a smoothly operating metropolis with a bright future. More than 7 million people visited, according to the organizers. There is little anxiety among residents over the drone strikes that have hit Moscow this summer, no alarm sirens to warn of a possible attack. When flights are delayed because of drone threats in the area, the explanation is usually the same as the one plastered on signs at the shuttered luxury boutiques of Western designers: “technical reasons.” The city continues to grow. Cranes dot the skyline, and there are high-rise buildings going up all over town. New brands, some homegrown, have replaced the flagship stores including Zara and H&M, which departed after the invasion began in February 2022. “We continue to work, to live and to raise our children,” said Anna, 41, as she walked by a sidewalk memorial marking the death of Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. She said she worked in a government ministry, and like others interviewed, she did not give her last name because of a fear of retribution. But for some, the effects of war are landing harder. Nina, 79, a pensioner who was shopping at an Auchan supermarket in northwestern Moscow, said that she had stopped buying red meat entirely and that she could almost never afford to buy a whole fish. “Just right now, in September, the prices rose tremendously,” she said. Nina said that sanctions and ubiquitous construction projects were some reasons for higher prices, but the main reason, she said, was “because a lot is spent on war.” “Why did they start it at all?” Nina added. “Such a burden on the country, on people, on everything. And people are disappearing — especially men.” When asked about the biggest problems facing Russia, more than half the respondents in a recent poll by the independent Levada Center cited price increases. The war, known in Russia as the “special military operation,” came in second, with 29%, tied with “corruption and bribery.” “In principle, everything is getting more expensive,” said Aleksandr, 64, who said he worked as an executive director in a company. His shopping habits at the grocery store have not changed, but he said he had not traded in his luxury Western-branded car for a newer model. “First of all, there are no cars,” he said, noting that most Western dealerships had left Russia and that Chinese brands had been taking their places on the roads. The war has made itself evident outside supermarkets and auto dealerships. Moscow may be one of the few cities in Europe without sold-out showings of the movie “Barbie.” Warner Bros, which produced the film, pulled out of Russia shortly after President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and bootleg copies of “Barbie” were shown only in a few underground screenings. Theaters regularly show movies that premiered more than five years ago because of licensing issues and strict new laws banning any mention of LGBTQ people. Advertisements to join the military are plastered on roadside billboards and on posters in convenience stores. Moscow’s metro recently stopped making announcements in English, with a Russian-language voice announcing every stop twice. Cosmetically, Moscow is changing, too. A statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet political police, was inaugurated this past week in front of the headquarters of the foreign intelligence services. It is a copy of a statue that stood in front of the headquarters of the KGB until it was torn down in 1991 by Russians hungry for freedom. The election for mayor also underscored the sea change in Russian politics. A decade ago, opposition politician Alexei Navalny stood as a candidate against Sergey Sobyanin, 65. Now Navalny is in jail, and there was no real competition for Sobyanin, who won a third term with an unprecedented 76% of the vote. Other parties, including the Communist Party, fielded a candidate against the incumbent, but they are all considered “systemic opposition” parties, or groups in parliament nominally in opposition but who align their policies with the Kremlin on most issues. “Before the war, I still voted,” said Vyacheslav Bakhmin, a chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the oldest human rights group in Russia. “I don’t want to vote now because, well, the result seems to be clear, right?” Many in Moscow chose not to vote, although turnout was at a two-decade high because of electronic voting that allows Muscovites to cast a ballot online. There is also heavy-handed encouragement of public-sector employees to vote. Sobyanin benefited from a carefully cultivated image as an effective manager, and Moscow’s cleanliness and ease of getting around are praised even by people who oppose his political party. He has made transportation a hallmark of his tenure, and he not only keeps the trains running efficiently but also is opening brand-new stations. The elections in Moscow and in more than 20 Russian regions are widely seen as a test run for presidential elections in March. Putin has not declared his candidacy, but he is widely expected to run. As Putin presides over a war with no end in sight, authorities have worked to limit public expressions of dissent and make things seem as normal as possible. Alexei Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station before the Kremlin shut it down last year, said that the government had engineered the war’s absence from political spaces. “This war, it is mainly on TV, or on Telegram channels, but it is not on the street. It is not even discussed in cafes and restaurants, because it is dangerous, because the laws that have been adopted are repressive,” Venediktov said. He noted cases in which people expressing anti-war views were denounced — or in some cases reported to the police — by those sitting next to them on the subway or in restaurants. “People prefer to tell one another, ‘Let’s not talk about it here,’” Venediktov said. “And that’s why you can’t see it in the mood.” In Moscow City, an area of skyscrapers that is the Russian capital’s answer to New York’s Financial District, many people casually dismissed a series of drone strikes that damaged some of the buildings there but resulted in no casualties. One woman, Olga, who said she worked nearby, just nodded as a colleague shrugged off the potential risk. Later, Olga sent a New York Times journalist a message on the Telegram messaging app: “I couldn’t say anything, because at work they don’t talk about a position like mine,” she wrote. “I am against war and I hate our political system.” When there is a drone strike inside Russia, she said, “I always hope that maybe someone will think about what it means to live under shelling, and regret the loss of our normal life before the war.” She said that if the explosions do not cause casualties, then “I don’t regret damage to the buildings at all.” Venediktov said that even if changes on Moscow’s surface were hard to see and increasingly harder to discuss, people were truly transforming inside. “People are starting to return to the Soviet practice, when public conversations can lead to trouble at work,” he said. “It’s like toxic poisoning — a very slow process.” © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

Det är naturkatastrofer som har skapat ofattbart lidande i Marocko och Libyen, men lidandet har förvärrats, förlängt och försvårats av de ansvariga politikernas saktfärdiga agerande, enligt The Economist. Efter jordbävningen i Marocko och flodvågen i Libyen möter hjälparbetare och offer nu svåra byråkratiska hinder: visum som bara gäller i delar av landet, kroppar som inte får begravas utan pappersarbete, och kanske till och med regeringar som är för stolta för att be om hjälp. After both disasters, authorities spurned offers of help and left victims to suffer. By The Economist 9th month, 2023 edition First the ground shook; then the skies opened. Just before midnight on September 8th an earthquake struck Morocco with a magnitude of 6.8, the strongest there in more than a century. The shallow epicentre was south-west of Marrakesh, under the Atlas mountains, a soaring range that bisects the country. Hilltop villages were reduced to heaps of rubble. At least 2,900 people were killed. Two days later Storm Daniel, a Mediterranean cyclone, made landfall in eastern Libya. It dumped as much as one metre of rainfall in a single day—two to three times more than the region sees in a typical year. In the port city of Derna, which sits at the end of a long wadi, or valley, two dams burst. Floodwaters wiped out entire neighbourhoods. The death toll has already crossed 5,300, with many thousands more missing. More than 10% of the city’s population may have drowned. The back-to-back disasters had a biblical air. Endless scenes of heartbreak played out on Arabic news channels, as people desperately searched for their loved ones in homes flattened or flooded. But as days turned to hours, sadness turned to anger. Morocco and Libya have little in common. Morocco is a stable monarchy led by the same family since the 17th century. Libya has not one but two governments, an internationally recognised one in the west and a warlord-led one in the east, neither of which can perform the basic functions of a state. One country is a popular tourist destination and a manufacturing hub for Europe; the other a war-torn state that is nonetheless a big oil producer. What they do share is a sluggish response to disasters that were uncommonly ferocious but hardly unimaginable. The earthquake that shook Morocco came without warning. But if individual quakes are impossible to predict, trends can be spotted. A study in 2007 by a group of seismologists counted more than 1,700 of them in and around Morocco over the past millennium, including dozens in the Atlas mountains. Yet few were prepared. Building codes have been strengthened in recent years, but many homes are built of simple masonry, which buckles easily during an earthquake. In the villages hit hardest by this month’s quake, residents cannot afford to reinforce their houses. The World Bank reckons around one in five rural Moroccans earns less than $3.65 a day, compared with 4% of city-dwellers. In the hours after the earthquake, dozens of foreign countries offered help. Morocco accepted it from just four: Britain, Qatar, Spain and the United Arab Emirates. A group from Secouristes sans Frontières, a French charity, was blocked from entering the country. Germany organised a 50-man rescue team, only to stand them down hours later. The Moroccan government has not explained why it rejected or ignored offers of assistance. Some aid workers say too much help can be a bad thing, as different teams get in each other’s way. Others see a mix of politics and pride: accepting aid from Spain but not France, for example, seems linked to France’s role as Morocco’s colonial master from 1912 to 1956. The army has led relief efforts, but the terrain has made them difficult: clearing roads to reach isolated mountain villages is slow going, and survivors will need regular deliveries of food and medicine. Parts of the bureaucracy seem overwhelmed. Some people report being unable to bury their dead for want of official paperwork, leaving bodies to rot in the sun. Moroccans are not sure if their king, who spends much of his time in Paris, was even in the country when the earthquake struck. It took him almost five days to pay a quick visit to Marrakesh. Before he arrived, workers could be seen repainting kerbs and zebra crossings—an odd priority. If Morocco’s response has been slow, Libya’s has been shambolic. The authorities had ample warning about Daniel, which poured torrential rains on Greece almost a week before it hit Libya. As it neared Derna, the mayor reportedly asked Khalifa Haftar, a warlord who wields power in the east, to help evacuate the city. He was ignored. Even as waters rose behind the doomed dams, no one was told to flee. The devastation that followed is best understood from above. Before-and-after satellite photos show that buildings near the wadi have gone (see pictures). Bridges were swept away. The waterway’s once-orderly path is now a messy sprawl; green parks and black asphalt are a uniform shade of brown, the city coated in mud. Foreigners have offered aid to Libya as well, but it will face logistical hurdles. Visas issued in one part of the country may not be valid in the other, for example. After years of civil war, no one is even sure how many people need help: official estimates of the dead and missing are little more than guesses. People in other bits of eastern Libya are nervous, and the government has done little to reassure them. On September 12th Mr Haftar’s spokesman warned that another dam, near the city of Benghazi, was close to breaking point. He urged residents to evacuate. Hours later, he told them everything was under control. The scale of the disaster reflects a particular history of neglect in Derna, a city that Libyan authorities have long regarded as a hotbed of Islamism. Muammar Qaddafi, the dictator deposed in 2011, was happy for Derna’s residents to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. Islamic State conquered parts of the city in 2014, though it was later pushed out by various Islamist rivals. Mr Haftar, who loathes Islamists, then laid siege to Derna to root out those groups. Much of Libya is in shambles, but there has been notably little investment in Derna’s infrastructure—perhaps one reason why the dams, built by a Yugoslav company in the 1970s, failed without warning. Many Libyans suspect Mr Haftar was not unhappy to see the place submerged. Moroccans will spend the next few months anxious about aftershocks. In the long term, storms like Daniel may become more common: climate models predict that a warming world will bring fewer but fiercer Mediterranean cyclones, with some creating hurricane-force winds. Wildfires are already a growing problem around the Mediterranean basin. Governments will need to be better prepared © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.