Fukushima

FC Rosengårds sportchef Therese Sjögran har en ny dröm bland alla andra. – Det skulle vara jätteintressant att besöka akademin i Fukushima och kanske då att hitta en annan ”Momo” innan någon annan gör det…

Experter från Japan och Kina möttes på lördagen för att diskutera spillvattnet från det havererade kärnkraftverket Fukushima, det första mötet av sitt slag sedan Tokyo förra året började släppa ut vattnet i havet.

Ett kraftigt jordskalv har inträffat i Japan med magnituden 7,6, enligt Japans meteorologiska institut. En tsunamivarning är utfärdad, skriver flera olika nyhetsbyråer. En stor tsunami kan nå landets västra kust under måndagen och skalvet kändes till huvudstaden Tokyo, skriver Japan Times. – Det här är en väldigt stor jordbävning. Det är ju nästan lika stor som de vi hade i Turkiet här i februari. Skalvet sker inte på en punkt utan längs en sprickzon som är tio mil lång, säger seismologen Björn Lund till TV4 Nyheterna. Konsekvenserna kan bli stora och på bilder ser man stora sprickor i gatorna och hur det skakar rejält. Människor som bor i de värst drabbade områdena uppmanas att evakuera till högre höjder, rapporterar japanska public service-bolaget NHK. Det har också rapporterats om väldigt höga vågor som skulle kunna dra in. – 1,2 meter höga vågor har mätts upp någonstans i alla fall. Så du ser ju inte ut som att vi får liksom värsta scenariot med upp emot fem meter höga vågor, säger Björn Lund. Vad kommer hända nu? – Nu handlar det framför allt om att kartlägga skadeläget på halvön. Om vi tittar på efterskalven så sker de flesta av dem på land. Det handlar om hur nära själva sprickzonen det ligger byar eller städer och hur mycket de har skakats om. Det blir ju oerhört starka markrörelser i närheten av den här sprickzonen. Så till och med i Japan där man ju annars bygger väldigt väl kommer hus i närheten att kollapsa. Tre meter hög tsunami förväntas drabba Niigata Regeringen har satt upp en särskild nödcentral för att samla information om skalven och tsunamin och förmedla dem snabbt till invånarna, meddelar premiärminister Fumio Kishida under en pressträff. Ett kärnkraftverk som ligger i området har inte drabbats av skador, enligt regeringen. Omkring 33 500 hushåll saknar el efter jordbävningen. Japan drabbas ofta av jordbävningar. Vid ett skalv i mars 2011 skadades kärnkraftverket i Fukushima svårt av den efterföljande tsunamin. – Det här är ett mycket stort skalv. Man har inte haft en sån här stor jordbävning i Japan sedan 2011 då tsunamijordbävningen skedde, säger Björn Lund.

På Kinas nationaldag den 1 oktober skickade kommunistpartiets ungdomsförbund ut ett meddelande till sina knappt 18 miljoner följare på mikrobloggen Weibo. I meddelandet fanns en musikvideo med rapparen Gai, vars texter tidigare handlat om droger och våld men som nu bytt inriktning och blivit ungdomsförbundets nya MC, skriver The Economist. I ett Kina där allt fler ungdomar är arbetslösa och där boendekostnaderna är skyhöga har partiet börjat finslipa sina propagandakanaler med hjälp av hiphop för att locka fler ungdomar med nationalistisk, kommunistisk retorik, skriver tidningen. The party’s youth wing is growing inside companies By The Economist 2 October 2023 To mark China’s National Day on October 1st the Communist Youth League sent a message to its nearly 18m followers on Weibo, a microblog platform. “Today, as protagonists of this era, we will write new legends on this sacred land!” it proclaimed. Attached was a music video, its lyrics suffused with patriotic rhetoric and interspersed with clips of speeches by Mao Zedong and the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping. So far, so predictable. The surprise was the singer and his style: a rapper whose early songs about drugs and violence were deemed unfit for public airing. GAI as he is known, has turned a new leaf. He is now the league’s MC. The Communist Party’s youth wing is a vast organisation. With 74m members it is nearly as large as the party (98m), from which it is separate although some of its members have both affiliations. It plays a big role in China’s political life. The league indoctrinates people aged between 14 and 28 in the party’s ideology, trains potential party members and helps the party to identify talent that can be groomed for high office. It also has an outward-facing task: spreading the party’s message among young people with no political ties. After he assumed power in 2012, Mr Xi worried that the league was not up to the job. Officials admitted that it had become out of touch with young Chinese. For the party, China’s youth are a growing problem. The economy is stagnating, unemployment is rife among the young and housing costs are sky-high. Late last year small youth-led protests broke out in several cities. They were aimed at Mr Xi’s draconian “zero-covid” regime (subsequently abandoned). With extraordinary bravery, a few demonstrators in Shanghai even called on Mr Xi to step down. He will be mindful of the pro-democracy turmoil of 1989, when some of the league’s officials joined the protesters. That period of upheaval across the communist world haunts Mr Xi. He often harks back to the Soviet Union’s collapse, which he blames on a breakdown in ideological orthodoxy and discipline. “It doesn’t matter if the Communist Youth League makes a thousand mistakes,” he said in 2015, quoting Deng Xiaoping. “But one mistake it cannot make is to deviate from the party’s track.” In June Mr Xi declared that since 2012 the organisation had acquired a “brand new image”. But also that month the league’s chief, A Dong, said that amid “profound and complex changes” at home and abroad, “the overall fighting spirit and capabilities of the entire organisation urgently need to be improved.” This will involve pushing ahead with sweeping reforms that began in 2016. They range from cutting bloated management to expanding the league’s grassroots presence and tightening controls over membership. Honing the league’s propaganda skills is also part of this effort. People like GAI, whose real name is Zhou Yan, are helping. In 2018 Chinese netizens speculated that, after GAI’s rise to stardom on reality TV shows, his performing days on officially approved platforms might be numbered: that year the government reportedly ordered broadcasters not to use artists representing “hip-hop culture”, or even sporting tattoos (GAI has plenty: “Badkidz” says one in English). “Hip-hop’s prospects in China seem dim after Chinese rappers removed from TV shows”, said a headline in Global Times, a staunchly party-loving tabloid. The story noted GAI’s disappearance from the airwaves. But the newspaper’s prediction soon proved wrong. The league began to turn to rappers, including GAI, to make itself appear more in tune with the country’s youth. Slick videos featuring these and other singers have been pushed out by the league through a plethora of social-media accounts. By August last year, the organisation’s central administration was running 26 of these with a total of more than 200m followers, according to China Youth Daily, the league’s newspaper. The league’s main account on WeChat had a following of 110m, making it one of the biggest accounts on social platforms, the report said. Online, the organisation began referring to itself as tuantuan (“league-league”). In Chinese, doubling a syllable makes a name sound cuter—pandas’ names are routinely formed this way. To Western ears, the rhetoric used by these accounts is often far from endearing. Mr Xi has pushed the new-look league to the front line of China’s online nationalism, using it to flood the internet with criticism of the West and of anyone in China with negative views of the party. “Why can’t we voice our opinions?” he asked the league’s leaders in 2013. “Good prevails over evil. When positive voices online become powerful, the impact of negative public opinion can be reduced.” League accounts have been used to heap vitriol on Western journalists, sow disinformation and to attack dissidents suspected of trying to foment a “colour revolution”. In 2021 the league promoted a conspiracy theory that Sars-cov-2, the virus that causes covid-19, was developed in an American military lab. The hashtag the league created on Weibo to spread this story has been viewed about 1.5bn times—an average of more than once per person in China. In recent weeks the league’s accounts have whipped up public anger against Japan for releasing treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant, which was destroyed by a tsunami 12 years ago—ignoring support for the plan among many scientists elsewhere. There is no doubt that nationalist rhetoric excites many young Chinese. It is less clear, however, how much the league’s online presence is helping it recruit the kind of people it says it needs to create “healthy and vigorous new blood” for the party itself. Of Chinese aged between 14 and 28, about one-third are members (the league’s officials can be older). But official statistics show that membership has fallen by nearly 20% since Mr Xi became China’s leader. This may not reflect any change in young people’s desire to join. Mr Xi’s reforms have aimed to make the league more elite. Teachers have been told not to sign up entire classes, as once was common (and is still the accepted practice for the Young Pioneers, a league-controlled organisation for children aged six to 14). Schools have been given quotas for how many students they can recruit. The league is not trying to raise the ratio of members to non-members in its target age-group. Indeed, it has set a cap of 30% for 2025, which suggests that it plans little change. But it is trying to expand membership in private firms and NGOs. Among China’s 50m registered private firms, the league’s presence is still tiny. Between 2018 and January 2022, however, the number of league branches in such businesses more than tripled to above 300,000. In Yinchuan this year, league officials announced a plan to establish branches in all of the firms in the western city’s industrial parks by September. With the help of a recently developed database, known as Smart League Building, the organisation can keep much better tabs on such activity. All league members have to register their personal details on this system. Mr Xi’s eagerness to boost the league’s influence may seem at odds with a common belief that at least part of his decade in power involved a struggle with senior leaders who had once served in senior roles in the league. Such officials are often referred to as members of the tuanpai, or “league faction”. Under Mr Xi they have become far more marginal at the top of the party hierarchy. But there is little evidence that the league has operated as a factional bastion. More likely, Mr Xi prefers to surround himself with former colleagues, and he has never held office in the league. Jérôme Doyon of Sciences Po, a university in Paris, notes that the league’s administration is still a big source of recruitment for leadership positions in the provinces. As Mr Xi sees it, the league has a crucial role to play. Even a decade ago he was warning its officials of a global “clash of ideologies” involving ceaseless efforts by “domestic and foreign hostile forces” to Westernise and divide China. This was making it even more imperative, he said, to provide China’s youngsters with “strong guidance” on their ideals and beliefs. Which is why, between occasional outings to revolutionary sites and performing good deeds in their neighbourhoods, recruits can expect plenty of time in the classroom, studying the thoughts of Mr Xi. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

▸ Radioaktivt spillvatten som behandlats från kärnkraftverket i Fukushima i Japan ska dumpas till havs.

▸ Byggnadsarbetare har stulit och sålt potentiellt radioaktivt metallskrot från en plats nära det förstörda…

Byggarbetare vid det olycksdrabbade kärnkraftsverket Fukushima har stulit och sålt potentiellt radioaktiv metall, uppger Japans energidepartement enligt AFP. Materialet försvann från ett museum i den särskilda zonen som upprättades runt kärnkraftverket efter tsunamin 2011. Förra året tilläts människor återigen visats i zonen, men strålningsnivåerna kan fortfarande vara över de normala. Det är oklart hur mycket metall som stulits och vilka strålningsnivåer den har.

▸ Premiärminister Fumio Kishida och tre av hans japanska ministrar åt på onsdagen sashimi till lunch.

Tonläget mellan Kina och Japan verkar allt mer frustrerat efter att Japan släppt ut renat radioaktivt kyl- och regnvatten från kärnkraftverket Fukushima i havet, skriver AFP. Enligt landets regering får japaner i Kina utstå trakasserier efter agerandet, och vid ett tillfälle ska en tegelsten ha kastats på ambassaden i Peking. – Det är extremt beklagligt och oroande, säger Japans utrikesminister Yoshimasa Hayashi. Hayashi har uppmanat styret i Kina att vidta åtgärder, som att mana till lugn bland befolkningen för att undvika eskalering. Inflation, räntehöjningar och svängande börsrörelser – hur navigerar man det utmanande ekonomiska läget? Med Omnis systerapp Omni Ekonomi får du Sveriges mest heltäckande bevakning av börs- och bolagsnyheter. Lägg därtill att Sveriges främsta aktieexperter svarar på de svåra frågorna och hjälper dig att hantera marknaderna.