Parade rehearsals and VVIP movement

THE first three weeks of March have been a nightmare for thousands of citizens commuting within the centre of the city. In addition to putting up with the usual traffic jams caused by heavy traffic and VVIP movement, commuters — including members of the National Assembly — have been greatly inconvenienced by the countless parade rehearsals which had practically ground traffic and thus business in the city centre to a halt.

Advance announcement of the expected closure of roads and “special traffic arrangements” did little to alleviate the situation. Secretariat and other office goers, businessmen, schoolchildren and even MNAs were stranded for hours, with some going round and round in search of alternative routes. Not a few silently cursed the 23 March parade for causing such a nuisance.

In previous years, parade rehearsals on Jinnah Avenue, the commercial and business centre of the Capital, were usually kept to a minimum. Most of the routine rehearsals used to take place in the spacious environs of the Jinnah Sports Complex with traffic in Blue Area blocked off only for the full dress rehearsals, which usually took place on Sundays.

This year, however, Jinnah Avenue was being closed for too many hours and too many days. According to a press release on March 6, Jinnah Avenue was to be closed from 6am to 12:30pm for all types of traffic on seven days (6, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19 and 20 March), and from 8am to 1pm and then from 3pm to 5pm on 10 other days (7, 8, 9 ,10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17 and 21 March).

Such prolonged road closures right in the city centre is not tolerable in a modern society because it is damaging for business and the economy. Difficulty in reaching destinations in Blue Area means working hours are wasted and much essential work is left undone.

Students were also reported to have missed their examinations due to the traffic diversions.

Similar nuisance to the public is caused by traffic jams due to VVIP movement within the Capital. Overzealous police promptly shut down stretches of the VVIP route for half-an-hour or more without apparent thought about the importance of time and punctuality for citizens.

During the past few years, it has been reported every now and then that the president has taken notice of the holdup in traffic during VVIP movement, and that he has duly directed the quarters concerned to correct the situation and ensure that the public is not inconvenienced. The last time it was reported he noted the problem was on March 13, 2005.

But it is obvious from the persistence of the problem that either the president is just merely noting the problem for public consumption or that the quarters concerned have failed to follow the president’s directives.

The above is not an indictment of the 23rd March parade or VVIP security. Laboriously rehearsed parades like the one on 23rd March are necessary for instilling national identity and pride. There is also no denying that VVIPs like the president and the prime minister need protection, particularly since they have already been targets of abortive assassination attacks.

The trick is to find a balance that would allow the staging of well-rehearsed parades and the protection of VVIPs without needlessly inconveniencing everybody else.

More than half-an-hour closures or traffic diversions for something as frequent as VVIP movement is not acceptable. Traffic disruption for VVIP movement should not be for more than seven to 10 minutes.

To achieve this, the traffic police and those responsible for security need to be well organized. A high level of coordination between police parties all along the VVIP route is also needed to ensure that the advance vehicles clear the road not more than 10 minutes before the motorcade passes through.

If parade rehearsals on Jinnah Avenue cannot be cut down, organizers must think of another way to reduce the misery of the people next March.

Some countries which had faced a similar problem with parade rehearsals held right in the heart of their capitals have pragmatically chosen to relocate the parade venue to other less congested and more open and spacious locations. This not only causes minimum disruption of business and commercial activity but also solves the problem of car parking by visitors and participants on the day of the parade itself.

Both the above problems can be solved if the quarters concerned bother to work out processes which allow maximum safety for VVIP movement as well as parade rehearsals to take place while reducing the sufferings of the people.

China: a capitalism that dare not speak its name

LONDON: After the sack of Nanjing in 1841, then imperial capital of China, the British secured what the Chinese still call the unequal treaty; Britain won control of Hong Kong and the right to trade freely in opium; the Chinese got nothing. And it was at Nanjing in 1937 that the Chinese were again and more bloodily humiliated by foreigners. The Japanese murdered an estimated 300,000 civilians and soldiers in an atrocity whose calculated, indifferent cruelty rivalled a Nazi death camp, but to which the world has been curiously indifferent.

Yet today this once decaying symbol of China’s century-long weakness is at one end of a booming 250-mile-long corridor of factories and worker flats; at the other end sits the throbbing mega-sprawl of Shanghai.

China is beginning to meet the economic expectation that it has long promised but never delivered, due to a phenomenon that dare not openly speak its name. Capitalism, a distinctive and more socially minded Chinese capitalism but capitalism none the less, is irreversibly taking root in the world’s most populous, and communist, country. Nothing is likely to be the same again.

Nanjing’s ambitions, and its capacity to meet them, is tribute to that. As the deputy director of the city’s economic commission explained to me, it aims to become China’s number one knowledge city. It has 37 universities. A state-of-the-art metro system with bullet trains begins operation this autumn. The plan is to combine this extraordinary infrastructure with the opportunities of globalization to make the city’s three core industries — automobiles, petrochemicals and ICT — super-competitive.

I asked him and a group of businessmen he had arranged for me to meet if there was any going back. None they nodded in unison. Nobody in China had any other prospectus than more of what was so evidently working.

Openness to inward investment is galvanizing Nanjing’s industrial base. Ford and Fiat have given the local car and truck industry, and its supply chain, critical mass and international quality standards. The latest addition is Rover, for Nanjing is where Rover’s new manufacturing capacity is to be located after its Chinese takeover. The plan is that Rover’s research capacity and high value-added production in Birmingham are to be maintained while volume car production takes off in the Nanjing-Shanghai corridor, taking advantage of the new access to the European market. (Eurosceptic TGWU leader Tony Woodley has a chance of saving some of his members’ jobs courtesy of Britain’s EU membership, a reality I hope he recognizes in the coming EU referendum.) The Rover bet may even come off. Part of the current economic alchemy is that Chinese wage costs are up to a 30th of those in the West for workers whose skill levels and productivity, with the same equipment, are equal to their Western counterparts. Every worker who leaves the land for the factory thus contributes to the boom. The other part is rising demand, fuelled by increasingly affluent Chinese consumers in their hundreds of millions, together with a protracted Keynesian stimulus on infrastructure spending on an unparalleled scale. The resulting growth, if it continues, will turn China into the world’s second biggest economy within 20 years.

The change-makers on the ground are an increasingly confident Chinese private business sector and a tidal wave of foreign inward investment, all aware that this is the 21st-century Klondike. Even some of the wholly nationalised, inefficient, state-owned enterprises burdened by having to provide cheap houses and pensions for every worker are getting in on the act. I visited one, the shipbuilding company Hudong-Zhonghua, that is growing spectacularly, combining all the Chinese advantages of scale and cheap labour with a commitment to high-quality engineering and ICT systems. It builds high-tech ships as well as anyone and for a fraction of the cost.

But maintaining the pace of growth is not guaranteed, a potential disaster for an economy that needs to find 10 million new jobs a year to hold off massive social unrest. Hudong-Zhonghua is the exception rather than the rule. Most managers of Chinese state-owned enterprise are communist administrators with no idea about business practice. Paying interest on bank loans, for example, is an alien concept; if the big four Chinese banks, despite massive infusions of capital, ever had to accept the resulting loan write-offs, they would go broke. But it’s a contagion that affects the private sector. Half the shares quoted on the Shanghai stock market have never paid a dividend. Too many Chinese businessmen think that money comes free; if the attitude doesn’t change, ultimately the money tap will have to shut, bringing the growth engine to a halt.

It is issues like these that are now preoccupying the party leadership, as last week’s annual party conference showed. The first phase of China’s growth — opening up to globalization, permitting a limited degree of market freedoms and launching a wave of massive infrastructure spending — has been the easiest.

The “soft” infrastructure of a market economy - accounting practice, credit appraisal, allocating resources to companies that need it, trustworthy and predictable law, professional, uncorrupt business ethics, worker representation and voice, free information flows and a critical media — has to be both permitted and then developed to sustain growth. Businesses, for example, have to pay interest on their loans and dividends on their shares and to be held to account if they do not.

Last week marked a turning point; the leadership openly recognized that addressing these issues was to define the next phase of Chinese development, along with a redoubling of efforts to lower the stunning disparities in wealth between the booming east coast and the desperately poor west. But the prerequisite is to maintain the growth momentum and that, in turn, is now dependent upon a robust soft infrastructure. Which, in turn, means completing the transition not just to the form of capitalism but to its content.

The Communist party doesn’t call it that; it prefers “harmonious economic development” or the “socialist market economy”. But this is capitalism by any other name. It is certainly not red-blooded, hire-and-fire American capitalism, nor ever will be; there are too many subtleties, informal networks and too much concern to do right by the wider Chinese society for that. “Confucian” capitalism will join European capitalism as another economic and social model with which to challenge the US variant.

But it will be impossible to develop a soft economic infrastructure without political ramifications; a soft political infrastructure that embodies more transparency, pluralism and accountability is part of the same process. In short, a form of democracy is on the agenda; the question is not if but how and what. It will have to respect China’s particularities. There is acute awareness about how easy it is for a country of 1.3 billion people to split, but it must happen none the less. The genie is out of the bottle and the future of the world hangs on the outcome.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

More light on Hitler

STUTTGART: Adolf Hitler was so crippled with anxiety during his final days that he would scratch his neck and ears until they bled and demanded that his toilet water, as well as the water in which his eggs were boiled, be constantly analysed for traces of poison. Before he took his own life he ordered his valet, Heinz Linge, to pour petrol over his body and burn it.

“You must never allow my corpse to fall into the hands of the Russians,” he told Linge. “They would make a spectacle in Moscow out of my body and put it in waxworks.” These insights into Hitler’s life, unearthed in a Moscow archive, were published on Monday in an account called The Hitler Book. The revealing excerpts are the product of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s obsession with his longstanding enemy.

After the Soviet forces captured Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Gunsche, and Linge, they documented the interrogative interviews prisoners.

The 413-page report was buried along with thousands of other secret documents in Russia’s Institute for History. The reports have now been rediscovered by the German historians Matthias Uhl and Henrik Eberle. The accounts are full of curious snapshots of a man whose private personality has been shrouded in mystery.

Linge, for example, is reported to have said: “Hitler’s conversation was banal. At the dinner table he would praise the dresses of the female staff and comment on how difficult they must have found it not being able to get their hair done or their nails filed.

“Hitler had a weird sense of humour. He would laugh at Eva’s lipstick on a serviette and then say, ‘During wartime lipstick is produced out of dead bodies.’” Gunsche and Linge were seized by the Russians in 1945. They were held captive for 10 years and interrogated daily to provide material to satisfy Stalin’s curiosity.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.